24
TYLER
THE REST OF THE NIGHT wasn’t as bad as the beginning, but it wasn’t good, either.
For starters, we were seated at the head table with our parents and the rest of the company’s higher-ups. Oh, and Blake. He’d turned up right before dinner and was acting borderline hostile toward his sister. I’d attempted to catch his eye to silently tell him to stop being such an insufferable shit, but he’d avoided my gaze throughout the entire four- course meal.
Stella and I were both in terrible moods, her for obvious reasons, me because I was still thinking about Maddie being a manipulative little bitch, was also deeply confused about my feelings for Stella, and because I was fighting pre-event jitters because my next party loomed, and the pressure to get everything right was astronomical.
Oh, and I’d been around Richard for far too fucking long.
I wanted to snarl whenever he opened his mouth. Force him to drop this charming act and reveal his true self—just like how Stella had forced Maddie.
The longer dinner dragged on, the more my thoughts spiraled. Feelings I’d kept shoved down were rising to the surface, refusing to be ignored. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother, a young, naïve country girl who’d come to the city with big dreams, only for Richard to crush them.
My father laughed at something Phil said, and I tightened my grip on my dinner knife. He should have done the right thing and taken care of us. I didn’t mean mansions and yachts, but basic goddamn necessities, like constant access to power and running water. Instead, we were left with intermittent utilities dependent on Mom paying the bills on time. The
absolute bare minimum in child support would have been life-changing for us. But no. He hadn’t even done that.
I drained my drink, signaling to our server for another.
My eyes tracked the young woman as she headed for the bar. Was this how my parents had met? Mom said she’d been waiting tables when a handsome man fifteen years her senior swept her off her feet and promised her a dream. Instead, it turned into a nightmare.
Mom hadn’t been shy about telling me what she’d gone through. She’d repeatedly told me I should stay away from anyone with wealth because they couldn’t be trusted. That money was the ultimate corrupting force in this world, turning even good people bad. That was the point where our opinions diverged. Money wasn’t the problem; these people were.
The server returned with my drink, but I barely sipped it, too distracted by my dark thoughts until Stella rose from her seat, and I snapped back to myself. Dinner was over.
We stayed and mingled afterward, just long enough to make the rounds, and for Stella to introduce me to more people she thought might fit my criteria. At one point, I made some excuse and wandered away. There were other people I needed to introduce myself to before the party was over.
After my errand, I found Stella, and we exchanged a silent look and decided it was time to go.
Outside, we stood shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, waiting for my car. Thunder rumbled in the distance, another storm blowing in off the
water.
“Are you okay to drive?” Stella asked.
“I only had one drink and a few sips of the second.”
She was quiet, eyeing me.
“I’m six-five and weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. Plus, I ate a lot.
I’m fine.”
She didn’t seem convinced, and I started to get annoyed.
“I’m not some rich idiot who doesn’t know their own limits.”
She flinched, and belatedly I remembered that while she might not have been driving the car that hit Runa, she had her own DUI under her belt from a few years prior to that.
“I don’t know what you have to be so pissy about,” she sniped. “You aren’t the one who had to face down the person who ruined your life.”
Anger swelled in my stomach. Yes, I fucking had. But it wasn’t like I could tell her that, so I locked my jaw and fixed my gaze on the street, silently urging the valet to hurry the fuck up.
We were only in the car a few minutes before the skies opened up and
rain started pelting the windshield.
“Can you slow down?” Stella asked.
“I’m barely going over the speed limit.”
“Yeah, but it’s raining.”
I ground my teeth and eased off the gas.
“There’s a party at Feddy’s tomorrow,” she said. “AJ invited me.”
“Talk to him a lot now, after your reunion?” I sounded like a jealous boyfriend. Fuck, I even felt like one.
“A little. And I think we should go. Everyone there will either be from my parents’ circle or trying to break into it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why not? It’s a room full of bored rich people. They’re literally your dream clients.”
“I don’t need it. The guest list is pretty much set and it’s too late to vet new ones. Plus, it’s better to keep it small and exclusive.”
“But fewer people mean less money.”
“Not if one of them gets shit-faced and blows through three million in one night like Blake did.” It was a dumb thing to say, and I knew it, but I was in too shitty a mood to try and fix it.
Stella blew out a breath. “You’re such an asshole.”
“I’ve never claimed to be anything else.”
“Then hopefully the night is a great success, and we’ll never have to see each other again.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “Desperate to get away from me, Sunshine?”
“Can you blame me?” she said, her voice rising. “Since you barged into my life, I’ve taken on millions in debt, experienced my worst flare in years, lost money because I’m missing so much work, and then, tonight, to cap it all off, I had another ugly fight with a woman I hate, because you dragged me in there!”
“I didn’t drag you anywhere,” I snapped. “You chose to follow me. I was perfectly fine to handle her on my own.”
“No, you weren’t. Threatening Maddie clearly didn’t work the first time, and it wouldn’t have worked a second. Whenever life gets hard, she runs straight to her parents.”
“You don’t know that that’s what would have happened.”
“Yes, I do. Before the night of the accident, she was my best friend. She always goes running to them.”
I shot a look in her direction. She’d been best friends with that monster?
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you fucking dare judge me. You are a fucking bookie, Theo. You ruin people’s lives for a goddamn living. Where the hell do you get off looking down your nose at anyone else?”
“Been holding that in a while, huh?” I said, my voice low and ugly.
“Yes. And something else, too.” She leaned toward me. “You might not be able to see it, but you are just like the people you claim to hate.”
“Shut up.”
“You take and take, with no remorse and no empathy for those you prey upon. And I know for a fact that not all the people you go after are corrupt,
because you went after my brother.”
“Stop it, Stella.”
“At the end of the day, you’re as bad as they are, maybe even worse,
because you do it for profit.”
“I said shut up!”
Headlights flashed across the windshield. A horn blared. I shot my arm to the right, holding Stella back as I slammed on the brakes and cut the wheel to avoid a car that had blown through a stoplight. Stella screamed as I swung back the other way to keep from hitting a driver who’d careened into our lane while dodging the first vehicle. More horns blared, and I let Stella go because I needed both hands on the wheel to get us out of the chaos.
A few seconds later, we slid to a stop on the side of the street, our gasping breaths loud in the sudden silence. I glanced back toward the tangled intersection. It was a goddamn miracle we’d gotten out of it
unscathed.
“Are you okay?” I asked Stella.
In answer, she popped her seat belt and threw open the door, stumbling into the night.
Fuck. She must be having flashbacks of the crash, and while I was probably the last person she wanted near her, I couldn’t let her run off alone
into the night.
I eased the car forward, parking in an empty space, and got out. “Stella!”
She ignored me, arms clasped around herself as the rain started to soak her dress.
I shrugged off my jacket and caught up to her, draping it over her shoulders.
“Get away from me,” she said, hurrying up the sidewalk.
“No. I can’t have you getting serial murdered, or I’ll never recoup my loses.” I’d meant it as a joke, but after our shouting match, it felt wrong as soon as the words were out.
“Is that all I am to you?” she said, her voice low and shaky. “All anyone is to you? Pawns on a chessboard?”
I grimaced. Yes, that was eerily close to how I’d first thought of Stella.
As a game piece, there to be used and discarded once I was ready to move on to the next one. Because that’s how I had to look at people to survive.
Otherwise, I might actually start listening to their sob stories—or worse, caring. And I knew the folly of that.
Take the guy Junior had stolen our play club from. He’d tried to sell me one tale of woe after another, when the truth was, he was nothing but an asshole with an addictive personality. He’d had money his whole life and didn’t understand it was a finite resource, so when he started losing at my tables, he just upped the rent on all his tenants to cover the cost.
Stella took my prolonged silence as confirmation of her accusation.
“You’re such a bastard.”
I shrugged. “You’re not saying anything I haven’t heard a hundred times
before.”
“Why, though? Why are you like this?”
“Remember what I told you? I’ll take any reaction I can get.”
“Stop it! Stop lying. No one is this awful unless someone really hurt them. Who hurt you, Theo?”
“Not me,” I snapped, tonight’s dark thoughts rising to the surface. “My mother.” I grabbed Stella and spun her to face me. “You want to know why I’m like this? Because of her. She was the nicest person on the planet, and all anyone ever did was use her. Her parents for free labor, my father because he wanted a young, hot side piece, and everyone else who entered her life. She gave and gave, and they took and took, just like you said, and I
decided that I would never let anyone push me around. I’d never let anyone treat me the way they treated her.”
“Do you fucking hear yourself?” she said, the words fracturing as she shivered. “You hated the way your mother was treated so you became just
like the people who mistreated her.”
“I’m not like them,” I sneered.
“Yes, you are.”
“The people I’m mean to deserve it.”
“You’re mean to everyone, Theo!”
Her words echoed off the brick around us, rebounding, burrowing beneath my skin like insects.
I wasn’t mean to everyone. I was nice to Josh. Well, nice-ish.
“Name one time I’ve been mean at the events we’ve attended,” I said.
“Easy, you’ve been mean to me 24/7, because blackmail.”
“Fine. Someone else then.”
“My brother.”
“That was self-defense.”
“Maddie, who I can admit deserved it, and everyone you plan to prey upon. You don’t get credit for being nice the rest of the time, because it’s been nothing but an act to worm your way into their good graces.” She pulled out of my grip. “I’m done having this conversation with you. You’re a fucking jerk, and you know it, and I don’t know why I’m even trying to prove my point. It’s like talking to a wall.”
She started to walk away, but her foot caught on the waterlogged hem of her dress, and she flailed forward. I grabbed her before she hit the pavement, scooping her up, bridal style. I could have carried her back to the car, but I didn’t think I’d be able to convince her to get into it after such a close call, plus her shop was only a few blocks away. It’d be no problem to carry her the whole way because, Christ, she was light. Almost painfully so.
I’d made the mistake of looking up her disease, and I’d learned that people with it could lose as much as twenty pounds in a month if they were flaring.
Stella didn’t have that much to spare, so, for the first and last time, I decided to make an exception for someone. For her.
“We’re done,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m certain all it will take is one party to clear your debt.”
A shiver wracked her body. I hugged her closer to my chest, and even though my shirt was just as drenched as her dress, at least the body beneath it was warm. All my muscle made me run hot, like a furnace burned inside me. I never thought it’d be good for anything other than keeping me warm in winter, but if I was able to heat Stella back up, then I guess it was my new superpower.
“But … you can’t know that for sure,” she said.
I hefted her higher. “Careful, it sounds like you want me to stick around.”
“I just want to make sure that when I’m free from you, it’s for good.”
“Don’t worry, Sunshine. It’s for good. I’ll find a way to drain them.” And even if I weren’t able to fully recoup the three million, I wouldn’t tell her.
The money wasn’t what I’d really been after anyway. Revenge was, and since it was now within my reach, there was no reason to drag this out any longer, despite the fact that I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to Stella.
I’d grown used to her over the past several weeks. And I’d never admit it out loud, but lately, I’d found myself actually looking forward to picking her up, wondering what sort of outfit she’d be wearing, what kind of mood she’d be in. If she’d be prickly or feisty or playful. I didn’t know what it said about me that I preferred feisty Stella over every other incarnation.
It says that you’re a brat after all, and you want her to put you in your proper place, at her feet, where you belong, my subconscious helpfully supplied.
I tried to muzzle it. On top of researching gastritis, I’d made the mistake of googling “brat kink,” and now my head was full of all sorts of thoughts and images I didn’t need there. They’d been cropping up more and more lately, and maybe that’s really why I’d been such a dick tonight. Maybe it had nothing to do with being trapped with Richard and everything to do with wanting Stella’s negative attention to distract me away from my own
fucked-up thoughts.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” she said.
I nearly stumbled. After everything I’d put this woman through, she was apologizing to me? Goddamn it, how had I been so wrong about her? And why was I now worried I might be wrong about other people, too?
I shook my head. No. I couldn’t start second-guessing myself. Not now that I was so close.
“Don’t be sorry,” I told Stella. “I’m fine.”
Thankfully, she let it go. “You can put me down now.”
“In bare feet?”
“I have shoes on—oh.”
They’d fallen off half a block ago, and it made me think she must be half frozen if she didn’t feel it happen.
“The mind really goes when you get older, doesn’t it?” I said, returning
to the familiar safety of insults.
“I am not old,” she grumbled.
“Said the woman born in the 1900s.”
She was quiet for almost a full minute. “That might be the meanest thing
anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Hey,” I started.
She looked up at me. “Yeah?”
I slowed enough to meet her eyes. “Don’t think this means I’m suddenly going to become a nicer person, but I’m sorry about what happened with Maddie.”
She dropped her gaze. “Yeah, you already said.”
“I mean seven years ago. I’m sorry you went through all that. Your best friend leaving you like that, and then trying to blame you for what she did …” I shook my head. “That’s beyond fucked-up. And I’m sorry about what happened in the car. I should have been paying better attention to the road.
That must have been … hard.”
“Not as hard as this apology is,” she said. “No wonder you’re such an asshole all the time. You are not good at this.”
I pretended to drop her.
She shrieked and clutched at me, and I hauled her back up.
“Also,” she added, “while I don’t regret anything I said, I can admit that screaming at you while you were driving probably wasn’t the smartest move.”
I was quiet for a bit, thinking over what she’d said to me right before the near-miss. “I don’t go after people who can’t pay.” God, why did I even feel the need to explain myself? “Or innocent people. I do my research. We usually cut people off when they hit what we believe is their debt ceiling.”
“Then how do you explain what happened with Blake?”
Shit. I’d walked right into this.
“That was a one-time thing,” I said. Technically, it wasn’t a lie.
“You still hurt people. You still ruin their lives. And maybe most of them deserve it, but it doesn’t make you any better than they are.”
I sighed. “I try to avoid hurting people. At least physically. Usually, I get big scary guys to threaten to do it, and that’s enough to put the fear of God into them. I’ve found threats of public exposure or asset seizure to be much more effective than violence, so that’s what we focus on. And we’re not unreasonable. We offer income-based payment plans.”
She made a sound of disbelief.
“Think about it, Sunshine. I wouldn’t be able to keep drawing in wealthy clients if I were as heartless and brutal as everyone says. People would be too scared to come back.”
“So, what? You’ve secretly been some good guy this whole time? Come on, Theo.”
“No, obviously not. I’ve done terrible things, and I have no plan to stop.”
“Why?” The word felt weighted.
“Why not? It’s good money. It’s challenging, every month presenting different obstacles, new ways to be creative. But more than anything else, I like it. It’s fun. And it’s what I’m good at.”
We reached her shop, the windows dark because it was so late.
“Okay, you can put me down now,” she said.
I ignored her.
