The Slum Heiress Bringing Down the Elite Clan novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Twenty Million

Maeve films the threat, Rafe walks her out, and Winifred orders a DNA test while Eugene signs a buyout offer on camera.

The two guards started toward me, and I did not move.

I took out my phone and held it up so the whole table could see the red dot.

"I have eleven reporters on a text chain, Mr. Saltonstall," I said. "Say it again, a little slower."

Eugene's face went the color of old paper.

The guards stopped.

Then a man in a black suit stepped between us, and I had to look up to see his face.

Rafe Hawkins was big, quiet and dark-haired, with a scar through his left eyebrow.

His grey eyes went over me once, from my shoes to my chain.

"Ms. Keane, I'll walk you out," he said.

"I didn't ask to be walked."

"Then you'll be walked anyway, with no one's hands on you."

He said it low, so only I heard it.

I realized he was telling me he would stop the guards if I let him.

"Fine," I said.

He took my arm above the elbow, and his hand was warm through my sleeve.

We walked down the center of the ballroom, through four hundred silent people.

Behind us a chair scraped.

"Mr. Hawkins," said a thin old voice.

Rafe stopped.

Winifred Saltonstall had risen on her cane, and the whole room waited for her.

She looked at my face for a long moment.

"Eugene, sit down," she said.

He sat.

"Brielle, put your phone away."

Brielle put it away.

"The girl will take a test," Winifred said. "The board will watch it taken. Until the result, she stays in the guesthouse."

"Mother, this is a stunt," Eugene said.

"Then it will end badly for her," Winifred said. "Mr. Hawkins, see her to the east gate."

She sat back down and picked up her fork.

I let Rafe walk me out into the October night.

Neither of us spoke until we reached the gravel drive.

"You didn't flinch," he said.

"I flinch in private."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

"I'll have the guesthouse ready within the hour," he said. "Do you have a bag?"

"I have a toothbrush in my purse. I plan ahead."

"I noticed," he said.

He stood looking at me a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he went back into the ballroom.

The test was taken at nine the next morning, in the boardroom, with six board members and one nurse watching me spit into a tube.

Eugene did not attend.

At ten, his assistant came and said the chairman would see me in his office.

His office was on the forty-first floor, with a wall of glass over the harbor.

You could see the Flats from there, a gray smear of tenements along the water.

I had once stood in a doorway down there, in a stolen coat, watching rain fill the gutters.

Eugene sat behind a desk the size of a car.

He did not stand up.

"What do you want?" he said.

"I want to be heard."

"You want money. Every one of you does."

"Every one of who?" I asked.

"Girls like you. Girls from down there." He waved a hand at the glass.

"I'll tell you a story, Mr. Saltonstall," I said, and sat without being asked. "A woman gets a lab result that says she's a Saltonstall."

"She gets thirty percent of this company and a seat on the board."

His fingers stopped moving on the desk.

"She also gets a lawyer who wants to see every vote you've cast for twenty-three years."

"Or she walks away," I said. "For a price, and a signature, and no lawyers."

"What price?"

"Twenty million."

He laughed once, short and ugly.

"And I would sign that to what?"

"A settlement offer. Nothing binding. A paper that says you'll pay it if the test comes back."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then I'm a con artist, you've lost nothing, and I leave town."

I watched him do the math.

I had spent my life in a bar where men did exactly this math, over beer, about other men's debts.

He thought thirty percent of his own company was worth much more than twenty million.

He thought I was a hungry girl who didn't know it.

"Have my lawyer draw it up," he said to the room.

He wrote his name at the bottom of a clean page himself.

I took the page and thanked him.

The phone in my jacket pocket had been recording since I sat down.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend