Page 5 of The Alpha's Fake Mate
I no longer needed to do either, though. I had a new career.
My friends said I was lucky. I’d just inherited sixty-five point seven million dollars, after taxes, from my Alpha dad whom I had not seen since I’d gone off to the academy against his will. He’d wanted me to stay behind and go into business with him. But I hated his business.
Now it was mine, along with all the money it generated.
I leaned forward in my chair, elbow on the attorney’s desk, and ran my fingers through my bangs, pushing upward, tugging hard. “Now. What do I have to do to sell that?”
I pointed to the paper I had just signed that wasn’t cash, but assets. One in particular. An inherited asset I wanted nothing to do with.
“Sell that one?” he asked. “Why would you do such a thing? It’s a cash cow. You may have money now, but this business guarantees you’re set for life should the worst happen, should banks fail or the other businesses dry up.”
“I don’t want to be responsible for it.”
“You have everything set into place. And an agency that runs it for you. You need do nothing and the cash flows in. Orion, why would you sell?”
Most Alphas would not understand. But then most Alphas didn’t give a shit what happened to Omegas who were out of their sight. My dad was one of them. He had no conscience about his business practices, and if unsavory things happened, he signed off on them and let others handle the fallout.
I wasn’t my dad. I was the type of kid who couldn’t just let things slide. I got into a lot of fights as a teen not because I was a bully, but because I could not tolerate bullies.
Alphas will be Alphas, so the saying goes. Aggression and strength were rewarded. We who were richer were even more privileged. We ran the world with no consequence to bad behavior. Asserting power and authority over others for fun was considered a positive trait, even if it hurt them. Short of murder, Alpha bullies were considered winners in life.
Maybe hating my dad fed my ire. When I grew big enough to take the assholes of my grade, the more popular Alphas in my private school avoided me. But nothing changed. Not the actions of Alphas, or the school, or the whole wide planet.
I could only affect my own little area of the world, quietly getting my science degree and slaking my Burns at privately vetted Omega cloisters where Omegas had the most rights and could accept or decline a customer at will, and where I knew they would not freak out over an Alpha who might want a less than submissive partner for a couple of days.
My dad paid for everything without a word.
Now, all my dad owned had become mine.
The attorney poured more wine into my glass, then helped himself. It seemed wrong to drink it under such bright fluorescents which illuminated the paperwork that bragged of such obscene wealth. Wrong to celebrate, somehow.
He leaned forward, bringing his face more in line with my own.
“If you want to sell,” he said. “All right. But don’t you think you should have a look first at what you’re giving up? If you don’t like something, you certainly have the money to make changes.”
I sighed. “Maybe.”
“Basically, if you sell, you lose all control. Who knows what the new owner might do to the place? But if you keep it, you can maintain it the way you like. Not your father’s way, but your way. Maybe even better than the way your father ran it.”
I touched the now dried ink of my signature on the last form. “Zilly’s. I don’t even know why it’s called that. I never wanted anything to do with the farms. Maybe because my dad owned one. But now I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll set up a tour. See what you think. If you want to liquidate afterward, I’ll put that into motion. But my opinion is it’s worth more to keep it than to sell.”
I gave in to him for two reasons. One, because he’d made a convincing argument, and two, because I was somewhat curious.
Just the idea of chattel farms made me cringe. My attorney was right, though. If I kept ownership I would have control. I could choose hands off or hands on. I could make sure the Omegas were treated with decency at the very least.
Most Alphas might look down on Omegas as second class citizens, but experience I’d had with the ones I’d met taught me they were as smart and capable as we were. Their statures, for the most part, might be smaller, their faces softer and prettier, their scents sweet as fresh cut flowers, but the look in their eyes was as fierce and intelligent and determined as any Alpha I had known. Somehow, in some warped and broken way, someone deep in the past had decided because Omegas had egg sacks and produced lubricant making them eager to be penetrated, they were less than us, unequal because they were submissive.
I knew though, that if you really studied submissive behavior in animals, you could see the one on the bottom was the one in charge, and if a mating had to be forced, where did that get fun?
But talk like that could get you bad grades in biology class, not to mention a life without friends.
The attorney—I guess he was now my attorney, Mister Saben Tratto, Esquire JD—brought up his tablet and started scrolling through it.
“I can set up a tour with you and the board for Thursday next week,” he said.
I didn’t need to check my own calendar. It was empty. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go back to school or not for a PhD. I had money now, so I thought about doing some traveling first. Go skiing in the Alps. Maybe buy a boat. Or a giraffe for the huge front yard of my dad’s house which was now my house. Wasn’t that what rich men did?
