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Gabe held the door for all of us to step inside. Roman was the one to step ahead and greet the receptionist, who seemed to know him already.
“Mr. Herman will see you now,” the receptionist said as she led us past her desk and into a conference room. She closed the door behind her, leaving the five of us alone in the room. No one sat down.
The door opened, and the man we saw earlier in the navy suit entered and greeted us with a smile. “Hi everyone, I’m Michael Herman and I will be handling the contract with Mr. Bianco for the property sale.”
He was closest to me and reached a hand out to shake. I stared at it for a long time, wondering if I wanted to shake this man’s hand. Eventually, I did it just to get the ball rolling.
“Bella Stone,” I said, staring Michael right in the eye. I hoped that he could sense my disgust from just that one look.
“Nice to meet you, Ms. Stone.” Then he made his way around the room.
“Please, have a seat everyone,” he said after shaking hands with Gabe, Roman, Dante and Ava.
I waited until Gabe sat down and took the seat beside him, with Ava on my other side. Roman and Dante sat across from us and Michael sat down at the head of the table. He took out a folder and opened it, slipping out several copies of the contract before passing it to us. “I only expected the four of you, so I didn’t print a copy for everyone, but if you’d like me to get my secretary to print another one, it wouldn’t be a problem,” he said, winking at me. I shot him a look of death in return.
“That’s fine, she can look at mine,” Gabe said, his eyes on the paper. His brow was furrowed as he flipped through the pages.
The room went quiet again as the guys and Ava looked everything over. I was able to see the contract, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I had no idea what the property was worth or what it even entailed, but from the looks on everyone else’s faces, they were getting a shit deal.
“The price is a lot lower than we discussed,” Roman said.
Michael looked over at him, still grinning. I wanted to smack that look right off his smug little face. “Oh? Tony didn’t negotiate the price with you? He told me the lower price wouldn’t be an issue, that circumstances had changed.”
“Circumstances,” I scoffed under my breath. “I guess you could call it that.”
Michael looked at me and I wondered if he knew. Did he know that his client was holding my babies hostage while he passed around contracts for the others to sign? If he did know, he was a damned good actor. A look of bewilderment passed over his face.
“I thought this was a negotiation that I wasn’t privy to, a change in the property value?”
“You can say that” Gabe muttered. “Do you have a pen?”
“So are you all okay with the change in price then?” Michael asked.
They all shared a look with each other, and for a second, my heart sank into my stomach. What if Roman and Dante wanted to argue?
But to my relief, they all nodded in agreement.
“We are,” Roman said.
Pens were passed around, and all four of them signed away the property that had been held by their mother’s side of the family for generations. I knew that it hurt them, especially Gabe, but we were given no other choice.
Once it was signed, I was the one to ask, “Now what?”
“Well, closing could take a couple of months, but the funds are being held in escrow until then. They will be released upon closing.”
Everyone started to get up from their chairs, but I wasn’t satisfied with that answer. As we were saying goodbye, I stopped before Michael and asked him, “How do you sleep at night knowing who you do business with?”
He stared down at me, and for a second, something dark flashed in his eyes. It made me think he knew exactly what I was asking. His frown was quickly replaced by the same smug expression from earlier. “What do you mean, Ms. Stone?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. My clients are real estate developers, mostly. Some might argue that they can be greedy, but no more so than anyone else, in my experience. They’re just capitalists doing what capitalists do.”
I stared at him, hoping for a hint of what I saw earlier to reinforce that he did, indeed, know what type of people he was doing business with, but there was nothing. His smirk just pissed me off even more. He was being deliberately obtuse.
“Let’s go, sweetheart,” Gabe said, taking my arm gently.
I shook my head and resisted the urge to slap the smirk off Michael’s face. What good would it do anyway, it wouldn’t get us any closer to getting our babies back. But the deal was done, and if what Gabe said was true, we should be getting a pickup point from Tony soon.
