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“You used a Game of Thrones reference?”
“Yeah.”
Shaking his head, Linden went back to reading, making one part bigger, then smaller before he moved on. “The issue is that this has implications for the Wilkes family now, in the present. This is not at all confined to the past.”
“Who?”
“River Wilkes,” Linden told him. “He’s the alpha who’s the head of their family at the moment, but according to this, he shouldn’t be. It should be the descendants of Beriah, Clay’s brother. One family needs to be struck from the jarl and the other brought in.”
“I guess I’m missing why that’s not easy.”
Linden turned to Wade, who sat beside him on the couch. “When you’re expelled from the jarl, property and funds that were accrued through deals with other members of the jarl, anything where your family benefited through association must be transferred to another family.”
“But we’re talking about hundreds of years. This guy Beriah made a whole other life, and even though from what Sasha’s mother said, it sounds like he himself went through hard times, his family is thriving. And while I’m going to research all of this… What was the fake son’s name again?”
“Richard Aldacott Wellington, first of his name,” Linden teased him.
“Oh, you’re funny.” Wade leaned in to kiss his cheek.
“Go on with what you were saying,” Linden murmured, clearly pleased with his husband.
“Well, I’m going to research all of this tomorrow morning, but I don’t see what the real-world, right-now ramifications of this are.”
“I just told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“Well, first, you don’t have to do any research, you can look this all up on the website that you have access to through me.”
“Which is helpful.” Wade grinned.
“And second, if this diary is found to be authentic, which I assume it will be, as Sasha here has already compared it to Wallis’s other writing, it means that River Wilkes is banned from the jarl. His family is no longer one of the elite lupine families, their ancestral home is forfeit, their wealth and how it was accrued would be scrutinized, their—”
“I thought their home was torn down last year?”
“That was the old one,” I told him. “Not the new one.”
“Okay, but—”
“I think River’s sister, who’s an omega, was mated to an alpha last year,” Linden said, turning to me. “Meekes? Myers? Middleton?”
“Oh, that’s right.” I searched my brain. “Merriweather.”
“That’s it.” Linden smiled at me before returning his gaze to Wade. “That marriage and any entered into in the last… ten years I believe it is, will be void.”
“Why?”
“It’s fraud,” Linden explained. “Money changed hands, probably land, deals were made, and contracts signed. I don’t know how many other marriages had omegas anywhere in the mix, but if there were any, then it becomes an even bigger mess. But immediately, the Wilkes family, as I said, is expelled.”
“What if the folks from—what was the brother’s name again?”
“Beriah,” I told him.
“That’s terrible, by the way, but what if no one in his line cares? Then what happens?”
“They can choose to litigate or not,” Linden explained. “If they’re happy and want to let bygones be bygones, then that’s fine. The Wilkes family will still be sanctioned and expelled from the jarl. That’s a foregone conclusion once the diary and its contents are made public.”
“That’s all dependent on it being authenticated, though, yes?”
