Chapter 65
T he rest of that day, leading up to after dinner, felt like an exercise in what my retirement might someday look like.
With all of my clients caught up, no further clients to recruit at the moment, and a healthy bank account, I simply spent the day with Layla on the couch, catching up on Netflix shows, the occasional news bulletin, and sports scores.
We still weren’t doing anything beyond a casual kiss here and there, but this actually felt better in some ways than the erotic flamethrower that was our first series of hook ups.
This felt like a more gradual, slower burn, the kind of thing that would help both of us in the long run.
If we took our time and waited for things to gradually come into being, I had a feeling it would be longer lasting than the last time.
We wound up getting pizza delivered as well, and while it wasn’t obviously the healthiest choice, as a nice “stay in and enjoy a slow evening” kind of meal, it worked perfectly.
I got mushrooms and sausage; she got a vegetarian’s pizza, even though she wasn’t vegetarian herself.
I teased her gently about spoiling herself more fully, and she shot back with a joke about how much I loved sausage.
It all seemed perfect, because for that particular moment, it was perfect. It wouldn’t be perfect in a week’s time or a week ago, or perhaps even tomorrow, but for this particular night, I’m not sure we could have done any better than what we had done tonight.
And it was a good thing, too, because at around 7:30 p.m., retribution for what I had done with Virtual Realty came running back to me.
At that time, I was slumped down, more lying on the couch than actually sitting down.
Layla had gone into the shower, leaving me alone for the previous five minutes.
I had mindlessly turned on some random cop drama show from the 2000s whose name I had already forgotten, mostly as a way to just enjoy the spoils of my day.
And then my phone rang, as if trying to spoil my day.
I looked down at it and groaned. “Edwin Hunt.” But there was no reason to ignore the call, not when the whole point of my strategy was to ultimately take down Edwin Hunt for the betterment of all society.
I just had to make sure that whatever I said didn’t give anything of value to that old cocksucker.
“Hello,” I said, trying to feign politeness in case Edwin did the same.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to in the slightest.
“You fucking cockroach piece of shit asshole,” he began, leaving me to almost laugh at the absurdity of what had just happened.
“You’re a goddamn little shithead, you know that, Chance?
You would have thought that everything that happened yesterday morning would have taught you a goddamn lesson, but it seems like you can’t ever learn shit!
I know what little stunt you pulled with Virtual Realty. You think you’re fucking smart?”
Damn! He’s real pissed!
Given that Edwin wasn’t exactly thinking clearly, I decided to troll him a little bit, have some fun at the old man’s expense.
“I’m not sure what you are talking about, Mr. Hunt,” I said, my voice oozing with so much sarcasm I would have suffocated in it if it were a real liquid. “Why, I’m just fulfilling my obligations and duties to Andrew Patel as—”
“Cut the goddamn bullshit, Chance, you and I both know full well what you did!” he roared.
This time, I actually had to move my phone away from my ear.
“You think your little maneuver in trying to get greater control will allow you to override me? You don’t even know what’s coming your way, boy.
You think you’re going to win this battle?
You haven’t even seen a third of the shit I will pull out on you, child. ”
“Battle?” I said, again pretending to be utterly confused and again delighting in the agony that I must have been bringing Edwin. “There’s no battle here. I just want to see Andrew do well and if does well, we all do well. Surely, as a lifelong investor, that’s something that you would—”
“I’m not going to stop until you are goddamn buried and ruined,” Edwin sneered. “You’ll have to move to goddamn Zimbabwe just to get a job digging ditches. You think you can test me? You think you can push me? What I’ve done to you is nothing compared to what I can do.”
Did he… did he just admit that he’s done things to me before? I feel like that’s something I can’t not notice…
“What kinds of things have you done to me, Mr. Hunt?” I said. “As far as I can tell, you’ve just been an ignorant father—”
“You shut your goddamn bratty mouth!” Edwin screamed.
I wish he had taken the time to shut up so I could flesh out a particular thought going through my mind at that moment—for as successful a businessman as Edwin Hunt was… how successful would he be if he actually had a temper worth a shit?
“I’m so goddamn sick of your attitude! I should never have taken you into the family. I see what you’re trying to do right now, Chance, and I will see to it that it all backfires on you. You got that?”
I could sense our little fireside chat had to end soon. Edwin wouldn’t go much further before he would just simply hang up, either because he pressed End or because he had thrown the phone against the wall in frustration. Admittedly, I wanted to get him to do the latter.
“Let me give you some tips, Chance. Go the fuck away. Move to some shit city like Detroit or something. Don’t ever come back to us. And then, only then, will you ever know peace.”
That’s when I saw the chance to strike so hard at Edwin that I knew it would be worth whatever consequences emerged.
“Only if I can give you some tips back on how to save your marriage—oh, wait, damn, that’s right, you failed that.”
“You fucker!”
I wish words could describe how loudly Edwin shouted at me in those moments.
Primal rage didn’t describe the emotions Edwin was showing then, because primal rage suggested something other people had experienced.
I’m pretty sure the intensity and the burning hatred fueling Edwin’s words went well beyond what any sane, normal person had ever experienced before.
He laced every one of his words with fire, as if trying to char my entire body.
It was too bad that to me, they just had the effect of amusingly entertaining.
Yeah, there was some threat behind them, but what more could Edwin do besides what he had done?
If he was actually going to hurt me, that would come back—too many people were suspicious of what happened.
“You are a dead fucking boy! Dead! Goddamn fucking shitty ass dead! I fucking hate your guts, Chance, and I will make sure that you are buried and gone forever!”
I heard a loud thud on the other end of the line before my phone beeped to say the call had died.
I knew that Edwin had done what I had hoped would happened—either slammed the phone on the table or against the wall.
I just had to hope that Morgan had witnessed this all so that if we ever made amends, he could tell me the story of how his father lost his absolute mind on a phone call with me.
I laughed to myself as I heard Layla’s shower ending.
How ridiculous was that phone call? Here was a billionaire, a man with more money than some nations in the globe, flipping out over the actions of some young guy in his early 20’s!
And the best part was, even if Virtual Realty became a unicorn, even if it sold for eleven figures or went public at that time…
it wasn’t like Edwin’s net worth would increase by that much percentage wise.
It just wasn’t going to be anything more than a number, a bragging point for a sad man that had to rely on bragging points without actual love in his life.
But as Layla went through the hallway and to her room, shooting me a smile along the way, I realized that my thoughts about Edwin’s murder threat probably shouldn’t have been so lighthearted.
Granted, for as bad as Edwin could be, I didn’t think murder would actually happen.
But just the fact that, in a more detached and sober state, I considered it even a marginal possibility told me that I couldn’t be fucking around with this anymore.
My plans to put him on his heels and make him surrender Hunt Industries had to come to the forefront now. I couldn’t be fucking around any longer. I had to go to war.
The divorce helped. But I needed more bad press. More than a few men had survived an ugly, public divorce and kept control of their business. But not many men survived murder threats, survived deceitful business practices, or survived all of those coming together.
Edwin was a powerful, influential man, but if he had the number of enemies that Mom had suggested and that I suspected, then all it would take was a little push.
I would be the one to knock him off of his perch, and then the gravity of everyone else seeing an opportunity would pull him down the rest of the way.
Layla then came out, dressed in a t-shirt and underwear, sitting by me and patting my leg.
“You look… giddy,” she said, suspicious because that was my apparent mood. “What did you do?”
“Nothing yet,” I said, sitting up. I grabbed my phone, opened the call details, and showed it to Layla.
“Jesus,” she said. “I guess he decided you were worth a phone call, huh?”
“I’m not sure he thinks I’m worth anything,” I said with a chortle. “To him, he’d probably rather see me begging for pickles on the street as a homeless bum than be someone he has to talk to for more than a few minutes. Nah, he was just yelling at me for what I did with one of our investments.”
“Which was?”
I shrugged.
“Made sure I kept control and he didn’t.”