Chapter 4
Elliot
Since I was ten years old, I wanted nothing more than to leave Chicago. I hated it with everything I was.
Some people would say hating a city at such a young age is an overexaggeration, but to me, hating it seemed like the perfect reaction.
Being in the city meant I wasn’t back home.
Living in the city or anywhere near it meant my parents weren’t ever coming back.
It meant that, like my father and his brother, my siblings and I were essentially orphaned.
My hatred for the city grew through the years.
I hated everything about it. Even the name—Chicago—bothers me.
Which is why, at the age of fourteen, I begged my uncle to send me to a boarding school in Texas even if the ones in the city were better.
It’s why the second I turned eighteen, I started to travel without having to ask for permission or needing a chaperone.
I spent as little time within city limits as I could.
And I was going to do that for as long as I could.
In my head, Chicago wasn’t my home. It wasn’t the place I was born or anywhere near where I spent the first ten years of my life.
It wasn’t where my parents were. It wasn’t where I wanted to be, where I wanted to grow as a person, so I was going to do everything in my power to never spend more than a few weeks there.
That was the plan for as long as I could remember.
Things change, though.
Things happen that tend to change your prospective.
If someone asked me eight years ago if I saw myself living in Chicago willingly, let alone working for my family’s company, something I vowed I would never do, I would have laughed in their face.
But like I said, things change. Not completely, but things are definitely different than what I expected them to be at the age of twenty.
I still travel, still spend most of my week on an airplane and away from the city, but after every flight, I come back.
After every business trip, I go home to my penthouse in downtown Chicago.
After every acquisition, I have dinner in the house my father left when he was sixteen and I spent most of my teens trying to escape. I leave, but I still come back.
Why?
Why would I continue to come back to a place I hated for so long? Why would I buy a penthouse apartment in a place that constantly has me thinking about my parents? Why does it seem like I’m setting up roots here when that is the last thing I wanted?
If I’m being honest, nothing is truly holding me here.
My youngest brother, Drake, is in Texas finishing up his junior year of high school at the same boarding school I went to, slated to move to Boston for college when he’s done. He doesn’t need me.
Samantha, my sister, spends her time between Chicago and traveling the world.
She is trying to make a name for herself, becoming her own person outside the family name, but also trying to find an escape from this life that our parents left us.
In a way, she’s trying to escape like I did.
The only difference between her and me is that she comes back to the city a lot more often than I ever did.
Grayson, my other brother, the one who loves to label himself the middle child, is the only one of my three siblings in Chicago ninety percent of the time.
He convinced our uncle to let him open a sports media company under the Lane Enterprises umbrella and has been running that just fine for the last year at twenty-three.
If I truly asked myself why I haven’t moved away, why I haven’t moved back to Mexico at twenty-seven years old like I told myself I would to look for the answers that have plagued my life or why I even bought a penthouse, something that seem so damn permanent, I think I would know the answer.
And the answer is the man currently sitting in front of me.
The man people say I’m the spitting image of.
The man who, from the second I came into his life when he was twenty-two, hasn’t known whether to treat me like his nephew, his younger brother, or his son.
It’s a problem he never had with my siblings, but I guess a twelve-year age difference would do that.
Bennett Lane.
A part of me hates that he’s the answer, especially since the two of us don’t have the greatest relationship. It has gotten better these last three to four years, but it definitely still needs work, something we have both admitted.
I shouldn’t be going down the rabbit hole that is why the fuck I’m making life cozy right now. There are other pressing matters at hand.
Like a certain trip out west I need to mention.
“I was thinking of heading over to Vegas to scope out a property,” I voice, breaking the silence Bennett, my uncle, and I have been sitting in while my mind wandered.
We’re currently in his top floor office in the Lane Enterprises building, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows that look over the downtown Chicago skyline.
This office was once one Bennett would have killed for—very possible in the literal sense—and now that he’s in it, I know he would rather die than hand it over to someone who isn’t a Lane.
We’ve talked about me taking it over one day, but that conversation was one I killed within seconds. I’ve never wanted to be CEO, not when I first learned about this company and not in the years since. I still don’t.
That title is better suited for someone else, and Bennett knows exactly who that is.
“Property in Vegas?” The question comes out sounding bewildered. “What the hell are you going to do with property in Vegas?” Bennett asks, looking up from some website mock ups one of his assistants handed him.
I give him a shrug. “Vegas is gold. Sports teams are moving there left and right. I figure if Grayson ever wants to buy a team and move it to a new city or build an expansion team, he will have a place for it.”
“That’s a farfetched thought,” my uncle voices, abandoning the mock ups and looking at me straight on. “He just stepped back into the sports world. It took a lot for him to even ask me to support him with Nightwing. You truly think he will go out and buy a team or start his own?”
I know my uncle is thinking the same thing. We sure damn hope that’s what happens.
Grayson was seven when he asked Bennett to sign him up to play a sport.
He saw I had been signed up for soccer, and he wanted to play too.
He hated soccer, liked baseball somewhat, enjoyed basketball, and fucking loved hockey, so for the next ten years, he dedicated everything he had to the sport.
Bennett even bought him a professional hockey team in the hopes that if Gray was ever to make it pro, he would play for said team. Nepotism at its best.
All that didn’t happen. Grayson was close to getting drafted right of high school, but an injury ended up taking it all away.
It wasn’t until last year, when Grayson was out of college, that he started talking about hockey again.
When he came up with the idea for Nightwing, the company he founded, everyone in our family gave him our full support.
For the first time in years, I saw a version of my brother I hadn’t seen and had been missing for a long time.
“It could happen,” I say, throwing my uncle a shrug.
“And if it doesn’t? What are you going to do with a plot of land in Vegas?”
I shrug once again. “Sell it to you so you can build a hotel or some shit.”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “And who is going to run said hotel or some shit?”
“You?”
“Yeah, because Ella would love another thing added to my plate.”
As far as aunts go, Ella is a solid one, though I don’t really have anyone else to compare her to.
She’s only been in our lives for eight years, and only five years older than me, but in that time, she has become the female role model this family needed.
Even though we’re close in age, I still view her as someone I can go to if I need motherly advice, something my own mother has never given me, at least not past the age of ten.
“I’m sure she would be okay with it,” I joke, and all he does is shake his head.
We both know Ella would very much not be okay with it.
She already thinks he takes on too much. You would think since she helped him grow Lane Enterprises, she would be on board, but I get it. I’m sure if I had an Ella in my life, they would feel the same.
Thank fuck I don’t.
Even though I’ll be thirty in two years, I’m nowhere near ready for that type of commitment.
“If you do go to Nevada, do you think you can make it a business trip?” Bennett says, changing the subject slightly.
I give him a nod. “What do you need?”
Eight years ago, I had no plans to come work for Lane Enterprises or my uncle in any capacity. I had a seat on his board solely because I inherited it when I turned eighteen, and I was more than happy with just that, only coming into the office when required.
Then…something happened. Ella was taken, and to give her time to recover from what she went through, I took her place as executive assistant to Bennett Lane for a few weeks.
I was supposed to walk away when she came back, but I stuck around.
Bennett named me his Director of Acquisitions four years later when he saw I had a way of convincing people to work with us or sell us their product or properties.
I surprisingly liked it and will continue to do it but I wouldn’t bleed for my title like my uncle.
“There are rumors flying around that certain tech company is moving their main office from California to Texas. I need you to find out if it’s true and then swoop in on the California property.”
That takes me by surprise. “You’re thinking about opening up another office on the West Coast?”
That’s the only logical theory, since he doesn’t care much about me potentially buying property in Vegas.
For decades, Lane Enterprises has been rooted in Chicago.
From the stories I’ve heard, my grandfather and great grandfather never wanted to open another office.
Chicago was home, and they were going to keep it that way.
I don’t think they ever thought the company would get so big. We have a hand in almost everything—cars, security, weaponry, tech, media, sports with Grayson’s new venture, and a shit ton more. But Bennett did, and the fact that he is thinking about even opening another office is big.
“I am. I think it would be beneficial. More work, but beneficial.”
I nod my head in agreement. “Isn’t that adding another thing to your plate, though?” I ask with my eyebrows raised and a smirk playing on my face.
My uncle rolls his eyes. “Opening up another office would just be an extension of what is happening here, not a new venture that will be taking me away from my wife.”
If me and my siblings were younger and not ninety percent out of his house, we would have been included in that decision too.
“And if we open this new office, who would be the one running it?”
He gives me a look that tells me I shouldn’t be asking stupid questions I already know the answers to.
“I was thinking you—if you ever agree to take the COO position.”
Now, it’s my turn to roll my eyes.
For about two years now, we’ve been having this discussion.
As appealing as it may be to become the CEO’s second and help with operations, I don’t want it, especially if it means I would be stepping into the interim CEO role if something were to happen to Bennett.
The position isn’t for me, and it will never be.
“I’ll help with getting it up and running, but I won’t take the COO position. Besides, that position isn’t even open.”
“If I need it to open up, it will.”
I snort. “You’re willing to take out a close friend out of a position he’s worked hard for to hand it over to me?”
Luciano Acosta was brought in by Bennett a few months after he became CEO and cleaned house after what happens to Ella.
The man is terrifying, but he and Bennett make a good paring and is one of the key reasons, apart from Ella, why Bennett has had success in making Lane Enterprises what it is today.
Lucious isn’t going anywhere, but when my uncle raises an eyebrow at my comment, and I can’t help but let out a laugh.
“Right. I forgot who I was talking to: the man who got married for the sole purpose of becoming CEO.”
“That’s not the only reason,” he mutters, picking an imaginary piece of lint off his shirt.
“Oh, really? What was the other reason you had to marry your assistant after only knowing her a month?” Now I’m the one raising my eyebrows.
Bennett clears his throat and tries to give me the fatherly death glare we get from Henry, our family’s caretaker, when he wants us to shut up. It doesn’t really work with Bennett like it does with Henry.
“No reason I have to explain to you. Can you go to California or not?”
I throw a smirk at him, silently saying I’m going to be dropping the subject for now.
“Which company and where in California?”
“Nexus and in Mountain View.”
I roll my eyes a bit. I’ve read more than a few articles in the last week about the head of Nexus and how he is done with California. My guess is he wants to line his pockets with more money and thinks that moving to Texas will do that.
“Yeah, I’ll go. The guy who’s selling some property on the strip had some time to meet on Friday. I’ll see if I can get everything done during the weekend and then catch a flight to San Jose.”
I get a nod. “Sounds good.”
For a minute or two, Bennett goes back to look at his mock ups before I break the silence.
“You know, a rational person would be telling me going out to even look at property is a stupid idea, more so when we don’t even know if owning a team is something he’s headed for. He did make you sell the Knights after he got hurt.”
The Chicago Dark Knights was the team Bennett bought for Grayson.
He loved that team with everything he had, but the second the injury hit, he wanted nothing to do with it.
Bennett was hesitant about selling the team, but ultimately, what was best for the team won out over his nephew’s possible future needs.
Bennett looks back up at me. “I’m not a very rational person.”
He isn’t, and I’m just like him.
“I’ll head out this weekend and fill you in when I get back,” I say, getting up from the chair and buttoning my suit jacket as I make my way out.
Bennett’s voice stops me as I’m about to walk into the hall. “Don’t do anything stupid in Vegas. I don’t want to be hearing about any drunken escapades.”
I throw back a smirk at my uncle. “No guarantees, old man.”