Kingston's voice is wooden. "It appears so."
I don't know why that's what does it. Why hearing Kingston sound so flat, sonothing,is what gets my blood absolutely boiling. But I look down at the page again and I am suddenly, intensely,furious.
Not for me. I knew I wasn't getting one red cent out of that bastard. But his own son--
"Jesus Christ," I mutter. I look up at Kingston, trying to read anything in his face. Anything at all. But there's nothing. Just a tight jaw and a middle-distance stare.
You're all he has now, Kai.
Mallory may be a gold-digging airhead, but she wasn't wrong about that.
"I'm named as executor," Kingston says, suddenly reading again. His voice is mechanical--more mechanical than usual, and that's saying something. "For the estate." He looks at me. "Is that right?"
My hate for Luther surges back threefold, poisonous and cold.How dare he?I think.How dare he do this to his own fucking son?
It's not even just the will. Fuck the will. I mean making him a murderer. Forcing his fucking hand from day one. Forcing King's mom to...
Fuck. I can't even think about it. It’s honestly sick.
And now,now, he's left his son to be the author of his own deprivation. To write to those lunatic religious fanatics in France and inform them that what rightfully should be his—the family fortune that he has definitely suffered enough to have earned—is going to them and their bullshit.
Outwardly, though, I keep my voice even. "What's it say, exactly?"
"It..." Kingston's face is tight as he scans the lines, his eyes moving so fast I'm not sure he's actually reading. He rubs his forehead. "I'm sorry. I'm having some difficulty..." He clenches his fist around the sheet of paper, looks up at me. "Can you just tell me what I need to do?"
His voice is so thin and so taut that I almost miss that he's on the verge of tears.
And that breaks my heart clean in fucking two.
"Nothing," I say. I reach for the paper, and he darts away, but I grab at it faster. "You don't have to do anything, Kingston.”
“What?”
“Just…let me handle this."
He frowns. "Kai, you can’t?—”
"I absolutely can," I interrupt. "I'm just as smart as you are, even if you'll never admit it." I smooth the piece of paper over my thigh, hoping I'm right and that I can actually figure out any of this legalistic whatever it is.
"So, what?" Kingston says. "You're going to write to the Consistory and tell them that they've just been awarded one of the largest real estate portfolios in North America?"
I fold the paper in half, then quarters, then give up and shove it in my back pocket.
No, I think.Absolutely not. I won't let that happen.
Out loud, all I say is, "Yeah, I'll figure it out."
Kingston studies me a long moment. All neat and clean in his perfect pressed uniform-like clothes, and me in dirty jeans and a T-shirt I haven't changed in three days. And I think, briefly, of how in another world, in another life, a guy like him and a guy like me never would have crossed paths--not unless I jacked his Land Rover or he was tasked with buying the coke for his investment firm's Christmas party and I was the dealer's delivery boy.
But here we are.
"Okay." He nods, at last. "I trust your judgment, Kai."
That makes one of us, I think. But I give him a salute. Scoop all the papers back up, even the ones he already stacked on his desk.
"Go eat something," I say, and slam his door after me.
And almost walk straight into Gwenna.
