Tycoon Actor C547 (Patreon)

A few days had passed since Neil talked them into it. Lucas understood the reasoning — he wasn't unreasonable. That didn't mean he'd made peace with it.

Vince had never given him much to work with. No real warmth, no defense when it counted, nothing that looked like a father choosing his son. Whatever Lucas felt toward the man — or didn't — that hadn't changed.

But if what Vince was claiming about Myla held up, it was worth seeing through. That was the only reason he'd agreed to the condition at all: sit down with him, and let him see the baby.

March 20, 2023. Early morning.

The kitchen staff had been at work before sunrise. Lucas and Jennifer had picked the dishes themselves — nutritious, gentle, things that seemed like safe choices — without knowing the first thing about what Vince could actually handle anymore. It was the best they could do.

Jack brought him in just after seven.

Vince stepped through the entrance and slowed without meaning to. He'd seen photographs — the internet had made sure of that — but photographs gave you nothing of the actual scale of the place, the chandelier, the glass, the city sitting wide open beyond it. He stood there a beat longer than he intended.

Then he saw the table.

His jaw tightened. He took in the full spread of it, the obvious effort behind it, the fact that they'd done it at all — and something in his face gave way. The smile came slowly, and his eyes went glassy before he could get ahead of it.

"I — " He stopped, cleared his throat. "I really appreciate this, son. Truly. Thank you — both of you."

Lucas looked at him across the table. "I did it because you have proof against Myla. That's why I agreed to any of this. If you didn't have that, we wouldn't be sitting here."

Vince nodded once. "Of course. I understand that."

Jennifer set the last dish down quietly. Near the wall, Jack and Simon stood without a word, but the look that passed between the three of them said enough.

They'd been around Lucas through enough situations to know his range — composed, guarded, calculated, and genuinely warm when he chose to be.

What they were watching now was something different. Not quite coldness, more like a door that had been shut a long time ago and simply stayed shut. Aimed at his own father, it was a strange thing to witness. None of them could say they blamed him.

She took her seat. The table settled into quiet.

Vince made an effort with the food. Then less of one. His jaw worked without much purpose, and after a while he was just moving things around the plate, swallowing like it cost him something. Anyone watching could see he was fighting to keep it down.

Lucas watched him for a moment. "You don't have to keep going if you can't."

"No — no, you both made all of this for me, I can't just—"

"I said it's fine." Not sharp, just flat. Done.

Vince set his fork down. He reached for his water and took a long sip, both hands around the glass. "Alright." A breath. "You're right."

Silence settled again. Lucas reached into his pocket, unlocked his phone, and slid it across the table. Seraphina's face filled the screen.

Vince picked it up carefully. He looked at it for a long moment — something moving through his expression, present and then gone, like a man holding very still on purpose.

"Lucas." Jennifer tilted her head at him. "He wanted to see her in person, not just a photo."

"I know." Lucas took the phone back. "She's asleep. I'm not waking her up for this."

"It's fine." Vince set the water glass down. "Honestly — if she's resting, I'll see her another time. There's no rush." He paused, hands flat on the table, and then looked at Lucas directly. "I need to say something. I'd like you to just let me get through it."

Lucas said nothing, which was enough.

"I know what I've done to you. Every time it mattered, every time you needed someone standing in your corner — I wasn't there. I picked the wrong side, over and over, and I let myself get led by the wrong person for years without once looking back to see what it was costing you." His voice dropped, roughened. "I'm not here to ask for your forgiveness. I want to be straight with you about that. I don't deserve it, and I'm not going to sit across from you and pretend otherwise or dress it up into something easier to hear."

He exhaled slowly, like he'd been carrying the words a long time and needed to put them down somewhere.

"What I want — and I'll say this even if it doesn't reflect well on me — is to do one thing right before I run out of time to do anything at all. Not for you. Partly for myself. So I don't leave this world knowing I never once chose you when it mattered." He held Lucas's gaze and didn't look away from it. "That's a selfish reason. I know that. But it's the honest one, and I think you deserve honesty from me more than anything else I could offer at this point."

Neither Lucas nor Jennifer moved.

The room stayed quiet around them.

Whatever either of them had expected walking into the morning, it hadn't been that — no angle to it, no performance, just a man who had looked at the time he had left and decided to spend some of it telling the truth.

The illness had done something to him, that much was plain.

Stripped away whatever buffer he'd kept between himself and the things he'd done. What was sitting across the table now was just what remained.

No matter how much distance Lucas had put between himself and whatever he was supposed to feel about this man, watching him across the table made it harder to hold. He set it aside quietly, the way he'd learned to set most things aside, and said, "What exactly do you have on Myla?"

Vince straightened slightly. "I caught her by accident, first. She was on a video call on her laptop — someone she had no business talking to. It made me suspicious, so I had the laptop set up with a screen recorder without her knowing." He paused. "That's how I got footage of her on a group call with Geoffrey Eckstein."

Lucas and Jennifer both went still.

"Hm?" It came out of both of them at the same time.

Vince's expression didn't waver. "I kept digging after that. Went through her emails. What I found was..." He shook his head slowly. "Look — I am not a good man. I know what I've done in this industry, how I've treated people below me. I'm not pretending otherwise. But what that woman and her circle are into is something else entirely."

He went on to lay it out. Myla had been inside Geoffrey's orbit for years — quietly, without Vince knowing anything about it. She was tied to the Geoffrey IV Foundation. Not on the surface, not in any way that showed up in a headline, but embedded in it.

"It was actually the documentaries about Geoffrey that opened my eyes to how far it goes," Vince said. "That man is involved in trafficking. Genuinely. And based on what I found, Myla isn't just connected to your assassination attempt — she and Geoffrey's people planned it together. I have proof of that. Solid proof."

Lucas and Jennifer looked at each other. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Jennifer was the one who spoke first. "Does she know how much you took?"

Vince exhaled. "The falling out we had — that was because she caught me going through her things. We had a bad argument over it." He turned the water glass slowly in his hands. "But she doesn't know the full extent of what I actually got. I made sure of that. And given what she's capable of, I didn't think it was smart to stick around and find out what she'd do if she figured it out."

The room sat with that for a moment.

Lucas looked at him differently now. There was no reason for the man to fabricate any of this — no angle in it, nothing it got him. He said, "I need you to turn everything over to my legal team. All of it."

"That's exactly what I had in mind," Vince said.

They talked through it for the better part of an hour — details, timelines, what Vince had and how he'd gotten it.

By the end, Vince had gone quieter, and then something shifted in his face. He pressed a hand flat against his side, just below the ribs, and for a moment the conversation simply stopped existing for him.

"What's wrong?" Lucas asked.

"Nothing." Vince straightened. "I'm fine. Don't worry about it."

"That's obviously not nothing."

Vince started to wave it off, but Lucas kept going. "I have a hospital in New York. Advanced equipment, serious care. You should be seen there — properly, not whatever arrangement you currently have."

"My doctor's already been straight with me." Vince's voice was even, almost rehearsed, like he'd said the words enough times that they'd stopped landing hard. "He gives me about a year. Maybe a few if things go well."

Lucas and Jennifer both went quiet.

Jennifer asked, carefully, "Cancer?"

Lucas said nothing, but he was listening.

Vince looked down at the table. "Stomach. Stage three." He let out a breath through his nose. "So you see — I don't have a great deal of time to work with."

The room shifted. The lightness that had briefly come into the conversation over the last hour drained out of it.

"You don't need to feel bad about it," Vince said, and there was something almost gentle in it. "It's not your doing. I brought this on myself — years of bad habits catching up. That's all it is." He smiled, small and tired.

Lucas studied him for a moment. "Stage three isn't stage four. You're not dead yet." His voice had an edge to it. "I have a hospital. It treats exactly this. So stop talking like you've already made your peace with it and get yourself treated — because you still have a shot, and wasting it because your doctor has a pessimistic bedside manner is just stupidity."

Jennifer looked at him. "Lucas..."

Vince had gone still. Then slowly, something eased in his face. He laughed quietly — more breath than sound. "Yeah." He nodded. "Maybe you're right. Slim's still something."

Lucas held his gaze for another beat, then turned. "Jack." He waited until Jack stepped forward. "Please take Mr. Knight to one of the guest rooms. He needs to rest."

Jack nodded. Vince pushed back from the table and stood, moving carefully. He caught what Lucas had said — not Dad, not anything close to it — and didn't react to it outwardly. But the smile that stayed on his face as he followed Jack out of the room was a quieter, warmer thing than the ones he'd worn all morning.

The door closed behind them.

Jennifer turned to Lucas, a small smile already pulling at the corner of her mouth. "You went soft on him anyway."

"I didn't."

"Lucas—"

"I'm glad he's doing the right thing," Lucas said. "That's it. Whatever time he has left, he's choosing to use it correctly. I respect that." He picked up his coffee, which had gone cold. "That's not the same thing as going soft."

Jennifer watched him for a moment, the smile still there, and said nothing else.

---

Time didn't sit still, and Lucas didn't let it.

He had his legal team in contact with Vince within days. They sat with him, took his accounts, and walked out with everything he'd gathered on Myla — the recordings, the emails, the full picture of what she'd been doing and who she'd been doing it with. Vince cooperated without hesitation, even brought in his own lawyers to make the handoff cleaner. He seemed almost relieved to have it out of his hands.

He was also, for the first time in a long while, in a good mood.

The reason for that became clear the morning he met Seraphina.

Sera was having one of her fussier stretches — not quite crying, not quite settled — when Martha brought her in. Vince saw her and simply came apart. He dropped to one knee right there on the floor, not caring who was watching, and wept. Properly wept, shoulders shaking, one hand pressed over his mouth.

He looked like a man who had waited too long for something and couldn't believe he'd made it to the other side of the wait.

Sera, for her part, stopped fussing immediately. She stared at him. Then, with the complete absence of logic that only a toddler can manage, she tottered over and put her small hand on his arm — as if she'd decided, on instinct, that this crying person needed her attention more than she needed anything else.

Lucas watched from across the room and said nothing. He hadn't forgiven the man. That hadn't changed. But whatever was happening on that floor — an old man falling apart over a child who had no idea who he was — wasn't something he could find it in himself to be cold toward either.

Jennifer didn't say a word.

---

A few days later, they flew to New York.

Vince came with them — he needed to be admitted to LK Hospital, and Jennifer had decided she was coming regardless, partly because she wanted to see Daciana, and partly because she'd watched Vince's face every time Sera was nearby and couldn't bring herself to pull that away from him. She packed a bag and that was that.

The flight was smooth. The Knight residence received them as it always did, and Vince was taken to the hospital the same afternoon.

Lucas, the following morning, found Felicity.

She looked up from her notes when he walked in. "You're back. Took long enough — I thought you just went to LA for the Oscars."

"I did. Other things came up."

"Complicated other things, or the regular kind?"

"The complicated kind."

She studied him for a second, decided not to pull on that thread, and flipped her notebook open. "Well. You missed a lot. I've been terrorizing the dialect coach without you."

They talked for a bit — catching up on what had moved while Lucas was gone, what hadn't, where Felicity felt she'd made ground and where she was still fighting it.

At some point the conversation naturally ran into the work itself, and they decided to just run it.

It didn't take long for Lucas to see it. She'd closed a real gap since he'd left. The accent had more body to it now, more confidence underneath, and she wasn't reaching for it the way she had been in the early sessions.

When they finished he said, "Keep going at this rate, you'll have it fully locked in a month."

Felicity looked genuinely relieved to hear it. "Thank you."

...

Production settled back into its rhythm. The Brutalist pressed forward, week by week.

Vince remained at LK Hospital and was being handled well.

Melvin found out eventually. His first assumption was that Vince had checked himself in to get closer to Lucas — guilt doing what guilt does, pushing a man toward the person he'd wronged. Lucas corrected him on that. It was the other way around; he'd been the one to extend the offer. Melvin didn't say much to that, just nodded slowly, and the two of them ended up on the hospital roof.

"I honestly didn't expect this," Melvin said, looking out over the city. "You and him, in the same building, not at each other's throats. I've thought about a lot of possible futures for this family. This wasn't one of them."

"We're not exactly close," Lucas said. "He needed treatment and I have a hospital. That's the whole story."

"Right." Melvin smiled. "Sure it is."

Lucas let that sit for a second, then said, "There's also the fact that he has proof your mother was directly involved in my assassination attempt."

Melvin turned to look at him. Then, instead of the shock Lucas expected, he let out a long breath through his nose. "I know. I helped him pull some of it together, actually."

"Did you."

"Yeah." His voice was even, no hesitation in it. "I know she's my mother. That stopped mattering the moment I found out what she'd done. She needs to face it — all of it."

Lucas studied him for a moment. "Thank you for that."

Melvin looked almost uncomfortable with it. "Don't thank me for that. Honestly, I should be the one apologizing to you. She became... I don't even know what to call it. “Fixated.” You built something real, something she never expected, and something in her couldn't accept it. That hatred had to go somewhere and it went toward you." He shook his head. "I'm sorry you were the one who had to deal with the consequences of it."

"I've never understood people like that," Lucas said. "What drives someone to that."

"Neither have I." Melvin was quiet for a moment. "But they exist. And now she has to answer for it."

They talked a while longer before going their separate ways.

---

Time moved forward.

Vince's treatment at LK Hospital was progressing better than expected. His doctors weren't making promises, but the early signs were more encouraging than the prognosis he'd walked in with. For a man who'd been told he had a year, that was something worth holding onto.

Meanwhile, Myla was making noise. She gave an interview — her side of things, Vince's absence framed the way she wanted it framed. She spoke about the marriage, about him, about what kind of man he was when no one was watching. The media picked it up immediately.

Vince hadn't been seen publicly in some time, and now his wife was sitting in front of a camera with plenty to say about it. People started asking where he was. The story grew legs.

It got lively for a few days. Tabloids ran with it. Comment sections filled up.

Lucas watched none of it. He had work to do.

Weeks passed just like that — noise on one side, work on the other.

By May 10th, Felicity had fully locked the accent a few days prior, and the illustrators had everything ready. The plates for László's architectural work were detailed and complete — drawn from Lucas's own sketches as a foundation, the team had expanded them into something that could actually live on screen.

Everything was in place. Filming was next, and it was already prepared for.

They left New York and headed to Hungary.