Chapter Two
EVERETT
I wake up angry.
Not at anyone in particular—just at the fact that it’s barely five a.m. and my mind feels like it’s already halfway through a twelve-hour board meeting.
The sun is just barely rising over Seattle’s skyline. It's a dark jagged line beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows on the top floor of the Kauffman Enterprises tower. One of eight penthouses in this sky-rise.
I should feel calmer up here than I do. Instead, my chest feels tight. That same knowing tightness that I can never fully escape. The tightness that starts behind the sternum and radiates outward like cracks in glass.
Not now.
I shove back the duvet and sit on the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, fingers digging into the back of my neck.
My heart is already doing that thing—the stutter-skip, the too-fast rhythm that has nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the fact that my brain has decided, at five in the goddamn morning, to track every single thing I’m about to lose.
I close my eyes.
Four counts in. Hold for seven. Out for eight.
Dr. Meyers taught me this sophomore year at Stanford, back when I was having three of these a week and convinced I was dying of a heart condition.
Turns out I wasn’t dying. I was just a twenty-year-old carrying the expectations of a mother who paraded me around like a trained show pony and the legacy of a father I’d never met.
The heart was fine. The wiring behind it was shot.
After a couple of years of therapy with Dr. Meyers, I figured out how to keep things from escalating to a panic attack.
I hadn’t had a panic attack since. Until five years ago, when I got the call.
Conrad Kauffman had died, and I was now the acting patriarch of a family I had never met—six brothers, a sister, and a multi-billion-dollar enterprise I knew nothing about how to run.
Four in. Seven hold. Eight out.
The technique works most of the time. Not always. Sometimes it wins anyway and I just lie there until it’s done, alone, jaw locked, hands fisted in whatever’s closest—sheets, steering wheel, the edge of a boardroom table. Nobody sees those moments. Nobody knows they exist. And that’s how it stays.
Tonight—this morning—it’s manageable. The breathing catches the edge of it, blunts it, pushes it back down into the place where I keep everything that doesn’t belong in daylight. My heartbeat evens out. The tightness loosens its grip. Not gone—never fully gone—but contained.
I let out a slow breath. Open my eyes.
I have weeks to get married, or my siblings and I lose everything.
What kind of egomaniac conceives eight children for the sake of legacy, doesn’t bother to raise a single one of them, and then chains their futures to a marriage clause?
Sure, he threw money at our mothers to raise us.
Private schools, whatever we needed. My mother got the best deal of anyone—a Kauffman son, firstborn, the heir she could mold and present to Conrad like a trophy.
She drilled perfection into me like it was a language I had to be fluent in by age ten.
Straight posture. Right answers. Impressive handshake.
Impress your father, Everett. Make him see what I gave him.
As if I existed to validate her choices rather than live my own life.
Have any of us ever had a real conversation with the man?
No.
Our youngest sister was the only one. An accident—when our father’s cold heart might have felt something for another person, and he impregnated a woman who worked at a diner he frequented. He wanted all sons. But then he had a daughter, and she was the only one who ever got to know him.
Psychopath is more like it. God rest his spiteful soul.
I rub both hands over my face and let out an annoyed sound—more groan than yawn. The residue of the panic attack clings to my skin like sweat. I can still feel it in my fingertips—that faint tremor that takes twenty minutes to fully fade.
I can’t let my inability to have anything resembling a personal life ruin things for the rest of the Kauffman family. Seven other people are depending on me not to screw this up.
I stand, and then the memory of Friday hits me.
Her eyes widening in the hallway when Levi turned his full charm on her. The flush when he called himself the better-looking brother. Her fingers tightening on that coffee cup like she was bracing for impact.
And then my own voice, cutting through the air before I could stop it.
She’s off limits—
I scrub a hand over my jaw.
I don’t say things I don’t mean. I don’t lose my temper. I don’t snap. And yet there it was—reflexive, instinctive, and unfortunately, I said it out loud.
Maybe it was just because Levi likes to push. Maybe it was because the idea of Levi dragging one of my employees into whatever recklessly casual thing he calls a relationship is dangerously inconvenient.
That’s all.
I move through my morning routine with the same rigid discipline I bring to everything else.
I shower, shave, and then get dressed for the day.
The uniform is a comfort. Navy suit, white shirt, steel-gray tie.
Every element deliberate. Every decision unemotional.
I knot the tie and look at myself in the mirror.
Oldest Kauffman son. Head of Kauffman Entertainment Holdings. Owner of the Seattle Hawkeyes. Next in line to either secure or destroy the family inheritance.
There’s no room for error. No room for anything else.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Christian: Board wants a progress update on your "personal timeline." Don’t be late.
I clench my jaw.
My "personal timeline." They mean my marriage deadline. The clause that says if I don’t wed by thirty-five, not only do I lose my division, but every single one of my brothers—and my sister—loses theirs. Dad didn’t just leave us an empire.
He left us a ticking bomb. As if being an absent father wasn’t enough of a kick in the dick.
I slip my phone into my pocket, straighten my jacket, and head out.
My driver is already waiting outside when I get to the curb of the Kauffman Enterprises tower.
The skyrise is all glass face, catching the first real light of the day.
Our father believed in structure. Each sibling gets a division and a floor in that building.
Levi’s is casino and hotel acquisitions.
Colston’s construction. Zayne’s real estate.
Wes’s mergers and acquisitions. Archer’s security.
Christian’s legal. And somewhere managing events, charity galas, and Kauffman’s internal PR firm with a smile sharp enough to cut…
Everly. The baby of the family at twenty-seven.
The drive to the arena takes twenty minutes. Seattle traffic is light this early—the city hasn’t fully committed to Monday yet.
I have offices in both buildings, but I’ve been coming to the arena every day for six months. Penelope Matthews, the Hawkeyes GM, runs a tight crew—she doesn’t need me hovering. The board meetings, the real Kauffman business, all of that happens at the tower.
There is no logical reason for me to be at the arena this often, and yet, every morning for the last six months I show up there.
I pull into the garage, take the elevator to the fourth floor, and push into my office. Drop the briefcase. Unlock the computer. Numbers, charts, and projections fill the screen.
I should feel settled now. Back in my environment.
But something tugs at the back of my mind.
Brown eyes. Serious mouth. Nervous, determined energy.
Aria.
I grit my teeth.
She’s an assistant. One of many and technically redundant. We already had an administrative framework before I took over the Hawkeyes; she was a holdover from Carlton’s era. Charming, apparently beloved by everyone on staff, efficient. That’s all fine, but she’s not essential.
Except my brain keeps noting things before I can stop it.
My coffee already sitting on my desk before I walk in, piping hot, as if she anticipates my arrival every morning.
The way meeting packets are laid out in the correct order before I ask.
The way my inbox is pre-filtered into categories that match the way I think—and I never told her my system. She just figured it out.
And the way I lose focus when she walks into a room, and I have no control over it.
I don’t like that.
She’s been running coffee experiments on me for six months.
Coffee with sugar. Coffee with cream. One memorable disaster involving god-awful almond milk that made me do a spit-take in the middle of a video conference with Hong Kong over an acquisition.
I caught Damien trying to hide a laugh from his office camera.
I’ve grimaced at every version she’s handed me.
The ten-sugar incident was either an act of war or a cry for help.
I’m still not sure which. I haven’t told her how I take it because the more she gets right, the harder it will be to rationalize that firing her is the right move.
I open the file for the upcoming board session, forcing my focus onto bullet points and percentages. Marriage requirement. The board wants to hear the timeline, optics, and plans for exposure that boosts the trust’s image.
I can hear Christian’s dry lawyer voice in my head. "You know they’ll be watching for any weakness, right? Any crack. They want to see if you’ll break."
I won’t. I refuse.
If any of us fail, the trust absorbs every cent of our inheritances. Billions. Control of the money shifts back to the board—lawyers, equity managers, and men and woman my father trusted more than his own children. Men and woman who are still loyal to him. Not us.
And above them all is my aunt, Genevieve Holiday, Conrad Kauffman's younger sister, watching from the top like she’s just waiting for one of us to slip.
There’s a soft knock at my office door, and my shoulders tense before my mind catches up to why.
"Come in," I say without looking up.