Dark Beauty /Sirius Black/ [2]

Dark Beauty - 21.

Chapter 21

It was an odd feeling for Adria to feel so powerful, to have her head held high and her lips pursed, and her heeled clad foot crossed over her leg. Her hands perfectly clasped together on her lap and Jude was silently sitting on just that, tears dried from their morning and absentmindedly playing with the ends of Adria's lengthy hair.

Beside her, Benji sat. His hair was styled, unlike most days, a tie to his neck wrapped around a collared white shirt under a crisp grey blazer that Arden spent hours trying to figure out the perfect spell to get the many creases out of it.

And to his left was a shifty looking Alina - nervous, she was and scared of what was to come. She was the youngest, but that didn't dampen her ability to prove herself, to prove that she was just as right to be sitting with her siblings - Benji to her right, Alfie to her left and Adria who only wanted to take her hand, right there matching the eyes of the man behind a perfect mahogany desk.

"Your father..." he said, "very well-off."

"As was our mother," Adria said. Her voice was cold, and Jude looked up to her with such confusion - because that was not his Adria talking, it was a voice unlike any of them had ever heard before, but the man in front of them...a sexist, too high in power man who wished for nothing than to keep such money to himself.

"Yes...yes she was." He nodded quickly, eying the girl - no, eyeing the woman in front of him with curiosity, intrigued by her...by her looks and her stance and her clothes...and the way the child in her lap looked at her with such love, like a child with his mother.

"Yours?" he nudged towards the boy...too full of himself to realise it was not her child, but her brother but in saying that, he didn't care.

"My brother - our...brother." She ran her hand through his hair soothingly, "but if such things matter then maybe it'd be good to tell you I'm pregnant!"

He held back a snort, though the judgement shone through and his eyebrow had risen and with a huff, he spoke, "kids these days."

"Kids these days seem to sit behind desks upon a high horse," Adria snapped, though her voice feigned calm, and the man shifted, "Mr Specker, this meeting was called because you are withholding money - rightful money­­ from us. This will of my parents was from them, and it's ours, that house and what we intend to do with it is our business and this company, no matter the length of time my father worked here has no right or business with it."

"You must be out of your mind," Mr Specker scoffed, "if you think I'm going to let a bunch of...of children! Take this fortune."

"Sir, if I may," Alfie spoke, shifting slightly and Adria could tell he was biting his tongue, "I have a family. I have a wife - a child...I am not a child myself, and neither are my siblings. We are here to claim what is ours, we are here to take what we should've had months ago - what should have been brought to light months ago."

Adria wasn't sure she wanted to know what the call was so early that morning. She had woken to the constant ringing and jumped to get it just so Jude wouldn't cry from the early wake-up call, but what she didn't expect was that her money...and the rightful money to her siblings was being held from them by her father's company.

And his old partner.

"You may have known us since a young age," Benji spoke, a calmness to his voice and his hand clutching Alina who did not like the man in front of her, "but we are not that age anymore."

"I knew your father better than anyone else-"

"Yes, you really had such a bond when you didn't recognise his son," Adria but in, eyes narrowed to a glare, "this is not a discussion. This is not a debate - that money is ours and this company had no right to take it, or even think they had any sort of right to take it!