Chapter Two
Alex watched his little personal assistant, who could never hide her abject fascination with his private plane no matter how hard she tried.
She was always meandering around, opening drawers on furniture, looking inside the well-stocked bar, even though she barely ever drank anything stronger than a Shirley Temple.
She was a fascinating puzzle, was Verity. It was why he had hired her in spite of her lack of experience.
He had brought her in for an interview—a rare thing for him to interview an employee personally, but it was for the position of personal assistant, and more. Because he was beginning to recognize that his lack of human connection, his lack of personability, was becoming a liability.
Such a ridiculous thing.
He had power and money now. And yet still, he had to cater to the whims of others, especially ridiculous when those whims seemed to be created out of the air.
Created out of a false idea of who he was.
He wouldn’t say he was a good man, acting out of the goodness of his heart, but he didn’t do harm.
His life was his work. Which had made finding success possible in his early years.
He had worked his way up in a small, inconsequential tech company where he had found a mentor in the owner.
Eventually, he had taken over the business, then it had begun expanding, and he had renamed it.
Had made it his own. And had turned it into something else entirely.
A leading force in the tech industry, a global success.
Five years ago the company had become publicly traded, and then suddenly, the will of other people had been interjected into his success.
This was where conflict began.
Because it was no longer enough that he was brilliant, or that his product was superior.
Small actions could affect the price of his stock, the willingness of investors could be swayed and shifted by public opinion, as everyone fought hard to play the cutthroat game of being beyond reproach in the eyes of a public hungry for that dopamine hit of moral superiority.
Which was why good deeds became public domain, charity was a public performance and attending galas, parties, places where a person could be seen being the sort of person others might be able to admire, was essential. And something that Alex had never personally seen the point of. Now he had to.
Or he could let it crumble. Could let his empire reduce itself, could go back to being a force in business, rather than the force.
But relinquishing his grip on the gains he’d made simply wasn’t something he was willing to do.
And that was where Verity had initially come into the equation.
He wanted to begin making moves to take his company to the next level.
It had been suggested to him by one of his board members that he might try. ..practicing. That connection bit.
It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in it. It was just he had never had it. And therefore didn’t especially understand.
He had been with child protective services from near the moment he was born. He didn’t even know the circumstances around it. Why his mother had given him up, or why he had been taken away. Which thing it even was.
He had never—not from birth to the age of eighteen—been with a family for longer than six months.
And where at first connection had merely felt foreign, it had become something he had guarded himself against. Because the end would always come.
Because no one was attached to him, and so there was no point building an attachment to anyone else.
He’d honed so many skills that were valuable to him over the course of that childhood. Difficult though it was, it had made him into a successful man.
How horrendously ironic that the circumstances of that childhood should cause him to trip at the finish line.
No. He had not tripped; he had merely faltered. Now he had Verity, who everyone in the company loved. Verity, who made him eat salad and was currently poking around his plane like a nosy little mole looking for a hidey-hole.
“Sit down, Cricket,” he said. “You’re making me dizzy.”
“I’ll never get over how amazing this is. It’s really more the house than it is a plane.”
“No,” he said. “It is a plane.”
“You know what I mean. I think my apartment is smaller than this.”
“Why?”
She looked at him, humor glittering in her eyes. She found him funny, which was a strange experience. He didn’t think anyone else found him particularly amusing. “Have you looked at the prices for apartments in Athens these days? It’s a bit prohibitive.”
“I pay you very well.”
She nodded. “You do. And I like to have money left over for savings, and to do things. I go to the beach almost every weekend.”
“Do you?”
He had never thought about what Verity did in her spare time. Or where she lived. The idea of her doing things when she wasn’t in his office was somewhat disconcerting, and he couldn’t say why.
Of course, when she had mentioned asking Stavros on a date he had been forced to think of her in another context altogether, and he hadn’t liked that either.
She was...well, she was Verity. He didn’t take much notice of other people.
Their clothing, their likes, their dislikes, their moods.
He’d hired her to teach him to engage with those things, to talk to him, and he found that he was highly tuned into all those things about her now.
She was going to sit and eat a meal with Stavros? Just as she did with him?
He found that uncomfortable.
“Yes,” she said.
She turned from the bar, her gray plaid skirt swirling around with her, revealing a peek at her thighs. He didn’t really want to look at his assistant’s thighs, and generally speaking, if he didn’t want to do something, he didn’t. And yet.
She was a fascinating woman, though he would never say that out loud.
He wasn’t sure he had ever been fascinated by another person before.
But she was just so different. From an entirely different world, a different life.
While they didn’t speak in depth about their families, or the lack of his, she had told him once that she had spent her entire childhood in the same house.
The idea had nestled in the middle of his brain, and centered itself on many afternoons when his mind had begun to wander.
What would it be like to grow up with that sort of stability?
To not spend all of your life moving from house to house, between different neighborhoods in a city, or sometimes even hours away.
All of your belongings wrapped up in black plastic, your lone pair of shoes on your feet, growing tight and worn, until someone finally noticed but you might need a new pair.
He had a room in his house dedicated to shoes now. He could wear a different pair every day. The moment his feet felt even the slightest discomfort, he would change the shoes.
It was his favorite luxury. That and knowing that he was in charge of where he slept every night. He had multiple homes, and if he wanted to move between them he could, and often he did feel a strange sort of burning sensation in his chest when he spent too many nights in a row in one place.
He had an apartment at the top floor of the office building, and the house up in the hills on the outside of the city. A place by the beach. He could offer to let Verity use it. He supposed.
Those were just his houses within proximity to the company’s headquarters.
There were others.
It felt powerful to own so many pieces of the world, when he had owned nothing for so long.
And yet here he was, jumping through hoops he didn’t care to even acknowledge.
Thus was the cost of success.
There was a point where one could become successful enough that they had to consider nothing and no one else, but now he had begun to arrive at a different part of the curve, where if he wished to continue to progress he had to care.
Verity sat on the love seat opposite him, a keen sort of expression on her face. “What is the meeting about?”
“The product launch.”
“I understand that,” she said. “But I mean what is the focus of this specific meeting? Why have they called it now, and what are you concerned about?”
“I didn’t say that I was concerned,” he said.
“No, you didn’t.”
He stared at her. “And?”
“I can tell you’re concerned,” she said.
How strange.
“My popularity is in question, as you know.”
“Yes, I do know. But what are the real-world consequences to that?”
“A disappointing launch. And if we do not remain number one in the quarter during the launch period, then we will have ceded ground, and I refuse.”
“Right.” She leaned back, her blond curls fanning around her as she rested her head against the back of the love seat.
Her hair was one of the first things he had noticed about her.
It was wild, and she never tamed it. Even if it was up in a bun, she let tendrils fly free.
There was something about that which captured his focus in a way he could not articulate.
It was, he thought then, something to do with the fact that it was so quintessentially Verity.
“But the question I have,” she continued, “is what is enough? How many times do you need to be number one? Because success on this level surely can’t continue forever. Everybody reaches a peak.”
“That might be true when an entity is smaller than mine.”
Her lips twitched. “An entity?”
He narrowed his gaze. “You know what I mean. Total domination is possible. And I want to.”
“Why?”
How did he explain? How did he explain that in a world he had not asked to be born into, a world that had passed him around like a bad penny that no one wanted, he needed to make an undeniable, unquestionable place for himself? One that would endure after he died.
This launch was the one that would do it, and that made it more important than anything else he’d ever done. He had a chance to set a precedent with new technology, one that would carry on after he did.