Chapter 20
Max’s Money
JOHANNA
Preparing to reenter the conference room a second time, I’m calm, cool, and collected, no matter that I’m also shaking underneath.
My face is pale and still damp, but from a splash of cool water rather than more weeping.
My eyes are probably red, though it was hard to tell.
The washroom mirror went wonky and green-tinged a year after being installed and hasn’t been worth replacing yet.
Anamaria assures me I look fine, and I trust her enough.
My first crying jag since Max’s death, and it had to happen in public, and before males I haven’t seen for years—not that I’d chose to cry before anyone, given a choice.
Yet somehow, this batch of tears leaves me feeling cleansed.
Anamaria notices, too, her nose wrinkling as we return down the hall.
“You smell better, cleaner.” She nods approvingly. “Ever since Uncle Max got sick, you’ve had a lingering hint of mustiness, as though you’d been stuffed into a closet for too long. It’s gone now.”
My cheeks heat. Why hadn’t she or Corin or Caity mentioned it? Except, they knew I couldn’t do much about it, and probably didn’t want me to worry.
Still, something in me lightens further at confirmation that things are getting better, that I’m adjusting to my new circumstances.
A series of tremors in my fingers and toes immediately follows this realization. If Anamaria scented the difference, there’s no chance any of the alphas in the room will fail to catch it.
With one step into the room, however, all shakiness stops. The tension is almost tangible, a visceral sensation of shifting air pressures, complete with my ears popping as I swallow.
Anamaria makes a muffled gulping noise as she follows me in.
I respect Corin to the nth degree. Love him in so many ways, some for years and others still new and freshly blooming, but sometimes, he’s the classic dominant alpha even—or especially—on his turf.
He sits at the head of the table, back straight and exuding alphaness.
Printouts sit in five perfectly aligned piles before him.
After Dan’s admission of taking rut suppressors, of needing to take medication to moderate his alpha fuck-or-fight impulses, I’m not surprised that he’s in a seat two-thirds down the far side of the table.
His posture matches Corin’s, and he’s pushed his chair back just far enough to keep an eye on both Corin and Nathan at the same time.
Nathan’s dominance, however, I didn’t expect.
Max tended to invite milder alphas, presumably with lower hormone levels, to assist with his heats—and Nathan seemed to fit exactly that mold during the time we spent together, though that was admittedly months back.
Yet he, too, sits with a broom-straight spine across from Dan with a clear view of the other two alphas.
The three have allocated the room between them.
Classic unconscious alpha tactics 101. Leave alphas alone, and they’ll start by dividing space and resources.
Doesn’t matter whether the alphas are male, female, nonbinary, or a mix.
Happens even between family members and friends, if not quite as often as with strangers.
Not all alphas act like this, but so many do that the jokes practically write themselves.
Anamaria and I exchange a look, omega to beta and back.
For a moment, I consider indulging them. Instead, I cross my arms over my chest and glare at each in turn.
“You didn’t leave any room for us.” I flick my hands at Dan and Nathan. “You two move to the middle. Anamaria and I will share the far end.”
The alphas exchange glances, flashing bared teeth, then Dan and Nathan obey. As chair legs drag against the carpet, Corin’s lips twist sideways in an expression just a hair away from a smirk. I resist the temptation to roll my eyes at him—them—but Anamaria doesn’t bother.
All this tension has the hairs on my arms standing on end, and my pulse pounding at my temples, but not in a good way. I settle next to Anamaria, so my breaths are strongly scented with her gentle lilac and omega musk, partly overriding the alpha scents in the room.
Thank fortune Max named her to whatever this is. At the thought, I frown and stare down the length of the room at Corin. “So, why are we here?”
Obviously, I’m not asking why I’m there. I mean it mostly in a designation sense: why would Max pick three alphas and one omega to carry out his wishes?
Corin takes my question in a literally. “Let’s start with some background to give a sense of the scope of the task before us.
Max, whom we all knew in various ways”—he nods at each of us, gaze narrowing when it lands on Dan and Nathan—“focused on developing new innovations when he started out. He worked for a couple of different labs, dabbling in a variety of areas, before eventually deciding he could make a bigger contribution to the welfare of omegas generally, and himself in specific, by improving existing manufacturing and distribution.”
“That’s when we started Shallot Consulting,” I add.
Dan nods. “I’ve read some of the profiles about Max.”
“The point is, Max was at least partly responsible for a number of patents.” Corin sets his hands on two of the paper piles, the soft clomps pulling attention back to him.
“They didn’t bring in much revenue back then, so he basically allocated the income from licensing them to a single account and didn’t pay much attention to it. ”
“I remember that. We looked over the amounts, and they weren’t enough to make much of a difference in the firm’s success.” Vague images of Max shaking his head over pieces of paper float through my brain. “So he set them aside as a safety net.”
I hear a click from Dan’s direction, and from the corner of my eye, it seems Nathan shrugs, but neither says anything.
“He basically ignored the account, other than putting it in the hands of decent financial advisers.” Corin smiles down at me.
I return a wry grin, easily guessing what’s going through his head with ease: just as well that Max didn’t try to direct the investments himself. He was good at picking others to do so, but lousy the few times he dabbled in the stock market.
“No doubt he planned to something with it someday.” I sigh and swallow, not with bitterness, just a tinge of regret. “Except, someday never came.”
“He did, at least, get the paperwork signed to turn it over to a trust on his death. I have copies here, along with the last year’s statements.” Corin nods at Nathan and Dan. “He charged us to use the money to ‘make a difference.’”
He slides piles of papers each to Dan and Nathan. The piles are heavy enough that they don’t move easily along the glossy wood surface, winding up scattered along the far sides of the table.
While the alphas gather their documents, Corin brings Anamaria and me our piles with far more care. His hand brushes along my shoulders in a gentle caress before he returns to the far end.
The top pages are the charge and trust documents, as Corin says, and I skim the legalese, fingers flipping through until I reach the top-most financial statements, then stop abruptly, stunned at the number of digits in the balances.
Plural. The accounts are spread over firms with different specialties: real estate, healthcare, utilities.
Reading each balance multiple times, trying to add the rounded totals together, doesn’t make it any less surreal, even though I’m used to big numbers.
Our firm may be small potatoes by some measures, but we bring in serious money and incur equally serious charges to cover our costs.
Max’s patent monies equal and possibly exceed the firm’s annual income—not just profits but income.
“What the fuck was he thinking?” In the moment, I seek out Corin, barely even remembering Dan and Nathan are still in the room.
“I don’t know.” Corin shakes his head, momentarily grayer and more tired. “Like you said, that he’d do something with it some—”
“No,” I interject, “on second thought, he wasn’t thinking.
It wasn’t ‘interesting’ enough for him. He never did care how much solving a problem would cost or bring in.
He loved the challenge, the chance to make a difference.
” I rub my aching temples, the mix of scents getting under my skin and making my nerves jangle.
“We didn’t need the money, and the firm didn’t, either, so he left it alone. ”
“He did at least negotiate some pretty savvy fees for using his patents.” Nathan offers. He’s gone far deeper into the piled papers than I. Narrow glasses have appeared on his nose, flickering under the lights as he peers at a page of dense text.
“And he picked good advisers. These are top rates of return.” Dan holds an over-engineered calculator, tapping away as he makes notes.
The two of them start lobbing questions at Corin about all manner of things: legal terms, financial instruments, and licenses.
Under normal circumstances, I’d care. It’s not like these are unknown to me, but in the moment, they’re details—and the details don’t matter so much as what are we going to do with all this money?
I don’t realize I’ve whispered the question aloud until Anamaria turns and grabs my hand. Her voice is low, easily lost under the clamor of the three males, the three alphas, at the other side of the table. Only I hear.
“I have an idea. Well, Bebe is the one who got me onto it, though I still can’t figure out how she knew before me”—she wrinkles her nose as she drops her sister’s name, but her eyes are full of hope and dreams—“and started us daydreaming, but with this kind of money, we could make it a reality!”
“Make what reality?” I ask.
“Building special needs-based communities and co-housing developments, mostly for older omegas, and maybe betas, but also some younger omegas, and people, regardless of designation, in emergency circumstances.”
I shrug, the wave of words washing over without sinking in.
She bites her lip. “It’d be easier to show you, so you can see how much of a difference it makes.”
The layering of voices, interrupting each other and making increasingly hostile points, is enough to tell me the alphas have all but forgotten we’re here. I glance over anyway, but as expected, all I see is posturing.
“Could we go now, just us?” Escaping the growing levels of alpha musk would probably ease my throbbing temples.
“That’d be best. Alphas are welcome, but only on their best behavior.
” Anamaria rolls her eyes, because our three clearly aren’t.
She pushes her chair back and slams her hands on the table.
“Aunty Jo and I are going to check out a possible investment model. We’ll report back at our next meeting.
” A pointed look at her father. “Until then, please try to get along.”
In the blink of an eye, we’re out of the room, leaving most of my headache behind.