I slam the photo down on the cabinet.
After that, I'm done with memory lane. I rip open the file drawers and flick through folders, stuffing anything that looks half-relevant under my arm. Purchase orders, tournament results, fucking utility bills and tax assessments for Camlann House and the condo in Sarrasford and the place in New York and the flat in Paris and...
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.
My eyes go wide. The folder is thinner than I would've guessed, given how much loot there is to distribute. Maybe one or two pages inside. But I guess it doesn't take that many words to say "split it between my perfect beloved son and my materialistic witch of a second wife."
Well, jackpot, I think bitterly, and I'm about to bang the drawer shut when one last thing catches my eye. An accordion file, the kind that wraps closed with string. No label, just an icon embossed in gold.
A cross and two swords.
The Consistory. They who need no introduction. Presumably this is it: the top-secret correspondence Luther sends by telegraph or carrier pigeon or whatever those crusty French fucks think is inefficient enough to be morally square with God.
I grit my teeth and take it, too.
I barely getone knock at King's room before he opens the door, fully dressed even though it's maybe 8:30 a.m, like an absolute psychopath.
"Hey," I say, holding up the sheaf of papers. "Can I come in?"
"Sure." Kingston nods and steps out of the way. Unlike my room, there's actually multiple clean spaces to sit down. So, of course, I decide to sit on his bed and drop all the paperseverywhere just to make a mess. Call me petty, but I like the effect.
Kingston stays standing, arms folded, and stares down at the goods. Then he looks up at me. And in the split second he does, I realize something.
He's waiting. Waiting forme.
It's such a strange reversal of the natural order of things that it actually catches me off guard for a second.
"Okay." I breathe out. "So, the equipment stuff," I say, shuffling those papers into relative order. "It's easy enough. I have a record of all the purchase orders we've made for the club here, so if you want to just double-check those, make sure I'm not putting in anything we don't need, I can get all this in." I glance down at the inventory, scratching the back of my head. "Pretty sure the Leon Paul stuff's going to be on back order, but we can get the Negrini in as soon as they have the measurements, and I don't know how you feel about it, butI'llpay extra for next-day air because I don't give a shit, so--"
"Okay," Kingston interrupts. He removes those papers and tidies them into a stack that he puts on his desk. "What else?"
I blow out a breath again. "Well, there's his...bank accounts and stuff. Assets. Real estate holdings." I push those toward him. "Nothing that would surprise you. I'm presuming it mostly goes to Mallory, so, you know, good for her. And probably some to you, of course."
"Some?" Kingston says, picking up the narrow LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT folder and extracting the two pages inside. "What do you mean?"
"I don't know," I admit. "I didn't read it."
Hypocritical as shit of me to give him grief for not getting any of this underway, and I can't even complete the job myself.
But that's the thing about my bastard of a foster father. Even after everything, even after the fact that I'm 99% sure that heengineered my bio mom's death just so he could manufacture me into an orphan and scoop me up for his own purposes, even though I'm 100% sure that he would have stabbed his own son through the fucking chest to stop us getting on that plane if Kingston hadn't been faster, I still don't want to see it in black and white.
The fact that he never considered me as a son and never would.
The fact that everything's for Kingston and nothing is for me.
The fact that I am too fucked up to be trusted with any amount of power, money, or responsibility.
"A trust," I hear Kingston say. “It's all going to a trust."
"What?" I say absently. I've been chewing on my piercing again. It's going to make my lip chapped as fuck. I force myself to stop.
"It's all going to a trust," Kingston says again. He proffers the piece of paper. “With the Consistory as beneficiary.”
"What?" I grab it away from him. Scan down the paragraphs. A bunch of legalese, Roman numerals, whereases and therefores and all that stuff. But I scan down. He's right.
I don't believe it, honestly. I read it several times just to make sure.
"He left it all to them," I say.
