I narrowed my eyes, staring at my father’s former right-hand man, who was still the head of private security for the Stonewood family… for me, since I was the only one besides my stepmother who remained.
“What kind of clause? Why did he create it, and what did he want from me, Henry?”
“This is… old,” Henry added, wincing. “From long before your accident. He wrote it when you were still attending Stonewood Preparatory Academy, right around your eighteenth birthday, if I’m remembering correctly.”
I went stone still.
Before the accident meant before my coma, before my scars, before my brakes mysteriously malfunctioned and my entire life got turned to scrap metal and blood and broken glass when that goddamn deer came through the windshield of my Porsche 911 Turbo and almost killed me.
My father created this clause before I lost three years of my life to black nothingness and waking up on a ventilator to discover that my father was dead and my stepmother had conveniently relocated to a country with no extradition.
I swallowed hard and glared down at the leather folder.
“I was a different person back then, Henry. Surely, whatever this is, it was intended to punish my idiotic teenage tendencies, but I’m not that boy anymore. I haven’t been since the accident. Whatever this is, it can’t be fair to hold me to it?—”
Henry exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Ben… your father wasn’t trying to punish you.”
My stomach twisted.
“Somehow, I doubt that.”
“He was trying to save the Stonewood family legacy, and — more importantly — he was trying to save you from yourself.”
I finally flipped open the folder and squinted down at the pages inside it.
There it was: a printed clause, thick with legal jargon, my father’s signature bold along the bottom of the page, and my name typed clean and sharp across the top, alongside a date from over ten years ago.
My throat closed up as I scanned what it said.
“This is completely unfair, not to mention insane.”
Henry spoke again, his voice low and painfully gentle.
“Your daddy loved you, but you were?—”
“I was a goddamn disaster,” I muttered, squeezing my eyes shut as my shoulders slumped in defeat.
Henry didn’t disagree.
“You were the party boy prince of Stonewood, even though you were only nineteen,” he said. “Drinks, women, money burning ahole in your pocket… You lived like the world would just hand you everything you wanted forever.”
My jaw flexed painfully. What he didn’t say was that the world probably would have continued doing exactly that, if not for my accident destroying my good looks and turning me into a reclusive monster.
“If only he’d known what was coming, he would never have done this to me.”
Henry’s voice softened even more.
“He was afraid you’d never settle down… that you’d waste the family fortune on fast cars and bad decisions.”
The corners of my mouth tugged up into a humorless smile. Ironic how that turned out.
I had both a fast car and a very bad decision to thank for the map of scars carved into my skin. The brake failure wasn’t my fault, but speeding like a reckless idiot was.
My eyes dropped back to the clause laid out in front of me.
If Benjamin Jacob Stonewood does not take a legally recognized spouse by midnight on December twenty-fourth, upon the year of his thirtieth birthday, all Stonewood assets and holdings will transfer in full to Vivian Leigh Stonewood.
