Chapter 81: RICHARD
The pain I felt after my break up with Mel wasn’t exactly something that I wanted to experience twice.
My heart had ached so much that I almost died from the pain. It was too much. Too painful and too draining.
On top of it, Edward couldn’t even let me mourn what I lost, he kept insisting that I was pathetic, allowing a girl to have such an effect on me.
It made me wonder if he really loved Claire, or was it all a ruse? And if he indeed loved her, why couldn’t he wish the same for me?
I think I dared ask him during one of those stupid family dinners they insisted on having. The thing I hated most about these dinners was that, it’s usually enforced whenever the family is going
through something.
Like during the time of Claire’s unfaithfulness, during the failure of launching the brand on Italian shores, which till date the Lords had never allowed my father to forget. And in spite of the colossal amounts of progress my father’s incumbency as CEO brought, that one failure was like an ink dent on his spotless page of successes, spreading and difficult to remove.
What made it more degrading was that the Elders had warned him not to try the Italian expansion. Like the Dame Dynasty, the CEOs of the Wellington Empire also strive to leave a legacy project or change.
Edward had thought that a launch to Italian shores was his, but it turned out to be a failure. The Lords didn’t spare any time in swooping in with choruses of "I told you so" and "We warned you, didn’t we?"
The expansion failure was one of the reasons why the Elders didn’t argue much when my father decided to step down at such an early age to allow his young son man the wheels.
In fact, they had been very supportive of the idea, and I know they had thought that due to my youth and greenness, I would make a mistake or fumble things so that their long awaited plots to take over the mantle of head family would come to fruition much sooner.
I had proved them wrong with just a year of assuming power. My Wellington Edition launch shocked them speechless like the rest of the world. Before becoming the CEO and one of the most powerful men of the 21st century according to Forbes, I wasn’t really that