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“Need any help with those macarons, sweetie?” Tom asked.
Marinette shook her head. “Nope. All good over here, Papa!”
Tom smiled and turned his attention back to the pies he was making. As he worked, his mind drifted to his darling daughter and her new beau. It had taken all of his self-restraint (and several reminders from Sabine of his turn as Weredad) to keep from smothering young Adrien as he had Chat Noir at their ill-fated brunch. In his defense, though, the boy was clearly starved of affection in his own home. The way he clung to Marinette like a lifeline anytime they were together, leaning into even the slightest touch from her like a parched man yearning for water, spoke volumes about the effect his father’s workaholic tendencies had on him. Rocky as Tom’s relationship with his own father was, he found Roland’s favorite saying eminently applicable to Gabriel Agreste’s parenting style: that’s not how it’s done!
Sabine’s voice drew him from his wool-gathering. “Tom, I need to use the restroom. Can you watch the front for a few minutes?”
Tom nodded. “No problem.”
He poked his head out of the workroom, checking to see whether any of the display cases needed restocking, and was about to fetch another tray of pain au chocolat when he clocked the elder Agreste’s personal secretary stalking toward the entrance, tablet tucked under one arm. Her bearing seemed grimmer than usual, although she was still too far away for Tom to discern her facial expression.
Tom frowned. That can’t be anything good.
Surreptitiously taking his largest bread knife out of its drawer, he placed it blade-first in his mixing bowl and carried both with him to the register, placing them out of sight below the counter just as the woman—Natalya, was it? No, Nathalie—entered the bakery.
“Welcome to Tom and Sabine’s!” Tom greeted her, forcing himself to act jovially lest he belie his true opinion of her. It wouldn’t do for a misheard rumor to make Adrien think Tom disliked the whole family, after all. “How may I help you?”
“Is your daughter available?” Nathalie said without preamble.
Tom’s eyes narrowed. “May I ask what this is about?”
“Is she available?” Nathalie repeated.
“If you refuse to tell me what you want from her, no,” Tom replied.
Annoyance flashed across Nathalie’s face for the briefest of moments. “It concerns her relationship with Monsieur Agreste the younger.”
Internally, Tom’s hackles rose, but he did his best to act unconcerned, a fond smile playing across his lips. “Beautiful thing, isn’t it? He’ll make a wonderful husband someday, and a wonderful son-in-law for me and Sabine to boot.”
“Monsieur Dupain—”
“Has he said anything about kids?” Tom asked. “Our Marinette wants three. From what I’ve seen thus far, she couldn’t have picked a better man to be their father, which is truly remarkable considering his own upbringing—”
“Let me speak to him,” a voice emanated from Nathalie’s tablet.
Wordlessly she held it up with the screen facing Tom to reveal the image of Gabriel Agreste, his arms crossed over his chest.
“I’m sorry to burst your bubble, Monsieur Dupain,” Gabriel said, “but I must insist your daughter terminate her relationship with Adrien at once. Their association is damaging the Gabriel Agreste brand.”
Tom scoffed. “In what way? By preventing his legions of fangirls from imagining themselves on Adrien’s arm?”
“How I run my business is none of your concern,” Gabriel blustered.
“It is when it negatively affects my daughter’s emotional wellbeing,” Tom countered.
“I appreciate your concern for her,” Gabriel responded condescendingly, “but I feel confident her emotional wellbeing can survive the loss of a teenage crush.”
Tom raised an eyebrow. “Look, even if I agreed with you—and for the record, I don’t—it’s not my decision to make. Marinette loves him, and he her, and I don’t see any way either of us could convince her to give that up.”
“All it would take is one phone call for me to withdraw Adrien from Françoise Dupont and return him to homeschooling,” Gabriel noted. “He would never see his friends—or her—ever again. Do you really think your daughter would allow that to happen?”
Tom resisted the urge to rip the tablet from Nathalie’s hands and smash it. Instead, keeping his demeanor as casual as he could manage, he lifted his knife from the mixing bowl and raised it into view, a jolt of grim satisfaction running through him as Nathalie recoiled minutely at the sight of the sticky red substance coating the blade. “Tell me, Monsieur Agreste, have you ever considered having more children, giving Adrien a younger sibling?”
Gabriel’s brow furrowed in confusion, but he answered nonetheless, “Seeing as my wife is…indisposed, I don’t see how that would be possible.”
“Good,” Tom said, smacking the flat of the blade into the palm of his other hand. “That makes two parts of your anatomy that won’t be missed.”
Gabriel gaped at him. Before he could reply, Tom added, “Not that it seems there’s much to miss.”
“Monsieur Dupain—” Nathalie spluttered.
“This is an awfully roundabout way of going about expressing your disapproval,” Tom pointed out. Ticking off on his fingers with the knife as he went, he continued, “You go behind his back to get his girlfriend to be the one to break things off instead of telling him yourself, you try to conceal your intentions from me to get access to her, you resort to blackmail to convince her to fall in line with this sick plan of yours, and to cap it all off, you send your errand-girl to deliver the message instead of having the decency to tell her yourself! I don’t know what kind of twisted power game you think you’re playing here, but you will not drag Marinette into it!”
“I am simply protecting my company’s assets—” Gabriel began.
Tom let out a harsh, barking laugh. “Is that what you call this? Because if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to get the both of them akumatized!”
Tom hoped Gabriel and Nathalie would react with shame, expected indignation, wouldn’t have been surprised by anger. When they instead goggled at him in open-mouthed shock, Nathalie’s eyes flitting around nervously to look at the other patrons, Tom felt his own jaw go similarly slack.
“My God, you are,” he breathed in horror. “What kind of monsters are you people?”
Gabriel was the first to recover. “I—”
“Get out!” Tom roared, his hand tightening around the handle of the knife and swinging it up to point at the door. The blade stopped inches from Nathalie’s nose, drops of the red substance flying off and landing on her face and jacket.
“Monsieur—” Nathalie started.
“Out, I said!” Tom yelled, shaking the knife in her face once more. “Or so help me God, I will—”
Nathalie turned tail and bolted for the exit before Tom could finish his threat.
“And don’t come back!” Tom called after her.
Lowering the knife, he used his thumb to swipe some of the red substance off one side of the blade, then raised his thumb to his lips and licked it clean with an appreciative hum. “Cherry.”
Frowning, he took another swipe of the pie filling and tasted it. “Could use a little more sugar, I think.”
He turned around to see Marinette poke her head through the doorway to the workroom, biting her bottom lip. “Are they gone?”
Tom set the knife on the counter, then came over and pulled Marinette into a hug. “Yes, sweetie, they’re gone. Permanently, if I have anything to say about it. The first thing after your mother gets back, I’m calling our lawyer to file for a restraining order and then ASE to see if there’s anything they can do to get Adrien out of there. You’ll never have to worry about them again.”
Marinette buried her head in Tom’s chest. “Thank you, Papa.”
“It’s the least I can do, Marinette,” Tom told her. “It’s what any halfway decent parent would do.”
“Not that Monsieur Agreste would know anything about that,” Marinette quipped.
Tom laughed. He could tell from Marinette’s reaction that she’d heard most, if not all, of the confrontation, and it warmed his heart to know that she was upbeat enough to joke about it.
“Tell you what,” Tom said. “Why don’t you head upstairs and call Adrien, or text him, or whatever it is young lovers do these days, and I’ll finish the macarons?”
Marinette giggled. “Thanks, Papa!”
Tom smiled as he watched her bound up the stairs two at a time. Monsieur Agreste, you picked the wrong family to mess with.