2. Miles
Miles
“This is bad news, Miles,” Carlus, my second-in-command, told me the second I stepped into the hospital hallway.
I didn’t even kill the engine. Left the Porsche idling out front. I did ninety across town, ignoring every red light. I needed this not to be true.
Was this as bad as when Serena mailed back the engagement ring?
Nah. That shit sucked. She might have burned it. Selling it would’ve been colder. But no—she mailed it. Efficient. Professional. Serena to the bone.
“How bad?” I asked, already adjusting the cuff of my suit, smoothing down nothing. I made sure to keep the smile on my face. Jokes typically made things easier. Hell, when we laid off a big chunk of staff a few months back, my smiles and jokes took some of the heat off my ass.
Not the typical CEO way, but it worked for me.
I caught sight of Reggie. One of our best guys. Built like a damn fridge, now laid out like a Jenga tower someone tipped over. Cast, traction, wires.
Fuck.
Carlus rubbed the back of his neck. “He fell off the second floor. Faulty railing. He’s lucky to be alive.”
“At least now he has time to catch up on all those HR safety videos he kept skipping.” I nudged his arm.
Carlus didn’t laugh, and I cleared my throat, wiping my face. No.
Nothing about this was remotely fucking funny, but it was all I could do to not show a panicked man watching his company bleed out.
I sighed, running a hand over my face as I looked in front of me.
A lawsuit waiting to happen. Insurance was already thin. This delay? It’d cost me six figures, minimum.
And more than that, my reputation. The comeback I was staging? The redemption tour for the Whitmore name? Slipping. Again.
“Let’s not say ‘faulty railing’ out loud anymore,” I said quietly. “Until we find out what really happened. Maybe Reggie tripped. Maybe he’s clumsy as hell.”
“This ain’t a joke, Miles. This shit is serious.”
I forced a chuckle. “Tough room.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket for the third time. I ignored it. Whoever it was could wait. Probably someone else needing money, answers, miracles.
I watched Reggie breathe through the mask. Shit.
This was all Serena King.
Every time I rebuilt, Serena found a way to swing the wrecking ball with a smile on her face. Nothing says “I hate your guts” like stealing a $20 million development out from under you.
The woman knew how to grip me by the balls. Funny… How love quickly turned to hate.
I gritted my teeth, jaw ticking as I replayed the last few months in my head like a horror reel.
She took the last beachfront property I’d been working on for months.
In Lush, practically nobody fucking left town or sold generational property.
I’d taken the owner—a sweet, stubborn old widow— salsa dancing . Me . Salsa.
But I was willing and able to do anything to save Whitmore Ventures. We belonged in this town, just like the Kings.
And just when I thought I had it locked, Serena swooped in like the fucking angel of death she was and stole it. Probably promised the woman a goddamn statue or a yacht or some bullshit. And poof. Paper signed.
Game over.
She’d been tormenting me for months, years, really—cutting off my suppliers, spreading rumors, cherry-picking my investors like she was harvesting grapes for a goddamn King family wine.
That woman was a walking apocalypse.
She’d been relentless. Ruthless. And sure, I used to admire that about her. Hell, I used to want her. Still kind of did.
She always wanted power. I just wanted her. I once thought we could have both.
The few times I’d seen her recently, that ass was looking tight in those old lady slacks she wore. But I also wanted to throw her through a window. Metaphorically. Maybe. Even now, I’d probably lose my damn mind if she walked through that door.
“I don’t feel anything for you, Miles.” She took a step forward, and I gritted my teeth when I felt my body heat at the brush of her against me. “But I will destroy you. Every. Single. Bit. Of you.”
That’s what she said to me last year at Café L’Amour. A part of me saw her cutting me down and thought, maybe she’s the only one who still sees me standing.
But I was the roach she couldn’t squash. The charming bastard who always managed to crawl out of the wreckage. Even now, with the building falling apart—literally—I still had pieces on the board.
“Are you even listening to me?” Carlus’s voice jolted me from my thoughts.
I blinked.
“This is some serious shit. More shit than we’ve dealt with in the past. It ain’t a game.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, head throbbing like it had been waiting for me to notice. “You don’t think I know that? You think I wanted to get a call about this? It’s been fucking shit show after shit show. You don’t think I want a break?”
Calm. Be cool, Miles.
The company didn’t need a saint. It needed a fast talker with a toolkit of backup plans and a bulletproof smile.
I was trying to make my last name mean something again. Trying to build a legacy out of the ash and cocaine residue my father had left behind. I was thirty-three and felt seventy.
I hadn’t slept through the night in years. But I smiled. I shook hands. I gave speeches. Because people expected a Whitmore to stand tall even when the world was kicking him in the teeth. I had my instincts. And instincts had gotten me this far.
I glanced back at Reggie.
“You’ll be alright,” I murmured. For him or for me, I wasn’t sure.
Carlus shook his head. “I don’t know if it will be.”
“We don’t have the luxury of falling apart over it.” My voice was sharp, but the weight in my chest was sharper. “We need a solution. Fast. Before this gets into the Lush Chronicles. ”
My family had been in that damn gossip rag so many times over the years, I think sometimes they just put our names in there when internet traffic got low.
“You know I’m here for you, big man. I’m not going nowhere. Don’t panic. Don’t we always figure a way out?”
My phone buzzing made me jump.
I’d been reaching out to some new investors, people I didn’t think Serena had managed to touch. If we could get some new money in, that could help this go away.
Please let it be good news.
Disappointment flooded through me as I glanced at the screen.
Not the potential new investor, but a text from Gwyn, a name that I only vaguely remembered.
Are you free tonight, handsome?
I rolled my eyes. Fucking wasn’t on my radar right now. Gwyn looked at me like most of the women in town did. Like I was still Miles, the playboy. People would always remind me.
My intention was to set things straight for my company. Not fuck up and make another mistake. Some things were beyond repair, regardless of my desire to change it.
Scrolling through my contacts, I found Serena’s name.
Sunny.
I started calling her that because she was the most serious person I’d ever met.
Even when we were kids, she didn’t smile. Not once, not genuinely—not unless she was scheming or sparring with me. Cold, composed, terrifyingly brilliant.
But I saw the fire under all that ice. The way her mind never stopped moving. Her curiosity and compassion. The rare moments when she let herself laugh—God, they were blinding. It felt like the sun came out just for me.
So yeah, Sunny . Because it pissed her off. But I never stopped using it. And I never stopped waiting to see her shine again.
Even after three phones, I still had her number.
“We can’t let this get out,” I said.
Carlus turned to me slowly. “You’re saying cover it?”
“I’m saying contain it.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, trying to breathe around the tension. “If this ends up in the Lush Chronicles —‘Whitmore Crewman Injured in Unsafe Conditions’—we’re finished. I’ll lose the next project before I ever bid.”
Carlus folded his arms. “You want me to talk to his family?”
“Yeah. Just…soften it. Say we’re taking care of everything—hospital bills, worker’s comp, hell, I’ll even cover the damn groceries for the month. But they don’t talk to anyone until I say so.”
Carlus nodded. “It’s done.”
“Get the site shut down for two days. Say it’s for a safety review. Quiet. No press.” I clenched my fists.
“It’s already in motion.” Carlus slapped me on the shoulder, then squeezed. “I’ll go sit with him a bit.”
I waited until Carlus entered the room, then let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I wanted to punch something—anything to release the furious energy coursing through me.
This was supposed to be the comeback year.
I was so fucking tired.
Tired of smiling through failure. Tired of pretending this wasn’t all one long free fall from grace.
Every damn day, I woke up and tried to will this company—and my last name—back into respectability like it was a corpse I could drag upright.
But no matter how many boardrooms I pitched in or palms I greased, the whispers always came back: That’s Omar’s boy. You remember what he did?
This situation was the kind of thing that would bleed out slow—one photo, one blog post, one ugly headline at a time. It wouldn’t matter that I paid every bill or that I handled it in private.
Optics were everything in this town.
And the vultures would circle. Like they did when Pops was dragged out to the cop car in cuffs where all our friends and family could see.
How the lights and press were in our faces during the trial.
That was six years ago, but the way people in town behaved, you woulda thought it happened yesterday.
What the fuck was I really fighting for?
Everything. I had to. Because no one was coming to save us.
I knew above all I couldn’t wait to watch everyone in this town—Serena, Erik , all the Kings—eat fucking shit and be shocked by the way I turned things around.
That was what the last six years have been about: proving everybody and their bald-headed aunties dead wrong.
They were wrong when they said the Whitmores would never make it again. They were wrong when they said we’d only hold our heads in shame. They were wrong when they said we would run from the town my relatives helped build with our tails between our legs.
Whitmores were petty above all.
But we didn’t run. Never that.
One day, it won’t be us ducking our heads in shame. It’ll be them. All of them. Looking up at me from the dirt, wondering how the hell I did it.
Yes, my father fucked up. But I was turning this ship around.
So, if Serena wanted to fight dirty—sabotaging sites, stealing clients, sweet-talking people I danced salsa with, for Christ’s sake—fine.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t going as hard as I could be. Now? Fuck feelings. Fuck these people. They meant nothing to me anymore.
I was coming for the Kings. I was coming for Serena. I was coming for Lush.
And they better hope they fucking survived.
And I knew there was one property she wanted in town that could make her. That I was going to take.
I couldn’t wait for that moment. I couldn’t wait to finally say it.
Told you so.