Chapter 24 Owen
OWEN
The ink on the Sterling Capital contract is barely dry when I watch Robert Sterling slide the document into his leather briefcase. It’s a slow, deliberate movement, like a predator sheathing its claws before snapping the brass locks closed.
Click. Click. It sounds like a jail cell closing.
“Excellent,” Sterling says, standing up and smoothing the lapels of a suit jacket that probably costs more than my first car.
“The Series B funds will be wired tomorrow morning. Fifty million dollars of fresh capital, gentlemen. Do try not to spend it all on bean bag chairs and ping pong tables.” He offers a thin, bloodless smile.
“Your Series A funding gave me a foothold, but this new cash gives me oversight. I look forward to a boring, highly profitable partnership.”
He looks at Ethan first. “Keep the ship steady, Branson. I don’t like surprises, and volatility is bad for my blood pressure.”
He looks at Asher next. “Keep the code clean. We’re paying for stability, not experimentation.”
Then, his gaze turns to me. His eyes narrow slightly, scanning me from my untucked shirt all the way down to the scuff on my boot.
“And you… try not to end up on Page Six with a starlet or a senator’s daughter. We’re selling family values now, Owen. Not frat boy fantasies.”
I feel the muscle in my jaw jump, but I force it down. I flash him my best, brightest, most vapid smile—the exact one that’s gotten me out of speeding tickets, into VIP sections, and out of trouble for a decade.
“I’m a changed man, Robert,” I lie, putting a hand over my heart. “I’ve taken up knitting. I spend my weekends volunteering at a library for quiet introverts.”
Sterling snorts with a dismissive, wet sound. He doesn’t believe me, but he doesn’t care. He has his signature. He has his Morality Clause. He effectively owns us.
“See that you do,” he says.
He turns toward the door where Tessa stands, holding it open. She’s been invisible for the last hour, standing like a statue in the corner while clutching her tablet like a shield.
“Miss Hartley,” Sterling nods to her on his way out. “A pleasure. Your presentation on community engagement was… adequate.”
“Thank you, Mr. Sterling,” Tessa replies. Her voice is incredibly steady, but I can see the tendons straining in her hand as she grips the heavy door handle.
“Keep them in line,” Sterling advises her. “They need a firm hand.”
“I will do my best, sir.”
He walks out. The heavy glass door swings shut behind him, but the vibration seems to ripple through the room long after he’s gone.
The silence is heavy, saturated with the musky scent of his cologne.
Ethan exhales sharply, a harsh sound that cuts through the quiet room. He walks to the head of the table, rips his tie off in one violent motion, and throws it onto the mahogany surface.
“It’s done,” he says.
“We’re rich,” Asher notes. He’s still sitting, staring blankly at the closed laptop in front of him. “Based on the valuation, our net worth just increased by four hundred percent on paper in the last ten minutes.”
“And we’re contractually obligated to be celibate monks,” I add, leaning back in my chair and kicking my feet up on the table right next to the signed contract.
“Clause four, section B. No participation in deviant lifestyles or communal arrangements. He practically wrote ‘No orgies’ in legal font. I give it three hours.”
Ethan turns, completely ignoring Asher and me. The professional mask he’s been wearing for two hours entirely dissolves, revealing the tired, wired, and desperate man underneath.
He walks straight over to Tessa and crowds her space, completely ignoring the glass walls and open blinds that leave us exposed to the entire office floor.
“You okay?” he asks, his voice low.
“I’m fine,” she says. She forces a smile, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Just… happy it’s over. The smell of his cologne was giving me a headache. It was like breathing in an antique shop.”
“It smelled like old money and harsh judgment,” I agree, swinging my legs off the table and walking over to join them. “I hated it.”
I lean against the wall, arms crossed as I watch them. Ethan is looking at her with that terrifying, unnerving intensity he usually saves for hostile boardrooms, but Tessa just leans into it. She puts a hand on his chest, letting her thumb brush softly over the lapel of his jacket.
“So,” she says softly. “Fifty million dollars. What are we going to do with it?”
“Server expansion,” Asher says instantly from the table. “We need to migrate the database to a decentralized cloud structure before the user loads triples.”
“Marketing blitz,” Tessa counters. “We need to control the narrative before Sterling does.”
“I was thinking,” I say, catching Tessa’s eye.
She looks at me. Her eyes are heavily rimmed with exhaustion, but there’s still a bright spark there.
“I was thinking,” I continue, “we could use a tiny, microscopic fraction of it to order the most expensive takeout in Austin, lock the door to the apartment, and break every single rule in that contract.”
Tessa’s eyes light up, and a slow, genuine smile spreads across her face to cut through the fatigue. “Rule breaking?” she muses. “Mr. Sterling would be very disappointed. He wants us to be traditional.”
“Mr. Sterling isn’t invited,” I grin. “And tradition is incredibly boring. I want O-Toro. And I want you out of that skirt.”
Ethan makes a low noise in his throat to signal his agreement.
“Pack up and leave now,” Ethan orders her. “Take the B-elevator straight to your apartment. Don’t stop for coffee, and don’t talk to anyone.”
“Protocol?” she asks.
“Protocol,” he confirms. “We’ll leave in shifts. I’ll go in ten minutes, Asher in twenty. Owen… try not to look suspicious when you leave.”
“I never look suspicious,” I wink. “I look charming.”
“Go,” Ethan says.
I watch her walk out, watching the sway of her hips in that pencil skirt and the click of her heels on the polished concrete.
“We’re playing with fire,” Asher says, standing up and sliding his laptop into his bag.
“We just bought the fire department, Ash,” I say, clapping him hard on the shoulder. “Let’s go home.”
The vibe at the apartment is completely different tonight.
Usually, there’s a heavy desperation to us—a frantic need to connect before the world tears us apart. We exist in a constant state of high alert, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Harper to find out, for the press to catch us, or for the company to fail.
Tonight, it feels remarkably lighter.
Maybe it’s the fifty million dollars securing the company’s future. Maybe it’s the fact that Harper is safely back in Paris eating croissants and leaving us in peace. Or maybe it’s just that we’ve finally stopped fighting the inevitable.
We’re finally together, and tonight, we’re getting wasted on high-end sushi and cheap sake.
The coffee table is covered in black lacquer trays holding enough food to feed a small army—fatty tuna, yellowtail jalapeno, wagyu beef rolls, and glistening piles of sashimi.
“I win again,” Asher states, placing a bright yellow card on the coffee table with surgical precision.
“You’re counting cards,” I accuse him, throwing a piece of popcorn at his face. It bounces harmlessly off his forehead, and he doesn’t even blink. “It’s Uno, Asher. You can’t count cards in Uno. It’s a game of chaos, not logic.”
“I’m calculating probability based on the discard pile distribution,” Asher says, completely unfazed. “It isn’t cheating. It’s optimization. You play with emotion, Owen. I play with data.”
“It’s definitely cheating,” Tessa laughs.
She’s sitting on the floor between Ethan’s legs, finally changed out of her stiff work clothes and wearing one of my oversized vintage rock t-shirts with a pair of tiny cotton shorts.
Her hair is down, tumbling over her shoulders in a messy, wild wave.
Her face is scrubbed clean of makeup, revealing the soft dusting of freckles across her nose.
She looks painfully sexy.
“Your turn, Ethan,” she says, tilting her head back to look at him upside down. “Destroy him.”
Ethan’s sitting on the sofa with one leg stretched out and the other bent so Tessa can lean against it.
One of his large hands is absentmindedly playing with her hair, twisting the auburn strands around his fingers and tugging gently every now and then.
He looks relaxed for the first time in months, a half-empty glass of scotch resting in his other hand.
“Draw four,” Ethan says, dropping the lethal card directly on me.
“You absolute traitor,” I gasp, clutching my chest. “I thought we were brothers. I thought we had a bond forged in blood and code.”
“There are no brothers in Uno,” Ethan says darkly, taking a sip of his drink.
“Uno is a bloodsport,” Tessa agrees solemnly. “Sorry, Owen. It’s survival of the fittest.”
I just look at them.
That’s when it hits me. The pure, undeniable domesticity of it.
This isn’t just sex, and it isn’t just a harem or an arrangement or whatever clinical term Sterling would use to sue us into oblivion.
We’re eating dinner on the floor. We’re playing a children’s card game.
We’re fighting over who gets the last piece of spicy tuna.
This is a family.
It’s a weird, fucked-up, secret, contract-violating family, but it’s a family nonetheless.
“Okay,” I say, tossing my hand of cards down on the rug. “I fold. The game is rigged against the creative genius, so I resign in protest.”
“Sore loser,” Tessa teases, reaching for a piece of edamame.
“I prefer ‘gracious conceder’,” I correct, crawling across the rug toward her like a wolf stalking a particularly cute rabbit. “Besides, I’m bored of cards. I want to play a new game.”
“Oh?” Tessa raises an eyebrow, popping the bean into her mouth. “What game?”
“It’s called ‘The Morality Clause’,” I say, stopping just inches from her face.
Ethan snorts into his drink, and Asher instantly perks up, his blue eyes shifting from the card pile to us.