Page 39 of A Knight’s Revenge: The Complete Series

CHAPTER THREE

BENNETT

F or the duration of the Academy’s month-long winter break, the three of us laid low at Noah’s penthouse, leaving only to stay at Zach’s for one weekend when Noah’s father had briefly returned to the City.

Avoiding our parents had become almost second nature to us after all this time. As long as we answered their calls and appeared when summoned to take orders, they generally didn’t seem to care that we rarely crossed paths.

I did go home occasionally to make sure my mother was still alive, but I tried very hard to do so only when I knew my father was out.

As expected, he had demanded a private meeting with me shortly after the three of us had been yelled at as a group, and he’d told me in no uncertain terms that I was a failure, a pathetic excuse for a son and Heir, and that he expected me to take care of this problem before it got any further out of hand.

I’d only stared at him, letting his insults and rage slide right off my back while I hoped I looked serious instead of bored and annoyed.

All the while, she was on my mind.

Our best friend, the girl we had mourned for seven long brutal years, had returned to our lives, bamboozled us into thinking she was a nobody—a mouthy troublemaker, forbidden fruit dangled in front of us day after fucking day—and all the while, she’d been plotting against us like we were her enemies.

She had Zach living in fantasyland.

She’d broken Noah’s heart.

And she’d thrown down the gauntlet, and I was going to have to be the one to stand against her.

I hated everything about all of it.

Except for the fact that she was alive. Knowing that she’d somehow managed to avoid the cruel fate our parents had orchestrated for her, then swam across the fucking river and thrived ? It had lifted the crushing weight of the grief I’d been carrying around over losing her all these years.

I felt… lighter, somehow.

But I was also pretty fucking angry. Instead of running back into our arms, she’d declared war against us.

“They haven’t picked up anything from her except that she’s communicated with the head of the Knight Foundation several times through her lawyer,” Noah was saying as he bent over his laptop at the large dining room table that separated his Family’s kitchen from the living room.

“She’s only taken half of the Foundation’s funds so far, leaving the rest so that it can continue to support the charitable causes her parents outlined in their estate plan. ”

“How noble,” I muttered, scrolling through the front page of The City Tribune on my phone.

“She’s still richer than any of us schmucks,” Zach chimed in from behind the stove, where he was wearing nothing but his boxers and an apron while he futzed over his omelet like an asshole. “Without our trust funds, we’re still just leashed dogs.”

Despite Zach’s insistence that we should just show up to Jolie’s house with flowers and a fucking box of chocolates and demand she speak to us, we’d decided to keep our distance over the break, watching over things from Noah’s tower.

We weren’t watching Jolie so much as we were watching our parents watch her through their respective teams of investigators, hackers, and informants.

She’d spent her break in Olde Town with her adoptive family—including her cousin who was definitely not her cousin—except when she’d visited Mari in the City for a single weekend .

“She hasn’t contacted Anders either,” Noah added. “Except the Foundation’s told him she doesn’t want to kick him out of the Knight penthouse just yet, since she’ll be living at the Academy.”

“I’m sure she suspects Anders still hasn’t found his way out of Bennett’s dad’s ass,” Zach replied with a snort. “He’s probably taken to his bed over the shock of it all.”

I really didn’t know why my father bothered with Anders. He was useless, and it was no secret that Knight belonged to the other three Families now. Keeping Jolie’s weak-willed uncle as the “Acting Head of Knight” was a farce, and everyone knew it.

My phone dinged with another news alert, and I pulled up the landing page for The Saint Gabriel Herald . “The majority of the City media is still either discussing the Knight Heir’s reappearance in very vague terms, or they’re running our PR team’s version of the story,” I said.

“But the videos of her speech from the Holiday Ball keep popping up on national sites and gossip blogs that aren’t owned or controlled by the Families,” Noah added, fingers still clicking away on his keyboard.

“Every time the Families’ team gets them taken down, someone else puts them back up. It’s like Whack-A-Mole out there.”

As far as we could surmise, Jolie hadn’t done anything beyond tossing the bomb that was the truth out into the world along with the damning evidence she’d managed to steal, and now we were just watching as its blast slowly chipped away at the shiny visage of the Four Families.

A few more large pending deals had fallen apart for both Spencer and Hargraves, and Ferrero had lost one of its biggest investors in its casino business just last week—the lingering stench of murder accusations apparently unpalatable to certain people. Stock prices were tanking.

It would die down eventually. The Families held this City in a chokehold, and as long as the rich stayed rich, they’d continue to look the other way.

Zach dropped into the chair next to Noah at the table, his breakfast in hand, and I joined them after making myself an espresso.

I had a simple white T-shirt on—something I’d only wear in the privacy of our home—and flannel pajama pants.

With his sweatpants, Noah wore a fitted Holywell Crew shirt I’d given him last year, while Zach wore just his apron and a smirk.

“How much do you guys think Hendrickson’s balls have shriveled since he found out he’d been fucking with an actual Heir?” Zach asked casually as he shoveled eggs into his mouth.

“If he has balls at all by the end of the semester, it will be a miracle,” Noah muttered.

I shook my head. “She was so fucking reckless as Joanna. It’ll be so much worse now.”

Zach punched me in the shoulder much harder than necessary. “Have some faith in our girl, man. She’s all street smart and shit now.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “She doesn’t know how to play in our world, Zach. And not to mention, we can’t appear to be doing anything except making sure she fails.”

Noah just stared into his coffee cup, a frown on his face and his blue eyes misting behind his glasses. “She could’ve just come to us. She doesn’t have to be doing any of this.”

My heart ached for him—for that little kid who cried himself to sleep every night for months.

And he was right—she could have, and she didn’t.

After a few moments of tense silence, Buckley appeared out of the hallway that led to the foyer. Instead of simpering at Noah like usual, he looked at me.

“Miss Proctor is here to see you, Mr. Spencer,” he announced. “The concierge just rang me.”

Shit. There was only one person I hated dealing with almost as much as my father, and it was his private secretary.

Elise Proctor.

She was only thirty-two, had been my father’s private secretary since she was twenty-four, and was almost certainly fucking him. She thought she was Spencer, and the fact that he’d sent her to hunt me down at Noah’s house did not bode well for me.

“Fuck, he sent the Wicked Witch of the West over here?” Zach griped, sagging back in his chair. “I swear to God, if she hits on you in front of me, I am going to throw her into Noah’s pool.”

And there was also that.

“Send her up,” I grunted at Buckley because there was no refusing to see her without starting a fight with my father I didn’t care to have.

“Yes, sir. ”

As he retreated, Noah blew out a breath. “We were so close. Almost made it to the end of the break unmolested.”

A minute later, the loud ding of the elevator arriving at the penthouse sounded, followed by the click-clacking of high heels on the marble-tiled floors.

“The sirs are in the kitchen, miss,” Buckley’s nasally voice sounded out in the foyer, followed by a tight, feminine, “Thank you,” before the clicking resumed.

Elise marched into Noah’s kitchen like she owned it, her large designer bag thrown over one shoulder and a file folder clutched in her pink-clawed hand.

She wore her usual tight black pencil skirt and silky blouse, unbuttoned just low enough to tease a peek at her artificial tits that had appeared sometime during year three of her tenure with Spencer.

Her patent-leather heels were a few inches too high to be considered office attire, and her dark-brown hair was pulled into its usual severe ponytail.

She wore red-framed glasses that Noah had determined she did not have a prescription for, so we surmised my father had some kind of sexy-librarian kink she’d decided to play to.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she cooed as she dropped her bag unceremoniously on Noah’s dining room table. “I apologize for interrupting your breakfast, but Mr. Spencer is trying to get this little matter wrapped up today.”

She strutted over to where I sat at the head of the table, spreading the contents of the folder out in front of me as she leaned in, her tits inches from my face.

“If you’ll just sign at the bottom here, sweetie,” she said, her voice low next to my ear. “We’ll get you engaged. Your father has directed me to pick out the ring, so I presume that’s acceptable to you?”

Fuck. I’d been hoping for more time before having to deal with this, but my father was clearly more spooked by Jolie’s reappearance than he claimed to be.

I didn’t think the Jansens were in danger of going anywhere, even if there had been irrefutable video evidence of my father actually shooting Jeffrey Knight in the head, but he clearly thought this was an easy way to lock them—and their dollars—in with certainty.

No matter that it was my life he was signing away .

“Don’t do it, man,” Zach muttered from across the table. “Tell your dad to fuck off.”

Elise gasped like she was scandalized by Zach’s attitude despite having been subjected to it for years. “Mr. Ferrero! Bennett will do no such thing. He knows how important this is to the Family.”

I knew how important it was for my father to continue to treat me like I was too young, too inexperienced, and too clueless to make big decisions for myself and for Spencer.

I hated the bastard, but I also, inexplicably, still wanted his fucking respect.

I wanted to do right by Spencer.

“Here,” I said, scrawling my signature along the bottom of the contract—but not before I wrote in one important caveat. “Tell my father these are my terms. Purchase the ring and have it couriered to Harper along with the contract for her signature.”

She leaned in further, pushing her glasses down her nose as if she needed them to read what I’d written there.

“ The Engagement Period shall last the duration of the Parties’ tenure at Holywell Academy, with the wedding not to take place prior to the Parties’ date of graduation ,” she read aloud before turning to scowl at me.

“Your father will not be pleased you altered the contract.”

“He’ll respect my ability to negotiate,” I replied coolly. “I suggest you take this straight to the Jansens before I change my mind, Elise, or else Father will be even more displeased.”

“Can’t have that,” Noah added absently, pretending to be engrossed in his laptop.

She finally pulled her breasts out of my face and stood up, pursing her bright red lips.

“I see. Well, I will be on my way then.” She closed the folder and slid it gingerly into her bag before turning back to give me a sultry smile.

“You are getting good at this, Bennett. Soon you’ll be ruling the Family, and I’ll be there to… see to your needs.”

Before Zach could make good on his earlier threats, she turned on her heel and left the room, her hips swaying as she went.

Zach watched her leave, his nose wrinkling in disgust, before he turned to glare at me.

“You’re really going to marry Harper Jansen?

I know you’ve always thought of this as just a business transaction and that those Tier One bitches are basically interchangeable, but Harper almost killed Jojo, man.

If you hadn’t run out there to look for her after Harper gloated about it, our girl could be dead. ”

“She’s not our girl,” I retorted automatically before I responded to his initial question. “And… I don’t know.”

I’d wanted to wring Harper’s neck when I’d heard her bragging about abandoning Joanna Miller in the middle of the fucking river, and I hadn’t even known who she actually was then—another testament to the frustrating and confusing pull Joanna Miller had on me last semester.

To say I wasn’t thrilled to be engaged to Harper was a gross understatement, but I didn’t exactly have a choice at the moment.

We had a lot of problems to deal with, and this was a minor one that I’d just managed to kick two and a half years down the road.

We would be driving our cars back to Holywell tonight, and classes resumed tomorrow.

We would see her tomorrow.

And it would begin.