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.