Page 114 of Knot Her Beta

I let the knowledge sink in. When I first left Connecticut, I had told myself I was fine without the money. When I left for the second and final time, I told myself the same, but Dominic had given me hope.

For a moment, numbers rearrange themselves in my head. The office on Harbor Street. A house large enough for four adults and children. A college fund for pups who don’t exist yet. The kind of financial cushion that would let Emily take a week off without calculating what the lost labor would cost her.

I could have brought all of that to them.

Except none of them had asked me to.

I exhale as a weight lifts from my shoulders. “Okay.”

Dominic studies me with concern. “That’s it? Just okay?”

I study the closed portfolio, the leather worn at the corners from being carried in and out of offices for years. “What else would you like me to say?”

“This isn’t a delay, Grady.” His jaw tightens. “Your trust fund is inaccessible without either written approval of the designated trustee or documented evidence of bad faith in the original drafting. And there is no evidence. I’ve looked. My entire legal team has looked. The trust is airtight.”

I lean back in my chair. “I heard you.”

Dominic frowns. “You’re taking this better than expected.”

“The trust was always conditional. I knew that.” I straighten a stack of papers. “I just hoped the conditions were negotiable.”

“They’re not.”

“I accept that.”

“Did your visit back home really go that badly?” Dominic asks. “Is there no chance for reconciliation?”

I shift in the chair, and my knee protests. “Not under the conditions they demand.”

He stiffens. “What kind of conditions?”

“Arranged marriage.”

“Ah.” He lets out a bitter laugh as he walks over to the sofa and sprawls onto it. “I’ve been there. A couple of times, in fact. Was their pick horrible?”

I ease my leg off the stool and spin my chair toward him. “No, she was perfect.”

His brows furrow. “That must have made it hard.”

“It didn’t.” I fold my hands in my lap. “I don’t want perfect. I want Emily, Jared, and Leif.”

He cocks his head to the side. “Do they know how much you gave up to be with them?”

“Leif has an idea, but it doesn’t matter. Money couldn’t give me what I needed to be happy.”

“It was a hell of a lot of money. That’s hard to say no to,” he says with the air of someone who has lived the experience.

“What happened with your arranged marriages?” I ask.

“The first was Chloe.” He turns his head to stare out the window toward the Homestead. “She was my everything, so I was happy to go along with it, but then things happened. I was young and stupid, and I lost her.”

Chloe had only told me some of what she went through before we met, but what she’d shared was rough. Kicked out of her pack, ostracized by her peers, extorted by her mother, and almost sold off as an Omega to a pack she hated.

But meeting the Wrights, and reconnecting with Dominic, had changed the trajectory of her future, and mine in the process.

“The others were Omegas picked by my familial pack,” Dominic continues. “We tried with a couple, but they were all nasty, money-hungry vipers. The money was tempting, though.”

“Money is like that,” I agree.