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Once we’re buckled into my matte, black and chrome BMW X5, I back out of my spot like a NASCAR driver leaving the pit. Blackjack, my reliable Beemer, has a lot of power underneath her hood and she’s never done me wrong when I’ve needed her most—like now. As we glide in and out of traffic, Dad grabs the file folder and begins examining the contents inside. He whistles a few times and shakes his head. “Looks like my old partner is up to no good… again.”
“That’s the intel Garrick has been gathering for me on the sly,” I confess. “I’ve been paying him out of pocket and not using company funds. He’s been working on it between cases. And I’m fucking glad that I had the forethought to have him followed during his nightly excursions.”
“I’ve always told you to follow your intuitions. And I’ve never been more grateful for you doing so,” Dad says, slapping the folder shut. “I always knew Marcus was slime. But he’s fantastic in a courtroom so I let a lot of his get rich quick schemes go. Nowadays, I’m wishing I’d been paying better attention to his extra-curricular activities.”
Thinking back on the various conversations Dad and I have had throughout the years, I can recall many times he told me to follow my gut, that it’d never steer me wrong, and he was right, it hasn’t. He and I have had several knock down drag out fights, mainly over my future, but now that I’ve matured, I know thathe’s always had my best interest at heart. He knew, don’t ask me how, that this path would be rewarding for me.
Clearing my throat, I voice the thoughts that have been ruminating through my brain out loud. “I'm not sure if I've ever told you how grateful I am for you pushing me. I always thought you were trying to control me, but now, I see that you somehow knew this was what I needed to do in life. That it would somehow free me from the chains that have always tried to hold me back. I guess that old saying is true, father knows best.”
Dad chuckles before saying, “You always loved to be artistic, no matter what the canvas was you were drawing, but math… not so much, and you’d have thrown a fit and quit the first time a measurement didn’t line up or someone questioned the integrity of your work.”
I laugh along with him because nothing else he could say would be closer to the truth. Math and I, we have a love-hate relationship. I love to hate it and it loves to torment me. Out of the four of us growing up, Berkley is the only one who could make an equation his bitch.
Nine times out of ten, he either helped me with my homework, or gave up and did it for me so I’d pass. Luckily for us, our teachers were drawn in by our magnetism and didn’t want to upset our parents due to the funding they gave the school that helped keep them afloat, so we always passed, regardless of how poorly our test scores actually were.
I have the basic concepts down.
Addition.
Subtraction.
Division.
Multiplication.
I excelled in all of those skills. However, the very second you add in some letters and equations, all bets are off. And don’t even get me started on the bullshit of when a train pulls in at a station at X time and takes off at C time, what time did the passengers disembark—that got my papers shredded by the amount of times I used my eraser so I could start over from scratch. It was all useless information that clogged my brain and made my eyes cross. I think it’s unsolvable and a way for schools to make their students pay for tutoring sessions… to my chagrin, my parents spent an abhorrent amount of their fortune trying to get me to understand that derisory bullshit, which never happened. To this day, it’s a trigger for me and I end up having a bonfire that contains any sort of mathematical paragraph needing to be solved.
Once we park in the elite gym’s lot, we quickly jump out and charge toward the building. With no desk clerk in sight, we use the electronic combination provided to us as silent partners and enter. Dad leads me up a set of stairs where we walk into a fanfare of yelling. All of it coming from Marcus McKinny who’s trying to get a reaction out of his daughter who’s standing as still as a statue, staring at the poster hung up on the wall.
Dad takes up his lawyer pose, hands laced together in front of him with his feet shoulder length apart. Me being me, quickly strides into the room, standing beside Berlynn as if no time has passed, and stand shoulder to shoulder with her. She startles at my close proximity, and when she sees who is directly beside her, her eyes widen and my name becomes a whisper on her lips. “Aris? What are you doing here?”
“Dad and I were called in to take out the trash,” I answer, not hiding my disdain for the asshole by being quiet when I say it. “Literally.”
“Oh,” she says in an astounded tone. “Okay then.”
“What’s he threatening you with, Berlynn?”
“You name it, if it’s important to me, he’s threatening it,” she professes, a soured look plastered on her face.
“Berkley?” I take a guess.
“Always,” she conveys. “Somehow, it hasn’t crossed his mind that he disowned us and I have legal guardianship, granted to me by a judge, over my brother as well as his medical care. Mr. McKinny has come to the conclusion that I don’t have the time nor the finances to see that he’s properly taken care of.”
I snort in response and say, “That’s a load of horse shit. And the timing is convenient for him that suddenly he wants to take responsibility for his son.”
“That it is,” she agrees. “Our inheritance is due to be released in a few weeks.”
“I know,” I murmur, conscious of the date of their birth as well, if not better, as I know mine and Addison’s. “We won’t let him get away with this. We’ve been fortunate to have stopped his previous attempts at gaining access to y’all’s inheritance, but somehow, this didn’t catch our inside guy’s attention. Something I’ll be checking up on once I make it back to the office.”
“Marcus!” My dad snaps, losing his usually well-maintained temper. If my dad’s mad, you don’t always know it because he’s typically as cool as a cucumber but Marcus has a way of getting under his skin. “Enough. There’s an entire staff at the hospitalthat heard your tirade loud and clear when you disowned your children. You did so legally too if memory serves considering I was made their proxy by the courts.”
“Mind your own business, Ross!” Marcus yells, pointing his finger at my dad who simply smiles back at him. “This is my family, not yours.”
Dad, not one to be deterred when he’s on a roll, picks up as if he’d never been interrupted in the first place. “You don’t have a leg to stand on and you know it so you’re here using your brawn to gain access to their impending inheritance. It’s not going to happen seeing as I’m their conservator until they’re thirty. You are aware that there’s a clause in the decree stating that you and Lucinda are never to touch a cent of their money, right? So no matter how much muscle you bring with you, you’ll never receive a dime from them. You’re broke, you’ve lost everything, so now you’re going to try and steal from your children, right? Guess what, it isn’t happening. If anything befalls me before they reach their thirtieth birthday, I have an entire line of lawyers who’ve willingly tossed their names into the pot to make sure you never touch a penny of what is rightfully theirs. Didn’t know that, did you? No judge in this jurisdiction will even look at a case you bring before them. You’ve ruined your reputation and nobody is willing to step up and put their names on the dockets for you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Ross. I have allies willing to help me. Help my children.” Dad chuckles at Marcus’s misconceptions, waving his hand through the air as if he’s found the statement hilarious.
“Allies, Marcus?” Dad asks, tsking. “No. What you have are loan sharks on your ass who know that you don’t have a dollar to your name, but your kids will shortly. You need to be a man, standon your own two feet and not live off Berkley and Berlynn’s future. Move on, preferably to another country, and start over. I’ll even give you the plane tickets as a gift if it’ll get you out of my town. Maybe you’ll be able to put a roof over your wife’s head in a foreign country if nobody knows who you are and what maliciousness you’re capable of.”
