THE FUNERAL WAS EXACTLY THE shit-show I expected.
Josephine attended her husband’s burial decked out in a Hawaiian tan, a black Versace dress, and fake tears. Dean showed up and stood by his father’s side, paying his respects but not looking at me. And Trent and Jaime spent the ceremony trying to console me while stealing glances from me to him.
The condition of Dean’s nose and my black eyes were a dead giveaway. They knew exactly what had happened. I felt like they held me responsible for everything but didn’t want to bring it up, seeing as I was mourning.
Sort of.
I felt nothing actually. My dad’s existence only burdened my conscience. Every day he was alive had reminded me that my mother wasn’t.
A lot of things were buried when my father’s coffin was lowered into the hole. One of them was my frustration with him. But not the hatred. The hatred stayed, and with it, my turmoil. An unrest no one was supposed to know about.
It was a tragedy, but it was my tragedy. I didn’t want anyone else to know.
When I got back to the hotel, I sent Emilia another text telling her to call me. Now.
I’d have the will in my hands tomorrow. It was time for her to pack a bag and get her sweet ass on a plane. I was also planning on telling her she’d need to stay in California for at least a couple of weeks and help me in LA. I was even willing to throw in an extra few hundred thousand to sweeten the deal. Hell, at this point I was going to give her whatever the fuck she wanted.
But Emilia still didn’t answer.
Did she cower, deciding she wouldn’t lie for me? It felt like a betrayal. Bitter and heavy on my chest, on my tongue, everywhere we’d touched.
I threw my phone against the wall. It smashed, webbing the screen with countless cracks. The logical thing to do was to ask my PA to replace it with another one, only I didn’t have a fucking PA at that moment. I needed her and she wasn’t there. I needed her but I knew I’d die before admitting that simple fact aloud.
I walked the green mile from my rental car to the Cole’s mansion. Time moved sluggishly in those moments. Or maybe too fast, I couldn’t decide. This, right here, is what I’d lived for, for years. This, right here, was the end and the beginning of something.
The will.
The verdict.
The grand fucking finale.
Before I knew it, I was in Eli Cole’s home office, and even before the envelope containing the will arrived, a bad feeling gripped me. The stale room, stuffed with law books and old leather and an old man, felt like the wrong place to be.
Eli wasn’t overtly nice to me anymore. Not impatient either, but instead highly professional. When he ushered me over to a chair, he didn’t refer to me as “son” as he often did, and he didn’t insist on serving me coffee or tea when I told him no the first time. Instead, he looked at me like he knew I’d fucked up his son’s face, and that made me restless.
After the messenger delivered the will, he rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, slid his reading glasses on, and cut the envelope with a letter opener, utterly silent. My posture on my seat in front of his desk was guarded and tense. I followed his pupils as he skimmed through the verbiage. He was quiet, too quiet for the longest time, and I felt hot blood whooshing between my ears.
Jo had looked so fucking smug at the funeral. She hadn’t exchanged one word with me. Didn’t try to beg…
But then, I was so careful…
So cunning…
So agreeable to my dad all those years, up until our last encounter before he died, when I told him…
“Baron…” Eli kept pulling at an imaginary goatee, like he was trying to rub the concern off of his face. His tone told me what I didn’t want to hear.
I shook my head. This was not happening. I didn’t need the fucking money. I made millions myself. Not a fraction of what my dad had, but still.
It was about Jo not getting away with fucking murder.
It was about not walking around the world feeling hollow and cheated.
It was about justice.
“Give that to me.” I reached for the file and snatched the will from his hand. I flicked through the document as fast as I could, my pulse hammering so furiously I thought my heart was going to explode. Hell, half the shit I was reading didn’t even register. But there were two things that stood out to me immediately:
First, the will was handwritten. It would be almost laughable, if it weren’t for the fact it was, indeed, my dad’s handwriting and dated well before he got sick. I flipped to the final page to the signatures of the two witnesses. I didn’t recognize either name, but that wasn’t unusual. Lawyers often called in their employees in to act as witnesses.
Second, there was a disinheritance clause.
“He put in a fucking disinheritance clause!” I punched Eli’s desk on a dry scream.
The more I read, the more my blood boiled. He’d appointed Josephine to be the executor. But that didn’t bother me as much as the main deal: Josephine Rebecca Spencer (née Ryler) was to inherit his entire estate. I was getting a measly ten million dollars.
The disinheritance provision meant that if I were to challenge the will in any way, I’d get nothing. Just an extra fuck you to his beloved only son.
Jo had just become filthy rich in her own right.
And I had just been reduced from an almost-billionaire to a man who was still rolling in it, but wasn’t going to make any Forbes lists anytime soon. Not that I cared. The money didn’t mean shit. Revenge did.
I said nothing while Eli watched me, his face wrinkled and wary.
I’d been blindsided.
My father knew all along that I hated him. Hell, maybe he’d even suspected my plans. I didn’t know how or why, just that Josephine was a step ahead of me all this time. I gulped down a sour ball of anger.
Eli came around to my side of his desk and sat beside me in a second chair. Plastering the will back onto the desk, we both read through it with hunched backs. The will was dated in June, ten years ago. My mind whirled with so many different emotions.
A bad year. A bad month.
“Anything weird happen around that time?” Eli echoed my thoughts. “Anything that could make your father change his mind about the provisions he set up in the prenup?”
My father had been open about the terms of the prenup. She got nothing if she ever filed for divorce. He used his money to keep her married to him, controlling her with the threat of being penniless.
So she’d stuck around. I wasn’t surprised he’d left her something after all these years. But everything? It looked like Jo was the one controlling him all along. That shouldn’t have been a surprise to me either. Fucking Jo. She’d been whispering in his ear again.
The will was dated shortly after I finished high school. After I threw Emilia out of California for good and everything went to shit. After I went off the rails completely…
Ten years ago was when Daryl died.
“Yeah.” I crushed the will between my fingers. “Jo was going through a difficult time. Her brother died. She may have strummed my dad’s emotions. I just…” I took a deep breath. “I guess I’ve always hated him, but it still hurts to know he hated me too.”
“I don’t understand why he’s always favored Josephine over you, but it’s time to move on with your life, son.” Eli knew what my friends didn’t.
When I was twenty-two, the HotHoles all came back to Todos Santos for Thanksgiving. We all stayed at Dean’s house and got plastered. I’d just gotten accepted to law school, so I thought it was a good idea to wander into Eli’s study in the middle of the night and look through his shit. He was there, and I was so drunk, so lost, so sad, that somehow, I’d ended up confiding in him about the abuse.
I’d kept my mouth shut about my mother’s murder, though, just like I had with Emilia.
I chose to handle justice myself, and I did. Until today.
Everything was collapsing. I was a walking, talking ghost. A no one. A man without a cause.
“Don’t let what they did to you define you. Find something else that makes you tick.” Eli’s voice shook with emotion. He didn’t care anymore that I’d fucked up his son’s face. Because my life was so much more fucked up than Dean’s ever would be. “Live, Baron. Live well. Don’t look back. And don’t ever visit that place again.”
He was talking about the mansion I’d planned to burn to the ground. The place where I was going to build a library to honor my mom.
When I walked out of Eli’s office, I collapsed on the steps leading to his patio and lit a joint. I fished out my cracked phone and called Emilia. She didn’t answer.
I called her again.
And again.
And again.
Then I started leaving voicemails. Voicemails that didn’t make any sense and that I knew for a fact I was going to regret. Her answering machine greeting was her singing in her sweet voice, followed by a breathless, girly giggle when she got to her punchline:
“Hey, this is Millie! Wanna hear a joke? Knock, knock! Who’s there? Not me, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!”
I don’t know what your fucking problem is, Help, but you need to get back to me because…because I’m your boss. I pay you good money. I’m waiting for your call.”
“Hey, this is Millie! Wanna hear a joke? Knock, knock! Who’s there? Not me, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!”
Are you mad at me? Is that it? Is this because I didn’t pick up the phone when you called? Should I remind you I had important shit to deal with because my dad had just died? Besides, I was upfront with you the whole time. This is not a relationship. It’s two people fucking the obsession out of each other. Get back to me. Now.
“Hey, this is Millie! Wanna hear a joke? Knock, knock! Who’s there? Not me, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!”
Emilia! What the fuck!
Then, out of the blue, my phone vibrated in my hand. I let out a sigh and felt a little warmth finally seep into my chest. I swiped the damaged screen quickly.
“When you get here, I’m going to deny you every fucking orgasm you almost-reach for a whole week,” I growled.
A throat cleared on the other end of the line. “I’m afraid that won’t be necessary, Baron.” It was Jo, and her voice sounded amused. “Remember when you said we needed to do the dinner and wine thing more often? Well, I’d just love to see you tonight for a meal. Do you prefer red wine or white?”
My jaw ticked, and I would have hurled the phone across the patio if not for my need to hear from Emilia. I hung up and screamed until Keeley, one of Dean’s sisters, came out and dragged me into the house to calm down.
For the next twenty-four hours, I was coddled and fussed over by the Cole women like a pussy, while Dean came in and out of the house and shot me dirty looks.
“Fire her,” I heard him singing from his kitchen at one point while his mother sat next to me in the living room with a cup of tea and recounted every single family catastrophe she could recall and how things had somehow miraculously gotten better.
“Fire the girl, fire her now,” he continued, undeterred.
She was driving a new wedge between Dean and me, and she wasn’t even taking my calls. Hell, who knew if she was even down with helping me take Jo down? I seriously doubted it. No, I was on my own.
I thought I was going to use Emilia LeBlanc, but I was no longer able to control my plans for her, or for me. She was the only person I wanted to speak to when my world collapsed. No matter the outcome of the will, I couldn’t see letting her walk out of my life. Not again.
I sat in her ex-boyfriend’s living room, my face squeezed into his mother’s chest like a child, and realized that it was too late to back out.
I no longer wanted it to stop.
I was going after her.
And fuck the consequences.
