Chapter 37
I am your guardian. And I do not care what lawyers your parents hire. I do not care how much money it costs. I am going to fight for both of you. You are a package deal now, Team Slater. And no one gets left behind. Not ever again. Promise, Mia whispered. I promise, I said. I lay there listening to their breathing slow down as they drifted off to sleep.
They were exhausted, but I was wide awake. My mind was already back in logistics mode, planning the next phase of the operation. Getting off the ship was the easy part. The hard part would be the court battle. Austin would fight for Leo, not because he loved him, but because Leo was an asset. Leo was the heir.
Leo was the proof that they were a normal family. Losing Mia was an embarrassment, but losing Leo would be an ego death for Austin. He would fight dirty. He would use every trick, every lie, every ounce of leverage he had. But he didn’t know what I had. He didn’t know about the trust fund documents I had kept from 20 years ago.
He didn’t know about the clauses in the deed to his house. He didn’t know that I had spent my career preparing for worst case scenarios. I looked at the ceiling of the cabin. Sleep well, kids, I thought. Because when we land in Miami, grandpa is going to war, and I have never lost a war. I stepped into the bathroom of the small cabin and closed the door until it clicked softly.
The space was tight, barely big enough for a man of my size to turn around in. The harsh fluorescent light buzzed overhead, casting long shadows against the white tile. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes were rimmed with red, and the lines around my mouth seemed deeper than they had been this morning.
I looked like a man who had been fighting a war for 20 years instead of two days. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and pulled the satellite phone from my pocket. It was a heavy brick of a device that the captain had loaned me, explaining that it was the only secure line that could not be monitored by the ship’s general switchboard.
I dialed the number for Rachel Stein. Rachel was not a family lawyer in the traditional sense. She did not handle amicable divorces or estate planning for retirees who wanted to leave their porcelain cat collection to their nieces. Rachel was a shark. I had met her 10 years ago when the army was dealing with a complex contracting dispute involving millions of dollars in logistics supply chains.