Push

52. He Attended the Club

💔 Content Warning 💔
Chapter discusses heavy themes, including
organized crime and sexual coercion.

TOBY

The hotel suite looked like a paper factory had exploded. Gwen had torn through the duffel bag where she'd stuffed all our personal papers, snatching out one after the other, eyes blistering over the tiny words on the pages before flinging another useless document across the room.

"Hey... come on..." I crouched beside her and rested my hand on her hunched back. Sometimes, a touch was enough to drag her out of the busy place she got stuck in her brain. "Slow down."

"Slow down?" She almost shrieked at me. "I can't slow down! I have to do something!"

I felt the same itch she did. I'd never been good at slowing down and thinking things through, but I needed to step up and be the strong one this time. "Gwen." Gentle but firm. "You heard my mother. She hasn't seen the...deed..." I grimaced. Was that right? They'd thrown around a lot of words I hadn't understood. Trusts. Deeds. Titles. Legal jargon and a whole lot of blah had shot across the table like bullets.

"Of course she hasn't seen the trust deed!" Gwen gritted out, digging back into the duffel and grabbing another handful of paperwork. "I'm keeping it from her, remember? I'm biding my time to get my revenge." She barked a frustrated laugh. "This isn't possible! I didn't sign anything!"

"Maybe you signed it and didn't realize it? I signed that waiver thing at rock climbing with Zach and didn't read a damn thing. Pointed at a line. Signed. Boom!"

Gwen speared me with a glare. "I'm a lawyer. I don't sign anything without reading it. And it's not like your dad could've just slipped a bit of paper under my nose, and, whoops, I'm now administering your family's entire fortune. There would have been a hundred things to sign. The deed. Titles over all the properties. Accounts." She went very still. "You...believe me..." Her head turned, eyes lifting, anguished expression cutting deep lines around her mouth. "Don't you?"

I didn't even hesitate to shut down any doubts she had. "One hundred percent. Nah...make that one thousand percent. Tanya does, too. You heard her. She scored Dad full points for pulling the ultimate power move from beyond the grave."

Gwen's tight smile was edged with only the slightest relief. "If your mother hadn't shown me that screencap on her phone of my name being on the title of her house, I'd say she was making it all up to create drama, but..."

"Is there—I dunno—some other way this could have happened?"

Gwen sighed, shaking her head. "Unless there's a master of forgery out there who's chosen to steal my identity out of everyone else in the whole wide world, it's simply not possible."

With a growl of frustration, Gwen threw herself back, lying spread-eagled on the floor, eyes closed. She took long breaths as she processed the lunch disaster over and over. I wanted to curl around her in a hug, but I was bolted to the floor, the rusty cogs in my mind creaking into gear.

Master of forgery.

My gaze narrowed on the door of our hotel suite. Maybe there was something I could do after all. I rose to my feet and started to tidy the papers strewn across the hotel room and stack them in a neat pile.

"Hey, Gwen," I called over my shoulder as I dropped another document on the pile. "It's, um... getting late... I, um... Yeah... I might go pick up Noah." I raked a hand through my hair. Smooth—not.