“I know you like to toy with the interns, Devon, but why the hell are you so harsh on her? Every time you talk to her, you’re either horrible, or setting her up for failure.”

I watched her leave while Daniel’s words rang in my mind. He was right, but I wasn’t admitting that. If I did, I’d have to explain the whole sordid back-story.

“She needs to be tougher,” I said. That was partly true. “Otherwise, she’s just going to be eaten alive. Do you want to see one of our interns eaten alive?”

“No, but surely you don’t need to be a complete prick. Just a partial one.”

If only he knew that my anger, rage and need for revenge weren’t aimed at her. If only he knew the history, he would hate Nikki’s father as much as I did.

Almost as much, anyway.

But I wasn’t going to explain it to him. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone – especially not a former intern, now close associate. He respected me for the successes he had seen me pull off, and I didn’t want to lose his respect because of the failure I had allowed her dad to put on me.

All because I was too trusting of a man who called himself my friend. His words were hollow now, but back then they meant so much to me. Unlike everyone else I spoke to, he listened to my plans for world domination and then eventually helped me.

Everybody else made me feel like a lunatic whose ideas were pathetic and barely even worth discussing. Jerry Blythe, on the other hand, listened intently and even offered suggestions.

When I told him about my idea to build a military vehicle that would be faster than its competitors while keeping its passengers safer, he didn’t laugh. He didn’t remind me that I was only twenty-one and therefore unable to see why it wouldn’t work. He didn’t even offer a hint that he thought I was an idiot.

Instead, he dropped everything to come to my little shed in the middle of nowhere and help me build it. After we finished a long day at work together, he would bring a six pack and spend half the night welding, hammering and fitting.

And on weekends, he would be there even before I was.

So, when we got close to having a working prototype and we were ready to start looking for investors, I was surprised by his nonchalant announcement. “I’ve already got a patent on it, Devon,” he said.

I could still remember almost dropping a tool in surprise as he spoke from beneath the hood. To get a patent, he needed both of our signatures on the paperwork, but I hadn’t signed anything.

When I asked that question in confusion, he became shifty. It was something I hadn’t seen from him, but he was much less willing to make eye contact with me. Our normal good humor was quickly gone.

“I, well, you know. Patents are easy enough to get.”

“No, they’re not,” I said, feeling the anger build quickly. “I didn’t sign any paperwork for one.”

There was a sinking feeling, and even before he responded, I knew he had stabbed me in the back.

“I didn’t need your signature,” he repeated, barely louder after I had to tell him three times that I hadn’t heard him. “It’s in my name.”

“Your fucking name? How does that work? It was my idea!”

“Yes, I know,” he sputtered, finally turning to face me. “But I wanted to patent it quickly, and I didn’t have time to get you to sign anything. Besides, I paid all the fees, including the lawyer’s.”

Rarely a man to be stuck for words, I couldn’t find a single one as he kept talking. He told me how he would give me credit since it was “partly” my idea, and that he hadn’t meant to take it from me. He even suggested I could help him come up with a name for it.

That was when I kicked him out of the shed, fighting the urge to kick his ass as well. It wasn’t enough that he had stolen my idea and claimed it for himself, but offering to let me name my own product was a kick in the teeth.

He spent the next three months trying to find investors, and I spent that time trying to maintain some kind of self-control. Every fibre of my being wanted to sabotage the deals I knew he was working on, but some part of me wanted to be the bigger man. Besides, back then, I couldn’t afford the legal fees to sue him.

I tried to move on. Even when I sold the small shed for a big loss, I couldn’t forget what had happened there. The money I poured into the project and the blood, sweat and tears in it were all gone – just like my friendship with Jerry.

As I suspected, he was eventually forced to come back to me, groveling and apologizing. He had the patent, but he didn’t have any of the skills or contacts I had been cultivating since I first came up with my idea. None of the investors he approached would give him a cent.

But I was still holding a hell of a grudge. The kind that needs revenge to be anywhere near satisfied.

So, I made him a simple offer. I would get the investors for “his” idea, but he would have nothing to do with the company that came from it. He would be a silent partner, and I would pay him ten per cent of the profits for a period of ten years, or until I sold the company. He had no say in any of it.

When he suggested a slight change, I figured nothing would be lost by agreeing to it. “If you make it big,” he had said, refusing to look me in the eye as we sat at my kitchen table. “I want you to promise you’ll help me out. Aside from the profit sharing, I want you to agree that you’ll do me some favors if I ask for them.”

“What am I, some kind of fucking genie? What do you mean, ‘favors’?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m just thinking of the future, Devon. Since you won’t let me be involved in the project, I have to. I have a daughter to think of, you know.”

His snide little remark about me not letting him be involved almost caused me to walk away, but I knew I could get the funding. With the funding, I knew I had a good chance of making a lot of money.

In the end, I agreed to two “favors”. I didn’t know what they would be, but we agreed they wouldn’t be cash. “Maybe you could put in a good word for me somewhere, someday,” he said, obviously coming to terms with his failure to turn his theft into anything. “Maybe you’ll help me redeem myself.”

He was right about one thing: I did make it “big”. The investors fell over themselves to get involved because I knew how to sell the prototype to them. I knew the numbers they were looking for, and I had the balls to threaten to go to their competitors if they refused to invest immediately.

And when the company made a profit, I sold the fucking thing at the first opportunity. I wanted it gone from my life like Jerry was, and that was when he returned.

“You’re all over the TV these days,” he said, seemingly in awe. “I was just thinking that one of my favors could be for you to plug my new company’s product on a couple of your TV spots. You know, tell people it’s a good product and that they should buy it.”

I agreed, and I did what he asked. I plugged it three times on the three biggest shows I regularly appeared on, even though the anchors were furious with me. “You have to pay for advertising like everyone else,” one of them told me, fuming that she didn’t get to include my plug in the “advertising dollars gained” portion of her bonus.

When his product began to sell in higher numbers, I quietly bought out his closest competitor and poured so much money into it that they were able to run right over him. Only six months after those TV plugs, Jerry had to close up shop.

A large part of me wanted to know whether he suspected my involvement in his second failure, but I didn’t ask. He still had one more favor to call in, and I didn’t want to tip him off. I wanted him to remain easy to sabotage.

Then, a couple months ago, he contacted me. “I want you to hire my daughter for your executive-level internship.”

Those words were going to be stuck in my brain for a long time. It was one thing to screw him over – it was a fun thing, even – but it was another to screw over an innocent young woman. She had nothing to do with the original theft, but there she was, in my crosshairs.

“And you can’t fire her,” he had told me, obviously confident he had figured out how to stop me from taking my hatred out on her.

He said nothing about making her quit.