Page 17 of Chains and Vows

Cash absorbs this without any visible reaction, just a slight tightening around his eyes. "But Marcus is a fuckin' problem. More of a problem than you know."

I laugh, but there's no joy in it. "Well, what did you expect? Our mother sold me like a prize. Promised marriage for⁠—"

"Jesus Christ," Cash scoffs, cutting me off. He leans back in his chair, looking at me like I'm bein' naive. "That's not how it works, Savannah."

"Then enlighten me," I snap.

"Family alliances," Cash says with infuriating casualness. "Royal family shit."

I stare at him, heat rising in my cheeks. The dismissiveness in his tone—like this is just business as usual—makes my blood boil. "Are you serious right now? You're talkin' about my life. And you're actin' like it's just some normal Tuesday transaction."

"You don't understand," Cash says, and his eyes are on me but his words feel aimed somewhere further back—at some invisible audience, some old history I wasn't invited into. "The White family isn't just political money and good teeth. They've got reach. Real reach. The kind that outlasts elections."

He leans forward, elbows hitting the table, and something in the set of his jaw tells me this isn't new information to him.

It's been fermenting.

"Eleanor didn't make deals because she wanted to trade you off. She made them because she had to. Because somebody had something on her, or something she needed, or both." He holds my gaze, steady and unflinching. "Now think real hard before you answer this. When in your entire life have you ever once seen Eleanor Ashby do a single goddamn thing she didn't choose to do?"

"Exactly," I say, seizing on his point. "That's exactly what I'm saying. She saw me as somethin' to be traded. A commodity with a price tag and an expiration date."

Cash shakes his head slowly. "No. You're not getting it. They were holding something over her."

I can't picture it—not even in the abstract.

My mother wasn't a woman who got backed into corners.

She didn't flinch, let alone bend.

She never negotiated from a place of weakness.

Eleanor Ashby moved through the world like she controlled the coming apocalypse.

A queen who wrote the rules of her own kingdom and rewrote them when they stopped serving her.

The idea of someone holding something over her head, making her do anything she hadn't already planned to do—it doesn't fit the woman I knew.

It doesn't fit the myth she spent her whole life constructing.

"Eleanor had secrets," Cash continues, his voice dropping lower, quieter than it's been this whole conversation, like he doesn't fully trust the walls. "Not the kind you're thinkin'."

He shifts in his chair, and something about the way he does it—restless, deliberate—tells me this has been sitting in him for a long time.

"There are documents I need. Things she had drawn up outside the will, outside the lawyers, outside everything. There is a paper trail she kept buried." He looks at me steady and hard, the way he looks at something he means to break open. "I know this for a fact, Savannah. I've been working on this puzzle for years now. She left me a specific set of instructions on what to do."

"What kind of instructions?"

"Things she wanted me to buy. Things she wanted me to do."

"Buy? Like cows, or something?"

"Yes, that too. But that's not what I'm talking about. She told me to buy debt."

"Debt?" I'm thoroughly confused.

And it must show on my face because Cash says, "The financial world is very complicated, Savannah. And I don't have time to explain it properly, but hear me now. The world doesn't run on money, it runs on debt. Rich people, like us, don't sell things to get money. We borrow against it. It's called leverage. When you own something, it's collateral. Something to borrow against. It's a lot more complicated than that, but that's all you need to know."

A new panic rises in my chest. "So we're in debt? Is that what you're sayin'?"