PROLOGUE Benedict

A fter my head metaphorically spun around a complete three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, conjuring up my favorite scene from The Exorcist , I laser-focused on my father, Benedict Lexington Hawthorne Sr.

"Uh, what?" I demanded. "No one said anything about that before today," I added, wondering if, in fact, they had. I had a tendency to listen to only what I wanted to hear. I'd inherited the trait from my mother. Like me, she was too busy with herself to think of others.

I shifted my eyes to our family attorney, Jaime Goldberg. Jaime was actually pronounced, Hy-mee . I'd often thought what a horrible thing his parents had done by giving him that atrocious name. He'd been a presence in my life since I began speaking, so I'd had plenty of time to deal with him. Plenty of time to question if a man could live with a name like Hy-mee .

He lifted a folder and waved it in my direction. "Actually, Ben, we discussed this with you when we went over your trust fund four years ago. A month after Mrs. Hawthorne passed," Jaime attempted to explain. "You made the promise."

I heard his words but was still struggling to see myself living in some bullshit town in fucking Montana. I'd never visited Plentywood, Montana, and I had zero desire to go there now. "I'm not living in a Podunk town of a thousand people," I stated, turning to my father. "You won't even go to that town. Why should I? No fucking way." How could I? I needed Barneys and Saks Fifth Avenue .

My father moved his eyes toward Jaime but addressed me. "Not a problem, son. You can renege on the promise you made to your grandmother if you choose, but we'll be forced to move the thirty million from your trust to the family trust."

"What does that even mean?" I asked, my eyes ricocheting between the two men wearing ridiculously overpriced suits.

"It simply means that you'll get my mother's money when you get mine," he proclaimed. "As in, when I'm dead!"

"No way!" I protested. "What about now, Father? I need money right now."

"You're a doctor, Ben. I'm sure you'll make a decent wage soon."

I stared at him in disbelief. My father was my ATM. He'd fulfilled that role my entire life. There was no way he could think that I was ready to get off his teat just yet, did he? He was the legacy parent who got me into Columbia Medical School to begin with, and now he wanted me broke while I worked in Montana for a year as a small-town doctor.

"I'm not going, but I'll still need an increase in my allowance," I said, bouncing my focus between them. "I need a car befitting a doctor, and I'm tired of struggling to live off ten grand a month."

Jaime ran his finger down a piece of paper he'd referred to earlier as the disbursement of trust . "You'll no longer receive an allowance if you break your promise, Ben," he began, too calm for my taste. I leaned forward, pretending to listen to his legal speak, while simultaneously not giving a shit.

"No way," I stated. "Let me see those papers. That is not happening, Jaime."

"If you fail to fulfill your promise to your grandmother, a promise you previously, and I might add, legally agreed to." He paused and held up pieces of paper I'd blindly signed before my medical residency, papers I hadn't bothered to read. Back then, they said the agreement was my promise to Grandmother Hawthorne so I could get a larger monthly allowance. "Your allowance ends immediately because this trust will be merged with the family trust if you don't go."

"No, it doesn't," I said, shaking my head to make him wrong. "Father? No, it doesn't , right?"

"The gravy train is over, Benedict. Before your mother died, I also made her a promise. I gave my word to her I would no longer support you once you completed college. And, unlike you, I plan on keeping my promise," he declared.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" I raged. "But I don't have any savings." My father squirmed in his seat and shot Jaime a glance that sent chills up my spine. "What?" I asked, again looking back and forth at my new enemies. I knew my father, and I was well aware when he had more bad news holstered up and was ready to shoot my plans down.

"If you don't keep your promise, son," Father began. "Well… let's just say your grandmother considered something like that might happen."

"And?" I whispered.

Father continued. "Listen, Benedict. Your mother, and your grandmother, both felt that you might try to get out of this little promise. I, of course, had nothing to do with this. So, they insisted we use student loans for your college tuition rather than paying in full upfront."

"Bullshit!" I exclaimed. "You've never taken a loan out for anything in your life."

Father gestured to Jaime. He pulled a stack of envelopes from his drawer and placed them on his desk. "These are loan statements, Ben," Jaime said. "At 70k a year, you owe nearly 500k to the US government."

My father held his hand up to Jaime and then turned to me. "Listen, Benedict." God, I hated when he used my full name, his name as well. Good news never followed him using my proper name. If he added the middle name, Alexander, again after him, I knew I was truly fucked. "Here are the simple facts, son," he began. "Break your promise, and you will no longer receive an allowance, you'll be stuck with student loans you will have to pay, and you'll lose a thirty-million-dollar trust that belongs to you when it transfers to the family trust. What part of keeping a promise to your grandmother do you not understand?"

I stood and made my way to a wall of legal books, wanting to toss a few of the heavy ones directly at the men standing in the way of me being a physician in the Hamptons, or a Los Angeles doctor to the stars. "You can't do that," I insisted, my back to them. "Grandmother wouldn't want her only grandchild to suffer."

"I can, and I will," my father stated. "Go to Plentywood for a year and fulfill your grandmother's wish, as you said you would. If you do that, you'll continue to get an allowance. An allowance that I'll increase to twenty thousand a month, starting today. Also, I'll allow you to purchase a car that you desire, and the thirty million is yours once you turn thirty-five."

"Fuuucccckkkk! That's more than five years away!" I yelled, stomping my way to the huge window that overlooked Manhattan, still refusing to look at them. I wasn't yet convinced that I'd lost this argument. "I simply cannot do a year in Montana." I turned to face my enemies. "Look at me. Do I look like a guy that could live in Montana?" I noted, crossing my arms. Neither of them budged like I thought they would. My father never said no to me, and I wasn't sure I liked how it tasted. Montana? Town of a thousand hicks? How bad could it be? "One year?" I asked, facing the window again. "And I get out of that place with my trust fund intact?"

"Is that a yes?" he asked.

I spun around, glaring at my father and his uptight lawyer, lowering my voice. "One year only. That's twelve months. Not a single day more."