Chapter 33: I’m not your archnemesis. I’m your nemesis once removed
Cass had put his head down and buried it in the work that was required of him as the replacement Duke. He had a sharp learning curve, but it turned out that there were some documents around that were kind of like cheat sheets to help him understand what he was reading.
While Lord Blackburn didn’t have a journal, Cass could feel the small bits of personality and dedication in scraps of paper tucked away in the corner of drawers in his desk, in between clearly read books, and under obviously moveable stacks of papers.
It was cute, and they were clearly coded in some way, but Cass didn’t know why he would do so. There wasn’t an obvious connection between everything, and despite Lord Blackburn’s worries, he was being left alone. Cass was the one who had fucked that up, and that had been a really rough two weeks.
Cass had thought he understood how much work he needed to do as he cleared stack upon stack of paper, only to find that there was a whole other room where more papers were being kept for his duties as the not quite Duke. Fuck. Was there really not one damn good person around Lord Blackburn this whole damn time?
No wonder he went to the fucking dark side.
Cass was surprised by how easy he found the work as a Duke to be. It was a lot of math, charts, and making sure that the reports matched what had been reported to him. Turns out he had an assistant that helped him with his duties, only she lived in the room where all the other papers for the Duke were being stored.
Sam let Cass know that they weren’t on the best of terms, mainly because she came from his grandfather’s faction and they didn’t see eye to eye. She was mainly here to keep an eye on him to make sure that he was getting the work assigned to him done.
Apparently, Lord Blackburn had been putting off his work because his grandfather had refused to give up his title after he’d gotten married to Lady Fiona. Since that plan wasn’t working, obviously, Cass decided he was going to go the other way.
Prove that it was his grandfather that was incompetent since he was giving all of his work to his grandson, and claim the title of Duke for himself. It was a long con, but he had time. He just didn’t have as long of time to get out of the castle, but he didn’t need the title of Duke to do that.