Chapter 17
VAUGHN
When I’m alone, I think about women.
Not women in general. The women in my life. Or more accurately: the absence of women in my life. Because if I’m honest, the list is short. Appallingly short for a man of forty-six.
Of course, there were women I had my fun with.
I’m no monk, and my body has needs that can’t be satisfied with algorithms and crypto trading.
But they were always encounters, never relationships.
Hotel rooms, never apartments. (Fake) first names, never last names.
Women whose faces I forgot before the elevator reached the ground floor.
Not because they were interchangeable—that sounds colder than I mean it—but because I never allowed them to become more than a night.
A night is controllable. A night has a beginning and an end. You get dressed, you say something polite, you leave. No toothbrush in the bathroom, no breakfast for two, no scent on the pillow to remind you the next morning that you weren't alone.
I’ve lived my whole life this way. Alone.
Not lonely—that’s an important distinction, or at least that’s what I’ve told myself for thirty years.
Alone is a choice. Lonely is a failure. I chose to be alone because it’s safer, because it offers no target, and because after my parents died, I decided that closeness is a luxury I cannot afford.
And now a woman lies in the room at the end of the hall, breathing steadily, and I hear it through the thin wall, and it’s the most calming sound I’ve heard in thirty years.
This is wrong. This is not the plan. The plan is for Riley to be leverage, a name on a marriage certificate, a tool in my war against her father.
The plan does not involve me getting used to her.
But I am. To her footsteps in the hall, to the sound of the pipes when she showers, to the way she furrows her brow and moves her lips while reading.
To her comments about my cooking—which are technically insults, but delivered with an inflection that reveals she enjoys the food and that it makes her angry to enjoy it.
I am living with a woman. For the first time in my life. Not out of love—out of revenge. And it’s unfamiliar in a way that unnerves me more than anything Richard Blackstone has ever done to me.
Because I can fight Blackstone. I have strategies against an enemy.
Against a woman who reaches for my hand in her sleep, I have nothing.
I stand up and go into the living room. Sleep won't come, so I might as well work. I retrieve the satellite router from its hiding place and connect the laptop.
Three messages are waiting in the messenger.
The first is from Griffin. An update on the non-disclosure agreement, legal details I’ll read through tomorrow.
Griffin works at three in the morning, just like I do.
The difference is that Griffin has a wife and child at home—Selena, whom he met in a sex club in New York, which is a story you wouldn't believe if you didn't know Griffin.
The coldest, most calculating man in the Chester Street Society—the man who makes billionaires cry in court—fell for a young law student from Iowa who accidentally stumbled into his club.
Now they’re married, truly married, not Vegas-married, and they have a child.
Griffin sometimes sends me photos where he looks like someone who was gifted a parallel universe where he’s allowed to be happy.
The second message is from Beckett. Beckett Myers, surgeon, researcher, the man with the god complex and the hands of a pianist. Two years ago, he married a ballet dancer—Scarlett, a woman so direct and fearless that even Beckett folds before her.
They have a child together, and Beckett—the man who swore never to become a father—occasionally sends me messages complaining about diapers as if he’s written a scientific paper on their inefficiency.
His last paper was on a revolutionary cancer drug.
His last photo shows him with baby spit-up on his designer shirt.
The irony is impossible to miss. Beckett, Griffin, Marcel—all three have started families. All three swore they never would. All three failed because of a woman who was stronger than a vow.
Marcel Dubois, the Frenchman who met a vegan architecture student on a plane and never let her go.
Juliet, the woman who demolished his cynical facade with nothing but kindness and banana bread.
They have a daughter, and Marcel—Marcel, who swore after his divorce never to marry again—hosted a wedding nine months ago so extravagant it probably exceeded the GDP of a small country.
And then there’s Cayden. Cayden Miller, the only one of the Quattro who is still alone. Officially, at least. Cayden reached out to me last week, not through the usual Chester Street channel, but directly, via an encrypted line we’ve used since college.
He has a job for me. It’s about an investor named Elias Hayes, who wants to partner on Cayden’s stadium project in Montreal and whose corporate structure is suspiciously opaque. Cayden doesn't trust the man and wants me to dig. That’s what I do best.
I’ve already started. Between the cooking and the coffee and watching Riley, I’ve sat at the laptop in the evenings sifting through datasets.
Hayes’s investment firms, his offshore accounts, his connections to a company called Icarus Holdings.
It’s a welcome distraction from my own situation—a puzzle I can solve while the puzzle in my own head stubbornly refuses to make sense.
Cayden hinted between the lines that he knows a journalist working on the story. He didn't mention her name, but his voice changed when he spoke about her.
I recognize the symptom. I’m observing it in myself right now.
The third message in the messenger is from Valentino: All quiet. Next delivery as soon as you give the signal. Do you need anything specific?
I type back: Something to play with.
Valentino replies instantly: You’re not serious.
I think about it. Riley devoured the thriller, read the travel guide, and even flipped through the cookbook. She needs something to occupy her mind, something to challenge her. And I could use a distraction myself.
A deck of cards will do, I type.
Valentino’s answer comes after a pause longer than usual:
You’re getting a deck of cards for your hostage?
She’s not my hostage.
What is she then?
I stare at the question, and I have no answer for it.
My fingers hover over the keyboard. I type several responses and delete them all.
Complicated, I finally write.
It seems to be becoming my standard answer whenever Riley is involved.
I delete the messages, disconnect the router, and stow it all away. Then I sit on the sofa and stare at the wall.
Beckett has Scarlett. Griffin has Selena. Marcel has Juliet. Cayden has a journalist whose name he won't say. And I have a woman sleeping in a locked room whom I kidnapped to blackmail her father.
The Chester Street Society, once a brotherhood of men who swore that women and families stood in the way of their ambitions, has transformed over the last few years into a goddamn family business.
Babies, weddings, homes. Marcel even bought a minivan.
A minivan. The man who once owned a Bugatti now drives a vehicle with a car seat and crumbs on the back seat.
And me? I’m sitting in a house in the desert getting a deck of cards for a woman who hates me.