LOVING ME AND MY QUADRUPLETS

The Hidden Fortune

Chapter 5 — Adrian Kingsley's POV

I've been a lawyer for almost twenty years, and if there's one thing this profession teaches you, it's that everyone has a price. Even the dead.

Several weeks had passed since Mr. Vince Whitmore died, and I still hadn't been able to stop thinking about the properties he'd left behind — not the ones his family knew about, not the ones printed neatly in the will his sister-in-law's attorney kept asking me to finalize, but the ones only I knew existed. The ones that had never once appeared on paper anyone but me had access to.

Vince had hired me nearly a decade ago, back when Vance Logistics was nothing more than a name on a business card and a warehouse he was still paying off month to month, back when he used to show up to our meetings in a rented suit because he couldn't yet afford to own one. I watched that company grow from nothing into something worth real money, watched him grow right along with it — smarter, sharper, more careful about who he let close, more calculated with every deal he signed.

I liked to think I helped shape that caution in him. I liked to think, in some way, I'd made him the man he became.

Over the years, he'd accumulated properties he never told his wife about. Land parcels bought quietly under holding companies. Investment portfolios structured through entities with names that meant nothing to anyone outside this office. Assets tucked away in places even his own accountant didn't know to look, let alone Anna. Some of what he owned, his family was fully aware of — the house they lived in, the company that bore his name, the visible, obvious pieces of a self-made fortune. But a significant portion existed only in the files locked inside my office safe, structured quietly, kept entirely separate from the rest of his estate.

He trusted me with all of it. Trusted me completely, in a way I don't think he extended to many other people in his life — not even Marcus, if I'm being honest, though the two of them were close as brothers could be. Vince used to say I was the only man who understood the difference between what he owned and what he was *seen* to own. I think he meant it as a compliment.

Now he's dead, and here's the truth nobody in that family would want to hear: that man accumulated a great deal of wealth, more than any of them realize, more than most people ever manage to build in a single lifetime. And in my honest, professional opinion, he was greedy. Selfish, even, in the quiet way successful men often are — building an empire piece by piece without ever stopping to consider who might be standing close enough, patient enough, to take a piece of it once he was no longer around to protect it.

I intend to release to the family only the properties they already know to ask about. The house on Maple Ridge. The main company accounts, the ones the bank and the accountants and half the city already have documentation for. The visible, obvious pieces of his estate that no one could question without questioning me directly.

The rest — the properties nobody else knows exist — those I intend to keep for myself.

It isn't as complicated as people might assume. As a professional, I have my ways of concealing the truth, ways I've refined over nearly two decades of managing other men's fortunes and other men's secrets. I know exactly how far paperwork can be pushed before anyone thinks to question it, exactly which filings raise eyebrows and which ones simply disappear into the noise of a large estate. No one — and I mean no one — needs to think twice about where the remainder of Vince's fortune went. As far as anyone will ever know, it never existed at all.

He's gone. He won't be the one to stop me. And a dead man's silence, I've learned, is the most reliable kind there is.

I sat in my office that afternoon with the late sun cutting long shadows across my desk, leaning back in my chair, one leg crossed over the other, turning the plan over carefully in my mind. Weighing the risk against the reward. Weighing exactly how patient I needed to be before I started moving anything. It wasn't often a man got handed an opportunity this clean — no widow suspecting a thing, no brother asking questions I couldn't answer, no auditors circling. Just quiet, careful paperwork, and time.

I let myself imagine it for a moment. The properties converted, quietly, over the coming months. The kind of wealth that didn't just pad a retirement account but changed the entire shape of a life. I'd spent twenty years managing other men's fortunes while my own modest fees trickled in year after year. Vince had made millions off deals I structured for him. It didn't feel unreasonable, sitting there, to believe I'd finally earned something for myself.

I was still deep in thought, my hand resting flat on the folder of documents on my desk — the one containing every asset only I knew about — when my office phone rang, sharp and sudden enough to pull me straight out of the calculations running through my head.

I picked it up without much urgency, expecting my secretary to remind me of some meeting I'd already forgotten, some routine call I could push to tomorrow.

"Sir," she said, and something in her voice stopped me cold before she'd even finished the sentence — a strange edge to it, hesitant in a way she never usually was. "There's someone here. She said she'd like to see you."

I frowned, glancing down at my calendar. Nothing scheduled. No appointments, no walk-ins expected, nothing that would explain the tightness I could hear creeping into her tone.

"What's her name?" I asked, already reaching to straighten the folder beneath my hand, an old reflex, tucking away whatever wasn't meant to be seen.

There was a pause on the other end. Longer than it should have been.

"She wouldn't say, sir," she said finally. "She just insisted it was important — and that you'd want to see her.”