Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
Ericsson passed away this morning. You’ll be needed at the stadium in half an hour.
I read it twice. Not because the meaning isn’t clear the first time, but because some part of me wants Jeff’s text to say something other than what it says, and I’ve learned to distrust that part of me on sight.
The phone screen goes dark in my hand. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass behind my desk, forty-one stories down, the city goes about its Tuesday with no idea the man who built half the skyline I’m looking at has stopped being part of it. The coffee at my elbow has gone the temperature of the room. I’d had Bills send it up an hour ago and forgotten it the way I forget most things that aren’t load-bearing, and now a thin skin has formed across the top of it, the way it does, and I look at that for a second instead of the text, because the text doesn’t change no matter how long I look.
A man is dead, and the half-hour clock starts the second I lift my eyes from the phone.
I’ll be there.
I send it before I’ve decided anything, which is unlike me. I decide things. It’s the one talent I’ve never doubted, the ability to look at a situation stripped of whatever everyone wants it to be and see only what’s left when the wanting is gone. Richard Ericsson is gone. His daughter is at The Res. And the thing I’ve waited eleven years to own is now, by every clause Jeff drafted and every signature already dry on the paper in my safe, finally mine.
I should feel something cleaner about that. There’s no time to examine what I feel instead.
“Bills.”
He’s in the doorway before the second syllable, because that’s what I pay him for. Thirty-something, Harvard, a tie knotted so exactly it looks load-bearing itself, a man who loves hockey almost as much as he loves money, which is the only reason he and I have lasted three years without either of us putting a chair through the glass.
“Cancel everything,” I tell him, already pushing back from the desk. “Today, tomorrow. Rearrange whatever needs rearranging and don’t ask me to approve it. Just make it disappear.”
“All of it?” His thumbs are already moving over his tablet.
“All of it.”
He doesn’t ask why. That’s the other reason he’s lasted three years. He’s typing before I’ve reached the door, and I leave the cup where it sits with its cold skin intact, because a cup of coffee I’ve already let go cold isn’t worth one more second of my attention.
Colton is in the executive lounge, in the corner chair he always takes, the one with the angle on both the elevator bank and the window. There’s a paperback folded back on his knee and a paper cup of something steaming beside him, and when the elevator opens earlier than any version of my schedule should allow, his eyebrows climb toward his hairline. I’m not due anywhere for hours. He knows my calendar better than I know it myself. But the surprise lasts about as long as it takes him to fold the corner of his page and stand, and by the time the express car has dropped us to the street and I’ve crossed the lobby’s cold marble to the curb, the back door of the limousine stands open and waiting and Colton is holding it without a word.
I send him the location as I slide across the leather. A pin on a map, nothing else, no message attached. I don’t explain, and he doesn’t ask, which is worth more to me than half the men I employ who explain everything and understand nothing. He drops into the driver’s seat, glances at the screen as the link loads itself into the car’s GPS, and pulls us into traffic with the smoothness of a man who has spent a decade learning exactly how much pressure my patience will bear.
Ten minutes. The Res sits ten minutes from the tower when the lights cooperate, and today, of all days, they cooperate. Green after green slides past the tinted glass.
It isn’t enough. I’d have liked the drive longer, which is its own unfamiliar thought, because I’ve spent my whole life trying to shrink every drive, every gap between wanting a thing and holding it, down to as close to nothing as money can buy. But for these ten minutes I sit in the back of a car worth more than the house I grew up in, watching the city I bought my way into blur past, and I think about a man I respected and never told, and a deal I made for reasons I’d have sworn were simple right up until they stopped being.
They stopped being simple six months ago. I haven’t told anyone that. I’ve barely told myself.