12: Origins
The Heartphillia family was old money in that once upon a time, they had been aristocrats with their own land to govern, pheasants to tax, and knights that served them faithfully. They were also old money in that they did, in fact, run on old money. See, rewind some two hundred years and there had lived a man named Sir Allen Heartphillia, eccentric inventor and also the originator of the railways that ran through Fiore. His company was sprawling. His influence immense. And the pot of inheritance he had left behind meant that, with some common sense and the right investments, his descendants would never have to work again.
So when Jude Heartphillia, Allen's direct descendant, heir to his ancestor's sizable fortune and retired business mogul died a mere seven months before his daughter's eighteenth birthday, there had been quite the uproar.
What caused even more of an uproar was when Jude's will dictated that his daughter Lucy, the sole inheritor of his sizable number of estates and bank accounts, was to be placed under not the care of one of her distant relatives, but instead Loke d'Etoile until she turned eighteen and gained personal access to the family vaults.
Date first published: March 30, 2016
Tell me what you liked, tell me what you didn't. Thank you for reading!
