“So, just fuck my money?” Winnie asked incredulously. “Look, I need this money.” She looked between us. “It can change my life and if I decide to walk away I can take this moneywith me. At this point, I’ll take anyone. If you can find anyone to marry me in the next three hours, I’ll pay them. I’ll give them twenty percent. I’ll?—”
I cut her off before she could start panicking. “Hold on. Breathe. Tell me exactly what the rules of your inheritance are.”
“I just have to be married by twenty-three and stay married for two years. During those two years I can’t be on birth control. There’s a doctor already assigned to keep my body in check. There’s nothing too crazy wrapped into it. My great-grandma put it in place during a time when her daughters were doing whatever they could to get out of their arranged marriages. The money was an incentive for them to get married and the birth control thing was in hopes that they’d get trapped.” Winnie chuckled darkly. “You know how it is. Once you have a kid with a powerful man, they own you.”
“Unless you abandon them,” Flora inserted. “And trust me, it’s been done.”
“Right.” King exhaled. “Can we have the room for a second, ladies?”
“Uhm, sure.”
Winnie climbed up and she and Flora made their way to the door and quietly let themselves out.
“Is there a reason we’re entertaining this?” Xavia asked quietly. “I’m with Knight on this one. We didn’t break any laws and we don’t owe them anything. The amount of money that they were promised is absurd and even if we split it it’s swallowing up a significant amount of our earnings for the year.”
“Yeah, but we did fuck up their life.” King sighed.
“No. Rook fucked up their lives,” Knight corrected. “If the three of you want to split up the payments, cool, but I’m not willingly signing up for that shit and I want to make it clear that I don’t think she’s entitled to the money.”
“It’s money that would have been hers if we?—”
“If Rook,” Knight cut him off.
King looked over at Rook. I scoffed but didn’t comment. Knight was always clear that he thought King let Rook get away with everything so I wasn’t shocked by him putting his foot down right now. It was what it was at this point. He was standing strong on how he felt and I didn’t blame him. He was right. He was the provider for two wives and what would soon be the main provider for two children. His fiances were going to be tied up. He wasn’t lying and he owed it to them to give them the best life he could, despite what kind of shit Rook dragged us into.
“Fine. IfRookhadn’t shot a groom on their wedding day we wouldn’t be in this situation, sure, but in the grand scheme of shit, he’s a Barron and it looks bad on us that we came into these women’s home, killed one of their future husbands, and swindled them out of millions of dollars.”
“Bishop,” Knight said. “Do you have your portion of the money?”
“I can get it.” I said without hesitation.
“So you don’t have it?”
“No.”
“Right,” Knight scoffed. “King, you’re treating this like we’ve committed some noble sin because Rook defended himself. Nah. Do I think he should have been fighting at a wedding to start off with? No, but he’s not in the wrong outside of that.”
“Life isn’t just black and white, Knight. You know that.”
“So, what? You think they’re going to call our family’s honor into question or something?” Knight chuckled.
“Yeah,” King answered seriously. “I do.”
“Can they do that?” I looked from King to Knight and back.
“They feel like they were wronged so yeah, they can. The issue is that in this business…”
“Honor is everything,” Xavia finished.
“That’s right.” King reached over and set a hand on her knee and squeezed. “Look, if the money is going to keep shit going just fine, cool. Will it set us back a little, yes, but it’s worth it for the peace of mind it’ll give us and in the long run, we’ll make the money back tenfold. Since she would have had to wait two years to get the money anyway, I’ll talk to her about letting us pay it off in two years. We can split the grand total into three, excluding Knight in honor of him welcoming the next generation of Barrons in just a few months, and put up half of what we owe each year. Any objections?” King looked around at each of us.
I shook my head. Xavia didn’t even meet his gaze.
“If I need to come up with some of the money, I’m sure we can, but I just don’t know about a full fourth of it,” Knight said.
“And we’ll accept whatever the three of you can donate but I’m not going to commit you to it,” King offered.
Knight nodded.
