Thanks for this ask! I’ve always wanted to examine how Alice might feel about the way the Totsuki Network is structured as a mother.
Nakiri Alice heaved an enormous sigh as she read the memo from her assistant, who had been taking the minutes at the last board meeting. Her precious spawn was barely ten months old, and already he’d been ousted from half his inheritance.
Now that Erina had a son of her own—presumably one who had inherited her god tongue—he was suddenly the “natural heir” of the Totsuki Network. The board put it to a vote and decided that when he came of age, Raiden would get the academy and the hotels and the Nakiri Group’s diverse portfolio of investments, and of course neither Erina nor her grandfather had done anything to contradict them.
“You’re thinking too much about it,” Ryou told her as she paced up and down the kitchen waiting for the formula to finish.
“It’s not too much.” She glanced a him, half-pouty and half-pissed. “You should be more concerned that they’re cheating our son!”
The dark haired chef shrugged at his wife’s tirade. “Does it matter so much about the estate when you’re all rich?”
“It’s not about the money,” Alice huffed. “It’s the principle of the thing. They just assume that any child of Erina’s will automatically be more competent than a child of mine. It’s completely unfair to him!”
“What’s there to do about it now?” her husband asked.
“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I’m not gonna complain to Erina about the estate while she’s busy with her newborn.” That would be utterly obnoxious, even by her standards.
“I think the formula is done,” Ryou pointed out.
Alice sighed. “I’ll finish my declaration of outrage later.”
She finished making the bottle and went upstairs, where she found her son waking from a restless sleep. The fever—which had kept her in Denmark, while she’d otherwise be cursing out the board in Tokyo—had made him so lethargic.
“My spawn,” she said, lifting him up. The infant gazed at Alice lazily with ruby eyes that matched her own. “This is utter nonsense, you know. In ten or fifteen years, they’re all going to figure out that you’re a genius. But I know it now.”
She closed her eyes, sighing, and rested her forehead against Erik’s. In that moment, she hoped that he would be easy-going—even more so than his mother was. She hoped that he would have the ability to lead, but no desire to do so—that he and his cousin would never take interest in the same things.
She knew from experience that life would be far easier on him that way.
