Stepbrother Bad Boy's Baby Boxed Set(26)

"Get over here then!" Shannon yelled, and I was on to my next assignment.

The entire battle was stress from minute one. I was glad that we'd done practice run-throughs, because nothing from a normal service could have prepared us for what that one hour was like. The rush, the ad-hoc decisions, everything was different from the well-oiled machine that is a normal dinner service at Alinea.

Adding to the stress was the camera crews, the judges, and everyone else around us. I almost elbowed a camera man in the face at one point as he shoved his camera over my shoulder while I was working on preparing daikon radishes for another dish, and turned without him expecting it. You'd figure after ten years of doing the show the cameramen would be on their toes, but it seems even the best can get caught off guard at times.

Plating was a crazy situation too. Normally, I knew exactly where to put everything. Instead, for the battle we were bringing prepared ingredients to Shannon who was making the first plate for us, then having us duplicate it based off of her initial example. I could hear Smith muttering to himself as he copied Shannon's sauces on the third plate, smiling while he did so. "Madness. This is madness!"

It was an old joke in the Alinea kitchen, after a particularly overly dramatic line cook quit in the middle of a service. I hadn't been there at the time, I'd still been in High School, but the joke carried on through the years.

"One minute remaining!" the overhead announcer said, and we somehow doubled our speed, just getting the last plate done as the final five seconds were counted off. I tossed my now empty bowl into the sink and threw my hands up, all of us elated that the hour was over.

"Great job team," Shannon said, clapping us all on the back. "Now we see just how the judging goes."



* * *



Julian



"Tell me what you know about the marriage between your father and your mother," Kimberly said, clicking her trackball and pulling up some files. "Start from the beginning."

I had no idea what this was all about, but I sighed and went with it. Obviously Kimberly had a point to all of this. "Johnathan Castelbon met Alicia Youngblood while he was a grad student at Stanford University. He was twenty-one when they met. She was eighteen. They dated for about a year, then got married in a Las Vegas ceremony. I was born four years later. They divorced seven years after that."

"Come now Julian, details are important here. Why did they get divorced?" Kimberly asked, turning off the screen and turning around to face me. "What happened in the divorce that made you hate your father so much?"

"Which part are you looking at?" I half sneered, striding back and forth across the small carpet. "The fact that he cheated on her at least three times with various female employees, or the fact that he beat her and broke three ribs while I was away at summer camp, which led to her finally calling it quits? Or maybe that during the divorce, he used every slimy lawyer trick in the books to take me away from my mother and keep me for himself?"

Kimberly watched me let loose my anger, then sighed and turned towards the computer. "When your father started dating Sandra Aksoy, Krystal approached me to do some research on him," Kimberly said. "After all, Sandra Aksoy's net wealth at the time was over a hundred million dollars. While John Castelbon by reputation was super rich, he had been divorced twice, and Krystal was worried. So she asked me to do what I do. I would have done it for free, but she insisted on paying."

"So you hacked John Castelbon," I replied, my voice flat. "I thought you said you only did legal hacking, not that I'm upset about it. What did you find?"

Kimberly turned back to her computer and turned on the monitor she'd just turned off. "I didn't have to hack at all, it's a matter of public record in the State of California. While they don't exactly advertise it, most of the old records were digitized a few years ago, and that includes divorce proceedings. The majority of my work was merely doing a records search and reading the details of a very ugly divorce."

Before I could interrupt, Kimberly continued. "Case in point, the divorce of Johnathan Castelbon from his wife of eleven years, Alicia Youngblood Castelbon. During the trial, Alicia tried to claim that on the night of July seventeenth of the prior year, John Castelbon assaulted her and broke three of her ribs."

"I already said that," I replied. "I was at summer camp, and when I came home Mom's ribs were taped up, and she said Johnathan had done it. The bastard was so guilty he never even tried to deny it."

"The court found differently. In fact, considering that Johnathan Castelbon wasn't even in the United States on the night of June seventeenth, the claim that he had broken her ribs was a flat out lie."

I felt like my own ribs had just been punched, most likely by Mike Tyson. "What?"

"John Castelbon had gotten on a flight to Nagoya, Japan on the morning of June fifteenth, the day after you left for camp, to meet with representatives from the Nissan and Toyota corporations. He checked into the Nagoya Marriot, and was having breakfast with business clients at the time your mother claimed she was attacked. While she did have three legitimately cracked ribs, it couldn't have been your father who did it."

"That doesn't even make sense... then who?" I asked, my throat tight and raw. I could feel something inside me straining, and I was afraid of what it was.