Chapter 6
This was the most fucked-up all-hands Fletcher had ever attended.
Her screaming had scared off the pride, the last of them dragging Dyer’s bloodied leg through the dirt. But all the horrified screeching had also drawn the rest of her coworkers into the suite. Because what they’d been really missing was a crowd.
Shock waves rocked through the rest of the employees, each in various stages of the grief cycle—Molly had a trembling hand pressed to her lips, Deepti sniffled into the pocket square she’d stolen out of Raul’s suit jacket, and Melv started pacing, scrubbing the back of his sunburned neck.
“Someone call for help,” Fletcher said, knowing full well that someone would be her. It was always her. But, for once, her phone was upstairs charging on the nightstand. A version of herself whose boss hadn’t been eaten by lions might have been thankful for the work-life separation.
A familiar chime sounded next to Fletcher, and she dragged her eyes toward Sheila. The intern’s phone was glued to the end of her nose. A rainfall of confetti flashed on-screen as Sheila beat another level in her game, and Fletcher batted the phone away.
“Seriously, Sheila?”
“What?” A hot-pink chewing gum bubble pressed through her lips, and she bit it until it popped. “I can’t watch Netflix because my phone’s being so sketchy right now.”
Fletcher stripped the iPhone from Sheila’s sparkly gel-manicured grip. She had Carlotta’s direct line memorized. Her hands shook as she thumbed it in, but when she pressed the green call button, the phone didn’t even ring.
The bars at the top vanished.
What the hell?
She pivoted toward Raul, but the CTO bolted around the corner, already retching. No way did he reach the toilet.
“Mine, too,” Other Brian said, holding up his phone. Dismay painted his fair features.
Jackie nodded, her cell snug against her ear. “Nothing.”
“Oh my god, we’re all going to get eaten by lions,” Joplin wailed.
“Does this mean we don’t get promotions?” asked Asshole Rick.
It took twenty minutes and half a bottle of Xanax to herd everyone into the living room with the sunken conversation pit.
This one, on the second floor, had a stone fireplace with a rifle strapped above the mantel, built-ins stacked with vintage books, and a U-shaped sofa with room for about thirty-seven perched on top of a bear-pelt rug. Cozy. Kind of.
Fletcher’s back stuck to the leather cushions, hot and humid even this early in the day. Or maybe she sweated through her blouse.
That seemed justified. All things considered.
Waylon sat uncomfortably on the live-edge black oak coffee table, facing everyone else.
Dyer’s cane was perched against his thigh, and his fingers tapped a nervous rhythm against the ivory.
It was the only sign of his frayed nerves.
Everything else was a cold, unaffected shell.
The most serious Waylon had ever looked.
“What are we supposed to do?” Joplin asked, wet with snot. She tugged a worried hand through her pink hair.
“How could this happen? What happened?” Molly asked. Mildly accusatory.
For a fraction of a second, Waylon’s gaze found Fletcher’s. She’d be lying to herself if she hadn’t wondered the same thing. How had Dyer forgotten to lock his patio door? But it wasn’t just that—the protective fence had been deliberately turned off.
This wasn’t an accident.
And the note. No one wrote a note before coincidentally being eaten alive. He’d clearly intended for Waylon to be the one to discover his fate. Alone, presumably.
A nerve at Waylon’s jaw twinged, stressed from the force of clenched teeth. As soon as he tore his line of sight away from Fletcher, she remembered how to breathe in a regular cadence. Being near him had her sympathetic nervous system on the fritz.
He tamped his father’s cane against the ground, fingers paling around its handle. The room fell to attention.
“The only thing we know is that he’s gone,” Waylon said. The grit in his tone sent unsolicited shivers down Fletcher’s back. Uncurling his fingers, Waylon cradled the USB drive in his palm, and the team forcibly ejected themselves from their couch cushions to get a better look. “And he left this.”
Deepti frowned. “A flash drive?”
Raul’s eyebrows shot up like he’d been Bat-Signaled. “Let’s plug it in.”
After producing a laptop from his bag, he inserted the drive and tinkered with the computer in chilling quiet. The click, click, click of indented keys.
Waylon smashed a button on a remote, and a projector screen descended from the center of the room, large enough to rival IMAX. Strangely, Fletcher wasn’t in the mood for popcorn.
In a flash, Dyer’s smiling face appeared on-screen. Cheeks round and skin flushed. Living.
“Wow,” Jackie said. A bittersweet laugh parted her lips. “I didn’t even know he knew how to film himself.”
Bertram huffed, leaning back against the couch and adjusting the belt of his pants around his obtrusive stomach. “Always gets the last word, doesn’t he?”
When Raul pressed play, the video started rolling, showing Dyer fiddling with his camera, straightening it so that he would be centered.
All the air in the room evaporated. Goose bumps rose over every patch of exposed skin.
Fletcher could hardly believe this man was gone, nothing more than a pile of half-eaten flesh.
Her stomach Tilt-A-Whirled at the thought.
On-screen, Dyer cleared his throat. “Bit of a funny thing to do, filming a video like this. Is it still called filming these days? There’s no film.”
A laugh went up around the living room, soggy and vaguely mucus-y, but a laugh nonetheless. Dyer chuckled, too, like he’d anticipated the effect of his own charm. He could run a billion-dollar company, but he could barely work an iPhone camera. That was Dyer, for sure.
“By now, you all know what I know: Life is fleeting. Never is that more apparent than on Lydell Island. Time, as we’ve all learned, is precious, so I’ll keep things brief.
” His features tightened, and Fletcher heard more than one coworker swallow anxiously.
“I’ve been a dead man for months. In February, I started seeing a cardiologist. Dr. Hawks, awful man that he is, found a tumor growing around my heart. ”
Fletcher bit down on the inside of her cheek. All those missed appointments—the way Dyer kept asking her to reschedule. This whole time, she’d thought they were routine. Dr. Hawks had been trying to save him.
Waylon sucked in a breath too loud for the silent living room. Had he known?
Dyer smiled, and it was so familiar that Fletcher’s own heart squeezed.
Disbelief coursed through her veins. Yesterday had been the last time she’d ever see his mischievous grin in person, and she hadn’t even known it was the last time.
It felt unfathomable, his sudden departure. But here it was. Fathomed.
“There were treatment options. Procedures I could do. Surgeries to be had,” he said. “Or I could come to Lydell, drink something a little extra stiff, and lie down in the bed I shared with my wife one last time, listening to the sounds of the wilderness we loved so much.”
A gasp worked through the crowd. He had died the same way he had lived: according to his own rules.
“I’ve always known the company would go on without me. That’s why this hard drive contains two items. This video, and my last will and testament.”
Next to her, Molly inhaled shakily. Fletcher’s breathing felt just as uneven.
She picked a thread loose in her skirt, trying to keep the nausea at bay.
It wasn’t working. All she could think about were the taxidermied animals dotting the manor’s halls.
Would Dyer want to be embalmed and stuffed, put on display for the rest of eternity as immortal as he always felt?
Were billionaires into that kind of thing?
It was a little too easy to imagine him taking up permanent real estate in his penthouse office, perched in the corner case with a Madame Tussauds smile.
Then she’d really beg to transfer to Design.
“Melv,” Dyer said, peering to the side. It happened to be the side Melv wasn’t sitting on, but it was a valiant effort. “You’ll take the liberty of reading all the paperwork, I’m sure, but I’ll cut to the chase. Everyone here knows there is only one remaining Cartwright.”
Fletcher’s eyes cut toward Waylon. She was certain she wasn’t the only one who found her gaze drifting his way. The rightful heir. Not even Sheila—Waylon’s mom’s sister’s daughter—was a Cartwright by blood.
Waylon leaned his elbows on his knees, rolling the heirloom cane in his hands. Barely even bothering to watch. Couldn’t he at least have the decency to look interested in inheriting the entire Cartwright legacy?
A brief glint of affection splashed across Dyer’s face—real, genuine—before vanishing behind his usual theatricality.
“To my son, Waylon Cartwright, I leave Lydell Island, its animal inhabitants, as well as all of its structures and assets. It’s what your mother would have wanted, and you know I’ve never trusted anyone more than Tiffany to protect what I love most.”
Big surprise. Next, he’d inherit the yachts, the planes, and the Bora Bora home. Then, the Upper East Side penthouse, and the stocks and bonds. Cartwright Media and all affiliated assets. The whole kit and caboodle.
Dyer cleared his throat. “The rest I leave to fate.”
Her colleagues inched forward in their seats, but Fletcher shrank back into her cushion, coiling her knees toward her chest. To fate? In all the years she’d known him, Dyer had never left anything to the whims of others.
When Jet-Setter’s Amsterdam issue spawned a national outcry about marijuana legalization, it coincided with Cartwright Media’s lofty donation to a running politician whose platform miraculously aligned.
When the board of directors feared stagnation, Dyer organized a last-minute meeting to absorb a smaller publication.
When everyone else was exclusive to print, Dyer ushered Jet-Setter into the digital age.
He’d always navigated speed bumps with an innate charisma Fletcher often envied. But more than that, he didn’t merely extricate himself from sticky situations. He’d orchestrated them entirely.
One hundred years of periodicals had been printed under this banner. What kind of leader would leave that up to fate?
Dyer stroked his chin in the video, leaving plenty of dead air for dramatic effect.
He was sitting in his office. When had he filmed this?
How had she missed it? The moment lasted entirely too long.
Finally, he continued. “I’ve always heard publishing is a cutthroat business, and nowhere is that truer than on Lydell.
I’ve gathered each of you here for a reason.
For your tenacity. Your instincts. Your gumption. ”
The word flared through Fletcher like a flint strike.
“You’ll need it to run Cartwright Media.”
Murmurs turned to unashamed whispers. The Brians craned their heads together, chatting. Deepti blew her nose like an elephant trumpeting and then folded the handkerchief neatly in her lap, curiosity piqued.
“This is my will here. I’d like to read some of it for you.
” Dyer shuffled through some papers until he found a stack latched with a gold binder clip.
“As of the announcement of this will, all invited guests on Lydell Island are eligible for the inheritance of the remaining assets, including ownership of Cartwright Media, all mutual funds managed by Dyer Cartwright, and domestic and international properties deeded to Dyer Cartwright.”
“Eligible?” Asshole Rick asked. “Why eligible?”
Dyer, of course, didn’t hear him.
Half the room turned to Melv, waiting for the lawyer to make sense of this completely nonsensical sentence. Melv was rapt with attention, literally on the edge of his seat.
“You may have noticed,” Dyer continued, “the manor is a little quieter this morning. I’ve sent the staff off the island. All wireless connectivity and phone lines have been disabled and will remain offline for the next five days. What happens next is only between us.”
Reaching beneath his desk, Dyer extracted his ivory cane, the same cane now in Waylon’s hands.
“My grandfather carved this from the tusk of an elephant he’d killed here on a hunting trip. It’s a depiction of the beasts found on Lydell. Vicious animals in a lawless land, but at the top—”
Past a winged vulture, elephant, zebra, giraffe, cheetah, and maned lion, Dyer unfurled his fist to reveal the grip, the double barrel of a shotgun.
“Us.”
Time slowed down, seconds stretching into hours.
“Cartwright Media’s next leader needs to be a fierce predator.
Someone strong enough to survive in unforgiving landscapes.
I’ve disabled the electric fence separating you from the wild.
A rescue crew will arrive at the marina in five days, once you’ve had the chance to prove your grit and determination in this harsh environment. ”
Rescue crew? The room didn’t spin—it lurched with bone-crushing centrifugal force. Someone shifted in their seat. Someone else coughed. Fletcher didn’t see who because her eyes had gone tunnel-y. She was going to throw up and pass out, in that order.
On-screen, Dyer speared onward. Laughing like he hadn’t sentenced them to death. Or, maybe, laughing because he knew he had. The former CEO of Cartwright Media laced his fingers beneath his chin.
“If you can survive here, you can certainly handle a board meeting. However, only one guest will be able to take immediate ownership of my assets upon returning to the Cartwright Media offices in Manhattan. Choose wisely. All other guests must forfeit. This is what Lydell has always been: a hunting ground.”
A smile. His last.
“Good luck. You’ll need it.”