first time I laid eyes on Wyatt Tower.
I can't remember a thing about that day, but my caregiver at that time, a purse-lipped woman called Mrs. Spencer, had said that I'd been obsessed with the skyscraper at first sight.
That the massive building had mesmerized me like no other toy did.
That the gleaming marble and glass facade had caught my unwavering attention from the first moment.
Fucking.
Bullshit.
Fact the first. I didn't understand a thing about kids, but I sure as hell knew that the terms “four-year-old” and “unwavering attention” were never used in the same breath.
Fact the second. While Wyatt Tower was impressive, so had every other place I'd been to. Grandeur was the norm, not the exception, and if I had to bet, my reaction had likely been impressively unimpressed.
Not that Mrs. Spencer would ever dare admit that to my father, because fact the third: I was the heir to the business, AKA Wyatt Tower.
And the buildings surrounding it.
And the ones surrounding those.
My role had been written out for me from moment I was born. Literally.
Cabinets of documents and contracts naming me the sole inheritor to the Wyatt business and fortune. Paper manacles solid as steel, all ensuring I was next in line to take up the mantle from my father, the same one his own father had passed on to him.
Being obsessed with the company?
Fuck that.
I was expected to worship it.
And for the better part of my twenty-eight years, I had. Every moment aside from eating, sleeping and fucking had gone into the company.
Shit, I thought about it even while eating, sleeping and fucking. Every decision I made, every breath I took was for Wyatt Corp. It was the way since I could remember, and it was the way now.
And now it was coming to bite me in the ass.
I took a deep swallow from the rock glass clasped in my hand, letting the whiskey light a trail of fire down my throat.
“That bad? What did she say?” Gabriel’s muffled voice came from across the coffee table.
The idiot was staring down into the black glass surface, carefully arranging his brown hair for the third time in the past ten minutes.
I took my time to answer, staring impassively at the clouds of cigarette smoke swirling around the room.
Gabriel, Cam and I were presently in the VVIP room of the club atop Lancaster Hotel. It was the place we met whenever we had shit to discuss. This time, it involved an extortion of thirty million dollars between the three of us.
Fun times.
“She said no,” I finally replied.
“She what?” Gabriel dropped his legs from the coffee table to the floor.
Cam frowned. “I thought you made her an offer.”
“I did.” I held the glass up, studying the way the ambient light in the room shot patterns through the cut crystal. “And she rejected.”
Gabriel stared at me in disgust. “Dammit Ry, I always knew you were stingy, but this just takes the cake.”
“Stingy?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “You still owe me fifty grand, jackass.”
Gabriel looked at Cam for support. “You see?”
Whatever. The idiot had zero sense of logic.
“I offered Allie Beckett up to a hundred K,” I said curtly, “but apparently she has more pride than sense. Plus I underestimated how much she hates our guts.”
Gabriel frowned. “She hates us? The fuck for?”
“Damn Gabe, I don't know.” I tilted my head, looking at him like he’d just asked the dumbest question—because he had. “Maybe because we bought out her dad's company less than a month after his funeral and broke it up for profit? And took all his business partners?”
Gabriel held up one hand. “Hey, that's on you and Cam. Leave me out of it.”
“Nice try,” Cam snorted. “Your parents' firm rode on the connections to our companies.”
“Debatable. I think it's my charisma that got us this far, but then we'd be up all night discussing my qualities.” Gabriel shook his head. “I can't believe this. You can charm the clothes off any chick, and you can't get this one girl to take money from you? You're losing your touch, bro.”
“Call me bro one more time and it'll be the last thing you say,” I said blandly.
“Fine, buddy. But if you can't see this through, I'm going in like I should have from the start. Women can't resist me. Fact.” Gabriel propped his shoes up on the table again. “But that's assuming Wyatt hasn't screwed it up already.”
Cam gave him a dirty look. “Take your shoes off my table.”
“Or what?”
“Or I'll put this,” Cam held one meaty fist up, “right into your pretty face.”
As far as threats went, it was pretty effective. Cam not only looked like an NFL player with that buzz cut, he was also built like one. Gabriel's feet left the table faster than he could undo a bra.
Cam turned back to me. “Did you say something to piss Alecia off? You can come across as a patronizing prick sometimes.”
“You gotta be fucking me,” I muttered into my glass.
“Y'know, he's got a point. You’re an asshole, but it can't hurt to pretend not to be one.”
I swung my gaze to Gabriel, popping my jaw in irritation. “Et tu, Brute?”
He blinked. “Funny, I've always thought you the Brutus to my Caesar.”
I ignored him, like I did ninety percent of the things he said. Gabriel could test even a saint's patience, and unfortunately for him—and me—I was as far from a saint as a guy could get.
I crossed my leg ankle to knee and leveled a stare at them. “If the two of you think you have a better shot at this, you're welcome to try.”
Neither of them volunteered, but then I'd expected that. Gabriel simply didn't give enough shits, and Cam would approach it like a hammer to a porcelain bowl.
Allie wasn't the same girl we'd known either. Some part of me had simply expected an older version of the outcast from back in San Juan.
While she was still hot as hell, the years had given her a hard edge that was downright sexy. Even if she still liked to read, she was now just as likely to throw her book at anyone who pissed her off.
Shit, even the way she said my name was hot, like it was a piece of hard candy in her mouth.
I could think of something else hard that should be in her mouth.
“I know that look,” Gabriel suddenly said, smiling in that annoying way he did so well. “That's the game face you make when you have your eye on pussy.”
“Allie Beckett?” Cam raised his brow. “That's way messed up, man.”
I raised my brow right back. “None of your fucking business, man.”
Gabriel shrugged. “I don't blame you. The sisters were the only hotties we didn't fuck in San Juan. Maybe I'll take a shot at her myself.”
That pissed me off for some reason. “Back. Off.”
The asshole’s smile only widened. “Why? Think she'll like this dick better?”
Inside of grabbing his collar like I itched to, I merely flipped him off.
There was no point in creating a rift between us when we were already standing over a ticking time bomb.
Not to mention the four—now three—of us never fought over women. It just wasn't what we did, and there was no reason why I'd start now.
Not even if that woman in question was a snarky thing half my weight who dared to go toe-to-toe with me like no one ever had.
“Any updates on Estelle Valentine?” I addressed Cam instead, switching the topic to a less dangerous one.
At the mention of the bitch’s name, Cam's face darkened.
“From my intel, she touched down at JFK last Monday. She’s staying at the suites in the Plaza.”
“Doesn't matter where she is.” Gabriel stretched his arms across the back of the leather sofa. “She could be right in front of us doing a lapdance, and we still wouldn't be able to lay a finger on her.”
Truth.
I took another swallow of liquor, welcoming the punishing burn of the alcohol.
What sad shits we were. The combined net worth of the three of us was enough to buy a small country.
Yet here we were, getting our asses handed to us by a lone woman.
Then again, that woman was also the procreator of a devil spawn by the name of Theo Valentine. It shouldn't be surprising that evil ran in their blood.
Fucking bitch.
And fucking Theo too, for that matter.
“Can we kill her?” Gabriel asked hopefully. “We could get Cam's henchmen do a covert assassination, like in John Wick.”
“We're not in a movie, they're not henchmen, and she's not an idiot,” Cam clipped. “She'll release the info to the media the moment we try anything funny, and then we'd be in a fucking cage.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Ten years. Ten bloody years we've had this hang over our heads, and now it's here. Fuck me.”
He could say that again.
I had grown stupidly optimistic over the years that Estelle had either moved on or found her morals.
Obviously neither happened, because two weeks ago, we each received an untraceable email demanding a total of thirty million dollars in exchange for silence on that matter.
Like Cam and Gabriel, I’d seen this coming years ago.
That still didn't make it any easier to swallow, because with that email came the reminder of the first time I had traded my morals for profits.
Everything I had achieved, no matter how impressive, was built on the blood of a man.
Even so, I had come too far since then, worked too damned hard for everything to be taken from me just like that.
I'd given up my life, for fuck's sake.
Approaching Horace's daughter and hoping she had dirt on Estelle was a pretty damned risky move, but by this point, we were willing to try anything short of murder. Maybe even that.
We weren't strangers to it, anyway.
“How are the sisters doing?” Cam asked.
“Not well. They're living in a rented apartment in an area that's shady as hell.”
“That's weird.” He frowned. “Their trust-fund should have been enough to last them several more years at least.”
Up until the point of his death, Horace Beckett had been loaded. The sisters' trust-fund had been rumored to have held twenty million dollars, and that was just a modest estimate.
“He did, and yet they're flat broke.” I picked up the half-smoked cigarette in my ashtray and inhaled. “Squandering twenty mil in ten years. That's so stupid, it's almost impressive.”
“Dude, I spend that amount in a single year.”
“So you're ten times as stupid as they are.”
Gabriel flipped me off.
“Whatever it is,” Cam cut in impatiently, “we should find out more about Valentine. We still don't know if he's working with Estelle. He could be behind this, for all we know.”
Oh yeah, another thing?
Even after a decade, Cam and Gabriel still refused to refer to Theo by his name. It was like our ex-best-friend had turned into Voldemort.
“He's still in LA, last I checked,” I replied. “Give me what you have on him. I'll see if I can find out more.”
Cam raised a brow at me. “That's a lot of shit on your plate.”
I returned his look. “I'll handle it.”
We'd never discussed in detail what had happened all those years ago, but then again, we didn't need to.
I already knew that it had been me who'd started us on this path. It had to be me who fixed it.
We'd screwed up Allie and Karin's lives, true.
But if getting Allie to open her mouth could sort this mess out, by the time I was through with her, she would be singing like a goddamned canary.
The only mistake I'd made so far was misreading her. She had debts, she had shit financial management skills, but she also had more pride than was good for her. Money didn't cut it, and neither did knocking down her self-esteem.
But if there was one thing I'd learned at the helm of a real estate empire, it was that everyone could be had for a price. I just had to figure out what hers was.
And after that?
My lips curved coldly.
After that, she was mine.