It was about six that evening when I made my way into the old, familiar Sentry Casino. I had walked through these doors and the back entrance more times than I could count, and each time gave me the same good feeling I felt when I first entered the place. It had gone under several facelifts since it first opened its doors, each more tasteful than the last.

Beautiful red and blue designs swirled in the granite floors under my feet as I walked through the glittering halls, passing by the sounds of the gambling machines already in use for the evening and heading straight for the elevators. The glass wall gave me a beautiful view of the sunset as it took me up the many floors, and as I always did, I smiled at the sight of the bridge connecting the Sentry and La Torre Casino. The bridge had gone up about five years ago, and it had been one of my big introductions to the kind of world the Sentry meant being a part of. It was high-paced, staggeringly wealthy, and full of promise for a brighter future.

Nothing represented that more than the bridge between the Sentry and La Torre, which soon after its completion also represented a beautiful relationship between the owners of the two towers, Zane and Diego. They were the ones I was heading to meet this evening, in the very nightclub that stood in the bridge between hotels, and it really felt like stepping into their personal palace.

Being that it was only six, the place wasn’t alive with activity just yet. In fact, when I stepped through the doors, the only people there were a handful of older guests, and Zane himself at the bar, drinking a martini. I approached him, and he turned to raise his glass to me at the sound of my footsteps.

“There he is,” he said to the bartender as I reached them, and the bartender started to get my favorite scotch ready for me, like he always did. It paid to have a regular watering hole, and a place like this wasn’t a half-bad location for it. “Been a few weeks, Rod, good to see you again.”

“You have no idea what a sight for sore eyes you are, Zane,” I said, taking a seat beside him and feeling tension roll off my shoulders. And I hadn’t even gotten my drink yet. “Days like this, I almost wish you had some legal trouble to deal with here. The Sentry would feel like a break compared to what I’ve been dealing with.”

“You mentioned that,” Zane said, stirring his martini and leaning back on the bar to peer at me. Zane and I looked similar--both tall men with piercing blue eyes and muscular frames, but Zane had always been more of a people-pleaser. I was the ace in the hole, the ruthless man he could rely on when he really needed to pull out the big guns in a tight spot. But my impression was that he admired me in the same way I admired him, so we often came to each other for personal advice after knowing each other professionally for a few years.

Zane was a good man. That was why I asked him to meet me for a drink to blow off some steam.

“I could use a break from thinking about it for a few minutes, I think,” I said, smiling wearily at Zane and taking the scotch from the bartender, sliding him a $20 as a tip. “How’ve things been here?”

“Unbelievable,” Zane said with a broad smile, settling in and gazing around at the club with fondness in his eyes. “I had my doubts about how well the Sentry would be doing five years down the road, even the first time I hired you. But revenue has been skyrocketing so fast that Mick can barely keep up.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” I asked, snapping my fingers. “About Mick--how has the adoption process been going for him and Eric?”

“Almost finished!” Zane said brightly, grinning. “Thank you again for helping him out with that. Mick’s personality suits attorneys well, so he always has good things to say about working with you.”

“I consider you all friends at this point, Zane, you know that,” I said, grinning along with him. “And if you and Diego ever think about adopting…”

Zane rolled his eyes, shaking his head. “We’ve thought about it, but Diego has the same restless heart as mine. We travel too much these days. I’d feel bad having to either drag the kid around or abandon them to a nanny for so many weeks out of the year.”

“That’s understandable,” I said after a swig of my drink. “See, what you should do is all of you share Mick and Eric’s kid. Brotherhood of the Traveling Baby.”

Zane snorted a laugh and covered his mouth to keep from spilling his martini. “Bart is enough trouble as a godfather. I think Mick would lose his mind if he was even more involved.”

“Yeah, but you know how Nico keeps going on about how nice a kid would be to have around,” I said. “Get ready for that.”

“Oh God, I’m going to be the perpetual uncle, aren’t I?” Zane said, still smiling broadly.

“Think you’re already there,” I said with a wink.

After a few moments to chuckle and sip on our drinks, Zane gave me a mischievous look, and I could sense the question that was incoming before it even left his lips. “So, with all this family talk, what about you? Are you still the playboy you were when you first walked through the doors here and couldn’t keep your eyes off that intern?”

“Oh God, don’t say that, he probably still works here,” I said, rolling my eyes. I hesitated long enough to make Zane’s smile grow even broader, and I scratched the back of my neck, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. “That’s...part of the issue here, actually.”

Zane’s eyes went wide, and he sat forward, propping his chin up on a hand on the bar. “Oh? This sounds a lot more interesting than you made it seem over text. Okay, enough small talk, fill me in.”

I ran a hand through my hair. “Well, I wasn’t expecting to make you play therapist.”

“But I’m making you play patient, so go ahead,” he said through a grin.

“If you insist,” I laughed, but I finished off my scotch and gestured to the bartender for another before proceeding. Lord knew I was going to need it. “So, it all started with the convention I told you about.”

“How’d that go?”

“I got punched in the face,” I said candidly, smiling, and Zane blinked in confusion.

“Was there a boxing convention double-booked?” he asked, holding back a laugh.

“I had this one coming,” I said, drawing in a long breath. This was something I didn’t even want to disclose to Scott. “There was this guy I knew in law school, right? Name was Hudson North.”

“You don’t mean-”

“Yeah, Chauncey North’s son,” I said, nodding. “Scumbag must have been grooming his kid for a law career from day one, and it worked. Hud was good. Damn good. Good enough to be tied with me for top of the class for a while. The guy was trouble for me, and we were at each other’s throats all the time.”

“You sound like you’ve got some passion behind those words, if you don’t mind me saying,” Zane said, stirring his drink and peering at me intently. The man had a way of reading people, I had to admit. “Was there ever anything between you two? Or were you too busy being type-As?”

“Says the man who risked his business on a relationship with his rival,” I fired back at him with a smug smile, and Zane held up a hand, rolling his eyes.

“Guilty as charged.”

“Anyway,” I said, “no, not exactly.”

“‘Not exactly’ is the best kind of answer,” Zane said.

“Fuck you,” I said, smirking. “But the thing is, I didn’t know he was gay. He kept it a secret to almost everyone. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t into him, even back then. But damn, I was hard on him. I made him my enemy. It was my fault. I was out for the top of the ladder and made that known to everyone.”

“Would that have been any different if you knew the deal with him?”

I opened and closed my mouth, and I realized I had finished my second scotch. “I... I don’t know, honestly. Maybe? I might not have thrown him under the bus like I did. We had a classmate who got caught cheating. He was small potatoes, never had much promise to begin with, so whatever. But he was friends with Hud, and I knew about that.”

Zane’s eyebrows went up slowly as he saw where I was going with this, and for the first time, now that I was confessing it all to someone with the big picture in mind, after the heat of feeling justified after getting a punch to the jaw, I felt guilty. Real guilt.

“I talked to the dean,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “I didn’t have any proof, but I let him know just how close Hud and the cheating guy were--hell, I didn’t just do that. I exaggerated it. Made it sound like they might as well have been roommates. So close that it would be weird if Hud didn’t know that the guy was cheating.”

“And in the university’s eyes, not reporting cheating is as punishable an offense as actually doing the cheating,” Zane said, finishing the thought and nodding. “What happened to him?”

“Hud got investigated, thoroughly,” I said. “Exactly what I was hoping for. The stress of the investigation put pressure on him he couldn’t handle, and I edged ahead of him in the class rankings.”

Zane gave his head a shake, surprised. “Well, damn, Rod. You were completely within the bounds of the law, but that was pretty damn calculating, I won’t lie to you.”

“If I just wanted to be patted on the back, I’d have come to Gage,” I grumbled. “They never got evidence on Hud to kick him out, so he was fine--graduated second or third, I think. The man was still incredible back then. But he found out that I was the one who reported him and started the whole investigation. If that weren’t bad enough, now I’m thinking that if Hud got that surprise investigation while he was trying to keep his sexuality under wraps…”

“...the investigation might have accidentally uncovered something that tipped people off that he was gay,” Zane finished for me again, eyes wide. “Jesus.”

“Nothing like that came out,” I said quickly, “I would have heard about it by now. But that added fear must have doubled the stress on him already.” I knocked back some of my third scotch, feeling the warm sensation spreading through my whole body. “I never would have wanted to put him through that, even if he did know about the cheating.”

“So, I’m guessing he’s the one who punched you at the convention?” Zane asked, just now starting his second martini as I got halfway through my third scotch.

“Yep,” I said curtly. “Good shot, too, I’m lucky it didn’t break anything. Decided not to press charges when I found out he was gay.”

“Sounds like there is something still there,” Zane mused innocently, avoiding the glare I shot him.

“Well, it’s moot now,” I said. “We got hired to be on opposite sides of this nightmare of a case I took like an idiot.”

“Really now?” he said, looking surprised. “What are the odds?”

“Ridiculous,” I agreed, shaking my head. “But it is what it is.”

“I’m guessing old tensions are rising up again that a single punch couldn’t work out, right?”

“It’s been heated enough that the judge just threatened us with contempt of court this morning,” I said with a sigh. “And I can’t argue with him. I’d never act like that around anyone but Hud, and Hud’s out for blood.”

“That has a nice ring to it,” Zane said thoughtfully, “but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this city, it’s that letting your personal life get in the way of your professional life is asking for misery.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but around that time, another familiar face approached the bar. Diego was a beautiful man, and the only thing he loved more than this casino was Zane.

“Rodney, good to see you!” the Spaniard said in his light accent, approaching us and taking Zane’s hands before kissing him on the lips. “And it’s good to see you too, I suppose,” he teased, and both the men blushed like teenagers as they flirted back and forth.

I decided to turn away from them and give them a moment as I sipped the rest of my drink. As much as I loved Zane and Diego as people, they could be a little intense to be around when they were near each other. From a distance, it was heartwarming to see. And hell, from the perspective of all the other owners of the Sentry who had their own men in their lives, it must have been something they were all used to.

But as I saw Diego out of the corner of my eye lean in and whisper something salacious into Zane’s ear that made him blush deeper, the vibe they gave off played with the alcohol in my blood in the worst way. They reminded me just how single I was and having Hud in front of my eyes made it all the more biting.

I finished off my third drink and slid the glass across to the bartender, shaking my head when he started to reach for the bottle again. I’d had enough.

And now, I was realizing that while Zane’s words were true, the inverse of them was just as true. I couldn’t let my personal life get in the way of my professional one...but if I let my professional life hamper my personal life, I was looking at a long and lonely road ahead of me.