24. Drake
CHAPTER 24
Drake
She’s still gone in the morning.
It’s a stark realization, one I instantly hate, and as my gaze falls on the cage I’d had her stay in the first few nights, I feel a little queasy.
It’s not that I regret my behavior a hundred percent of the way. I don’t. I’d wanted someone I could torment and torture, but like they say, be careful what you wish for.
Fucking universe.
Fucking Mimosa.
My eyes are heavy, and my limbs are heavier. I don’t want to get out of bed, but I have to go to work. I have to put on a mask and pretend that everything’s all right when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’m not okay.
That’s been the truth for a long time, though, hasn’t it? Instead of facing it, though, I’ve been quashing that knowledge with pills and booze. I slowly drag myself out of bed, feeling like I’m trying to get out from beneath a lead blanket, and stagger to the bathroom.
If I’d thought I looked like shit yesterday, I look even worse today. My stubble needs to be shaved, my hair is a mess, my eyes are bloodshot, and I look like walking death.
There’s no way I can put myself together enough to go to the office, but I don’t have a choice. There are going to be questions about Caroline — and without her, I don’t ha ve someone to move my never-ending appointments and obligations around on my schedule.
Of course, now I don’t even know how many times she’d “forgotten” to reschedule appointments when she’d said she would.
I’d meant to go through my phone more the night before, but a bottle of whiskey later, it had seemed less important than sleeping it all off.
And really, I’m not sure I want to know how badly she’s been fucking me over, or for how long, or why .
Am I really that bad of a person?
Yes .
It’s Mimosa’s voice I hear, not my own, and I close my eyes. I’m a fucking man, and I’m not going to cry like a hurt child even though that’s what I feel like: an injured, miserable child who doesn’t yet understand that the world isn’t fair and that people will fuck you over given the first opportunity.
I force myself into the shower, but I don’t have the energy to do much more than rinse off. The towel is harsh against my skin as I dry myself, and every little thing seems to be making the misery worse.
I know this feeling.
Usually, I’d take a pill — or a handful of them — but I don’t have anything to take.
Well. I have some hard drugs in my safe, but with the board meeting approaching, I can’t afford to have something like that in my system. If I could be sure it would dull the pain enough, maybe, but I’m not stupid. Any high would be short-lived at best, and I’d be back to crashing down again.
I pull my boxer briefs on, then my suit pants, but I realize as I stare at my neatly-pressed dress shirt that I just fucking can’t . I can’t go to work. Things might be bad now, but they’d only get worse if I went in. I check my phone, seeing a dozen messages asking about Caroline, but I ignore all of them.
It’s my fucking company. I don’t have to answer to anyone.
At least, it’s my company for now. The clock is ticking on that, apparently. Soon, I guess I’ll have all the time in the world because my shareholders are going to take everything away from me.
Fuck .
I scrub my hands over my face, over my tired eyes, and I grab a t-shirt from the dresser. I’m too drained to change from the pants into my jeans or even sweats, and what’s the point anyway? It’s not like anyone will see me like this.
Mimosa is gone, and I despise her for having left me like that.
I know on some level that it was the logical thing to do. I bought her and used her and tortured her. Of course she couldn’t have ever cared about me. Of course she ran as soon as she had the chance.
But I’d wanted to believe she could care.
My thoughts start to go in circles, just as they had the night before, and I head to my liquor cabinet. I’m down to vodka, and while I normally hate the taste, it doesn’t matter now.
Nothing does.
I’m down to the last dregs in the bottle, dimly wondering if I’ve pickled my liver yet, when I pick up my phone again.
Yo , I text Chase. Guess who’s getting kicked out of his own company?
I think I manage to spell everything right, but I don’t particularly fucking care. Why bother sounding professional in a text?
My phone starts ringing a few seconds later. The caller ID says it’s Chase.
I laugh. Fuck. He’s going to realize I’m drunk as fuck and not at work like I should be. But why care? He’s one of the shareholders. He might as well know now to sell his stock in the company. Or is that insider trading? Fuck if I know.
I answer the call, trying not to slur my words but not managing very well, “What? You really need clarification?”
“Yes, I need fucking clarification! How the fuck would they kick you out?” Chase demands. I can hear somebody in the background, but after a few seconds, there’s nothing but silence.
I can’t help it. I start laughing again. “Because my fucking secretary has been going behind my back and fucking me over. Wait.” I take another drink from the bottle, finishing it off. “Okay, I fucked up first. I think. Whatever. It’s happening, so sell your shares or whatever.”
“I’m not selling my shares,” Chase snaps. “I have voting shares. If I sell them, I have no say in how the compan y is run.” I hear him beginning to type. “The board meeting is next week, we can?—”
Fucking hell, how far had this whole thing extended to? “The board meeting is tomorrow,” I correct him. “Got moved. Rescheduled. I don’t fucking know. And I guess my fucking secretary knew you would mess things up for her if you attended.”
I set the now-empty bottle on the bedside table. I’ll have to get up to get another, but I don’t have the energy for that.
“Tomorrow… Fuck. Okay, where are you? I’ll call Hunter, we can figure this shit out.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I say. “This little… conspiracy or whatever is too far gone. Just enjoy your new CEO.”
I hang up on him.
He tries to call back, but I turn my phone off. I’m dizzy, and I’m tired, and I… I fucking miss Mimosa.
Amber.
I miss her so fucking much.
I close my eyes. I don’t know why I care. I can’t even point to anything that said she might’ve liked me. She’d been so quick to tell me all the things I’d done wrong, and no matter what I’d done, it had been too little, too late.
I wonder if I should’ve told her about Irene.
I wake up to my pillow getting pulled out from under my head and the blankets getting ripped away.
I groan, trying to reach for them, but I’m too weak to do much of anything about it. I squint into the light, wondering when it had gotten so bright, when I see that Chase and Hunter are standing over me. Hunter is glaring, but he’s always glaring, so I guess that’s nothing new.
“Fuck me,” I mutter. “What the fuck are you two doing here? I’m… busy.”
“You’re about to be,” Chase says. He pulls on my wrist, and he’s surprisingly strong for a guy two inches shorter than me. “Get up. You need to tell us what’s going on so we can deal with it.”
I sit up w ith another groan. “Come on, Chase. Just fuck off already. It’s too late to do anything about this shit. This little conspiracy has been going on for months already.”
“ What conspiracy?” Chase asks. “I helped with the IPO contract. They shouldn’t be able to vote you out unless…” His grip loosens. “Did you do something stupid, Drake?”
“I always do stupid shit,” I tell him. “That’s nothing new.”
Hunter is silently looking around the bedroom. His eyes land on the cage, and he asks, “What did you do with your girl?”
I start laughing. “What did… I let her go. Grew a conscience or whatever. She’s probably down at the police station turning me in at this very moment.”
Chase groans loudly. “Now? You let her go now ?”
“So much for being above it all,” Hunter mutters. He goes into my bathroom, and I have no idea what he’s doing until he comes back out with a white pill bottle in hand. “What was in this?”
“Jesus, what is this? An intervention?” I complain. “I don’t fucking know. But I got cut off from whatever it was. Maybe he’s the snitch. Maybe that’s the final straw they needed. They’ve never fucking liked me. You know that. They’ve been just looking for an excuse to fire me from my own fucking company.” I shake my head and immediately wish I hadn’t. “I don’t know what they have on me, all right?”
Chase sits down at the edge of the bed and shakes his head. “Okay. So, you’re either high, drunk, in withdrawal, or all three at once. Some of the board members are conspiring to get rid of you—and they know well enough to keep me and Hunter out of the meeting entirely. You let your girlfriend leave you so you’d be in an even worse emotional state, and?—”
“She’s not my fucking girlfriend!” I shout, the wave of rage and nausea almost too much to stand. “She fucking hates me, man. She’s just a cold little bitch who played me. I didn’t need her around to?—”
To see me fall apart.
To see me lose everything.
Hunter rolls his eyes. “You were concerned enough to call me in when her feet got infected.”
I scowl at him, but as usual, he doesn’t look remotely perturbed.
“And May said she felt sorry for her because she clearly didn’t know yet what an asshole you were,” Chase adds. His lips twitch. “She probably knew, but she didn’t want to tell May because of some sense of loyalty.”
“Loyalty?” I sputter. “To who? The Pope? Because it sure as fuck wasn’t to me.”
“So you think she was in on it?” Hunter asks coldly. “Because if yes, we can find her and make her , at least, regret everything.”
The idea of Mimosa at Hunter’s questionable mercy makes another wave of nausea swell. “No. Don’t fucking touch her. Mimi hasn’t done anything. It was Caroline. She’s been fucking with my appointments. Encouraged me to go on vacation, and I didn’t even…” I wish there was something to punch that wasn’t Chase or Hunter. “I should’ve seen this coming.”
“Caroline?” Hunter asks.
“His executive assistant.” Chase shakes his head. “She couldn’t have orchestrated it all, Drake. It’ll have been some of the board members. If they have evidence of misconduct, they can present that and call for a vote to remove you. They might even have a replacement in mind already. That’d expedite things.”
“If he shows up like that, it’ll be plenty of evidence,” Hunter points out. “Does your Pi?a Colada have an address, or a phone number?” He picks up my phone from the nightstand, powering it on.
I blink at him, baffled. “What are you talking about?”
“Mimosa,” Chase says, sounding exasperated now.
I sit up straighter. “You won’t fucking go near her,” I snap.
Why am I being so protective of her? She wouldn’t do the same for me.
Hunter gives me one of his icy looks. “I see how ‘done’ with her you are. That’s also why you have a fucking app on your phone tracking her location and all her purchases. She apparently bought groceries for one hundred and sixteen dollars today.”
“I haven’t deleted it yet,” I mumble. “Give that to me. How’d you even get into it?” I reach for my phone, but Hunter keeps it away from me.
“You haven’t changed the passcode in fifteen years,” Hunter answers. “An d I remember how often I had to use your phone to call you a cab at university.”
Some tech whiz I am.
I should know better than to keep the same passcode for everything, but to be fair, I got drunk too many times to remember new ones and I’d had to go back to the old one.
“Caroline tried to feed me some bullshit about not having a choice,” I say instead of trying to defend myself and only making it worse. “So yeah, there were others involved. And, um…” I wrack my brain, trying to remember who the fuckwad in the bathroom had mentioned. “George. Fucking George. Probably Oliver, too. Maybe Patrick.”
“I thought Patrick was your friend,” Chase says.
I snort. “Yeah. Until I told him he couldn’t fuck Mimi. Then he decided to be a bitter little bitch and cut me off from everything and probably join this fucking conspiracy because he can’t get laid on his own.”
“I never liked Patrick.” Chase glances at Hunter. “What are you thinking?”
Hunter shakes his head. “Drake needs to shape up. We go to the board meeting, but I don’t like our chances if George Browning got involved. He’s friends with at least half the board and could easily sway another chunk of them. The ones he can’t sway are…” Hunter points between himself and Chase. “I could call up my father, but the only way he’d get involved is if we gave him an even larger share, potentially even a position at the company.”
Hunter’s father is a professional Senior Executive—which means he’s always jumping from business to business, managing them for a year or two before going off to another one, miraculously before the business he’d been managing plummets in value. I’d once floated the idea of his father doing it on purpose, but Hunter countered that his father was just too stupid to manage a business successfully, but smart enough to see when to flee.
“I already told you, I’m losing the fucking company anyway. Why are you being so stubborn?” I ask them. My head is throbbing, and I just want them to fuck off instead of trying to make me think .
Chase pats my thigh. “Turns out, we’re your fucking friends, even if you decided to wallow in a pity party after I hooked up with May.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I mutter.
“Leave him,” Hunter says coldly. Hah, like he ever shows any emotion anyway. “He doesn’t want our help, so it’s not our problem.”
Chase’s brows furrow. “Uh, Hunter… We agreed…”
I should feel triumphant, but all I feel is this profound, deep rejection. “Yeah, Chase. Just leave because I’m a lost cause anyway.”
“Before we go, do you want us to let Margarita in?” Hunter asks.
“What?” I ask, my aching head not processing. “Mimosa’s not here. The fuck are you talking about?”
He holds up my phone, which is showing me the feed from the elevator security camera. Mimosa is on her way up.
She came back.