Chapter 39
I walked home under a bright, sunny sky with relatively little honking in New York City.
It almost felt like the city had felt it fit to declare today a sort of holiday for what we had accomplished—securing Virtual Realty as our first major investment, beating out the bastard of an old man Edwin Hunt.
Compared to the last major night out, this was a rather sharp contrast to blacking out with a random Columbia co-ed.
I’d left Claire McLendon, the founder of our first company we’d invested in, Rising Sun, satisfied and unable to move in the best way possible in bed.
I’d barely found the strength in my own legs, but I had all the strength in the world in my head.
I felt not just on top of the world, but soaring above it.
Which made it all the more surprising, if not necessarily disconcerting, that I found my brother, Morgan, sitting on my couch as if I had left him there—which I most certainly had not.
“You aren’t at your place?” I said. “And how did you get a key to my place?”
“You gave it to me the night you got shitfaced hammered after the disaster with Burnson Investments,” he said. “You said that for what I did for you, I could have a key anytime I needed help from you. And, well…”
I already knew where this was going. I didn’t need it spelled out for me, because the actions of all of the Hunts had spelled out for me what had happened already.
“What the hell did Edwin Hunt do to you?”
Morgan just laughed.
“He was paying for my place,” he said. “Was. Then he got the leasing officer to kick me out and warned that if I tried to keep the place, he would destroy me with legal fees until I cried for mercy. I figured I could at least come here.”
“Of course,” I said, but I was just feeling sick rage at Edwin Hunt. His only son! And he treated him like a piece of garbage to dispose of. “You and I are going to operate MCH out of this apartment.”
“Good,” he said, though he spoke with what sounded like false confidence and bravado. “Between Rising Sun and Virtual Realty, we have quite the portfolio to start.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, even though I knew only half of that was true.
Morgan seemed to pick up on my hesitation, because he looked at me askance. My attention, though, was taken up by something else.
Normally, I didn’t give a shit about Facebook other than to check it maybe once every blue moon or so. But today, a notification popped up containing a name I hadn’t seen in ages, a name that elicited old memories I thought I had left behind.
“Chance?”
I heard Morgan, but I ignored him. I opened up the friend request to see who it was, thinking that maybe it was a coincidence. Their name was common enough.
But, no, it was definitely them.
“Chance? What’s going on? What haven’t you told me?”
Sarah Hill.
Staring at the grown woman on the screen and the name that had permanently etched itself in my mind ten years ago felt like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Sarah Hill… the name might as well have been what Eve was to Adam.
Sarah Hill had started me entirely on the journey that I was now on, and I didn’t just mean with women. She was the one who made me ashamed to be a Hunt. She was the one who made me feel like I was worthless for being adopted—not because of her, interestingly enough, but because of her rich father.
It seemed like she had never lost her taste for the classy lifestyle, either.
She was impeccably dressed in all of the photos, as if every shot required her to look like a model.
Her photos had her everywhere from a boat to a skyscraper in Shanghai to swimming off the coast of New Zealand where she had spent the last several years of her life.
But looking at the woman before me… I was stunned.
She was beyond hot. She was beyond beautiful.
Oh, she was sexy, all right. She had curves that made me feel like twelve years old all over again, but she was never dressed in such a way that anyone could accuse her of being a slut or just a tad too whorish.
She looked every bit the part of perfect woman.
Even as I heard Morgan speaking to me, I couldn’t pull myself away from the woman on my phone. This was Sarah Hill? She was great before, but now…
It almost felt too good to be true.
But if there was anyone who was too good for reality, yet lived in it anyways, it was Sarah Hill.
Sure, maybe the emotions of my youth were coloring who she really was.
Maybe the rose-petal imagery I had of her from my barely pubescent days remained, and it wasn’t so easy to shake off.
Maybe I was seeing her in such a glorious light because I was on such a high from my business and romantic revitalizations.
But anyone who saw what I saw would have to know that this was a real person who was unrealistically beautiful.
And best of all… it slowly came to me what this meant.
Sarah had left me because of what it meant to her father for her to be with someone who wasn’t a purebred billionaire.
Sarah had left me not of her own volition, but because of the control of her father.
Sarah had even said as much that when she was out of her father’s grasp, she would come to me and we would be together.
Now, suddenly, that dream was feeling an awful lot like reality.
This was…
I couldn’t even put it into words. What it felt like to wait for a full blown decade to get my chance with the dream girl, having all but given up on the dream many years ago… only now it was coming back.
Well, slow down. She just Facebook friend requested you. Seriously, you think because someone sends you a friend request it means you’ve gotten in her pants? Slow your roll, Chance.
Still, for once, I didn’t want to slow my roll. For all that had gone right in the past couple of weeks? It would be counterproductive to slow my roll. Let an immovable object stop my unstoppable roll. Then I would wake up and reassess.
Until then, though?
I happily clicked Accept, thinking of what this would mean for anyone who remembered Sarah Hill. OK, let’s be honest, no one gave a shit about who friended who on Facebook except for desperate people with their desperate target. But right now, all thoughts were fair game.
Only when I put my phone down—and only because I wanted to snap back to reality and save some of the fantasy for later—did I slowly come back to the real world.
Claire and I were still very casual, even if things got complicated from a business perspective.
Layla Taylor, the girl who had screwed me over…
only to turn out to be controlled by forces she couldn’t escape, was someone I had sympathy for, if not some distance.
Sarah Hill was nothing more than a digital bit of information on Facebook.
Right now, realistically, I had one girl I was having sex with regularly. I had another I could be if I decided to go back. And I had a third I fantasized about.
Still, compared to where I stood just a little over a month ago, not too bad.
“What do you mean?”
I snapped out of my thoughts as I turned to Morgan, who had his phone pressed to his ear.
His hair looked disheveled and his shirt wrinkled on him.
For someone who had always seemed like the true embodiment of a Hunt, for someone who got girls more than I—despite me having more charm—he sure looked like he was at the bottom of a pit right now.
And with good reason. His father had fired him.
His father had likely threatened to disown him, if not write him out of the will entirely.
He had lost his place because his father, who had paid for his Manhattan apartment, had kicked him out.
And he probably didn’t have any women he was seeing right now, largely because, well, of everything I had just listed.
But even for all of that, he looked on the verge of collapse. I motioned for him to put the phone on speaker, and he did so, placing it on the coffee table.
“—how much easier I can make it for you, boy.”
The all-too-familiar voice of Edwin Hunt came from the phone. I hated that voice so much. God, of all the people whom I wished I could banish to the ends of the Earth, it was hard to think of someone more worthy of that “honor” than Edwin Hunt.
The patriarch of the Hunt clan, Edwin cared for money and about nothing else.
He treated his wife as an almost literal trophy, he treated his son as an extension of himself, a businessman who only existed to make more money, and he treated me…
well, for the first roughly 21 years of my life, he didn’t treat me at all.
I was just a non-existent entity in the house, given as much attention by him as a dog that he never really wanted to take home from the pound.
But over the past three months, he had taken a much more manipulative and cruel approach to me.
He would offer me jobs at Hunt Industries, but I knew he only did so for the sake of controlling me or making money off of my efforts.
When I refused, he threatened to ruin me.
And now that I had basically stolen his son from him—at least in his eyes—he would do nothing more than to see me beyond ruined.
I would have taken a bet that Edwin Hunt was trying to strike a deal with the literary publishers in New York to make sure the name Chance Hunt was never published.
“There is only one way that you have any sort of future as a Hunt,” Edwin said. “I understand that you may have been in an irrational state the past few weeks. It was easy to get caught up in that fucking boy’s idea of doing it on your own.”
Boy.
I hated that word. I hated it so much I was pretty sure I would never call my future kids boy. I would just use the word son.
It connoted everything negative I had assumed Edwin Hunt had ever ascribed to us. It told me he saw me as a worthless piece of shit barely worth acknowledging. It told me he saw me as inferior, as nothing more than a body to do some busy work.
There were two fucking problems with that. One, I was twenty two, not twelve. The fact that I was self-aware enough to know I wasn’t mature meant I was light years ahead of anyone my age or even within five years of me. If I was a boy, then so was everyone else under the age of thirty-five.
Two, this “boy” had just beaten him at his own game and gotten an investment deal with a company that would be worth billions someday. What did that make Edwin Hunt if he had gotten beat by two boys?
“But that is nonsense and you know it, Morgan. You will never amount to anything without me. I have given you everything you’ve ever had in your life, and without me, you die. You know it. Don’t even act like it could be any other way.”
Morgan looked visibly shaken. I wanted to reach through and punch Edwin Hunt in his cocky face. Didn’t he know how easily either of us could kick his ass?
“I have grown tired of playing softball with you, boy. I gave you everything. I went nice when Melanie said so. I let her influence me too much. There will be no more bullshit or playing nice with you, boy. If you ever want to have a future, here’s what’s going to happen.”
My hands curled up. I don’t know how Morgan had the self-control he did. Probably because his father had succeeded in breaking him.
“One, you are going to disown that… Chance character forever,” he said.
I actually wasn’t that mad at what was said, at least not any madder than I already was.
It’s not like I had expected Edwin to like me.
“You will never talk to him again or say his name ever again. Second, you will sell everything you own in that tiny, pathetic company you have. I’ll let you keep the money because of how little it means to me, but you will sell it to me and give me the shares. Third…”
“Dad!”
A halting silence filled the air. All three of us waited for someone to crack it. In the end, it was Morgan who did so.
“I hear you. But I’m not quitting. I’m sticking with Chance.
He’s been there for me whenever I need help beyond money.
You just give me money and think anything will go away, no matter what the issue.
I don’t care about that anymore. I’ll make enough money.
You can keep your billions. It won’t mean anything compared to the support Chance gives. ”
Oh, how I wish we had set up that call as a video chat. I wanted to see the veins bulging from Edwin Hunt, the snorts that resembled that of a bull, the inevitable roar that was meant to display anger but instead just looked incredibly goofy and ridiculous.
“You… fucking… idiot!”
I heard a few things fly across the office. I honestly had to work my damndest to stifle my laughter, because the whole thing was just fucking hysterical. What kind of a leader lost their temper like that?
“I thought you would have gotten the picture by now, Morgan,” Edwin said.
“But it seems you never will. Fine. You want to know what I do to my enemies, boy? You want to know what it looks like when I am unafraid to break someone? You’re about to get your wish.
You are about to enter a world of hell that you will never escape.
Your name will be ruined forever. You will never be able to get a job sweeping floors at McDonald’s, let alone what you do now.
You will come begging for mercy, but you will find I have no mercy, because that is the only way you can succeed in business.
I had hoped you would learn from what I told you, but now I see you will have to learn from observing it happen to you.
Don’t come begging for forgiveness, Morgan. You will never have it from me!”
With one final scream on the other side, the line disconnected. Finally, free from having to stay quiet, I burst out laughing.
But my laughter died very quickly when I saw Morgan’s face.
“What?” I said.
“You never got to see what happened to the business associates that crossed my father,” Morgan said. The tone with which he spoke suggested only one thing—nothing Edwin had just said was an exaggeration. “We’re about to be in serious trouble.”
He looked at me very seriously, as focused and together as I had seen him in the days since we started Morgan & Chance Holdings.
“Promise me one thing,” he said. “You’ll believe me no matter what happens.”
When I heard that, it reminded me very eerily of something Layla had made me promise.
“Promise me you’ll love me no matter what happens.”
I gulped. The seriousness of the situation could not be overstated. I had no idea what would come, but I already actually felt nervous.
But there was one thing I knew. Morgan had never fucked me over before. Even when we joked and taunted each other, he knew when to stop. If there was anyone in this world I could trust…
It was Morgan Hunt.
“I promise.”