Chapter 1
CASSIUS
Agolden hue from the setting sun cast over Las Vegas Boulevard.
As I stood at the glass windows of the penthouse of Ruby, I watched as the ants of the town scattered about.
Tourists poured their money into my slot machines.
Men drank up my liquor, hoping like the idiots they were to get women only a man like myself got.
Women put on their tightest, most revealing outfits; the more innocent of the bunch thought they’d have the time of their lives.
The more experienced ones went over which men they’d go after, whose tables they could raid at the nightclubs and exhibits.
I sipped on a glass of bourbon as I took it all in, wondering how I’d spend tonight.
Our marquee art exhibit, Allure, was set to have its grand opening in about two hours.
We already had an A-list cast of women set to drag men and their dollar bills into our coffers.
We’d hired a top jazz musician to perform, and we were in negotiations to get her to establish a residency here.
But that didn’t answer who I’d fuck tonight.
I had options, but honestly, those options bored me.
Call me crazy—my brothers certainly did—but I could have used a woman who put up a little bit of a fight, who didn’t just spread her legs and call me king just because my bank account had ten digits in it.
Contrary to popular belief, such a woman was not likely to be an actress or a celebrity; if any, those types were the fucking craziest of all.
Doing press tours for clout, posting to social media for likes and followers…
funny, I didn’t recall being able to build the Ruby with Instagram likes or clicks on TMZ articles.
The opposite, really. The fewer people knew of my activities beyond what I allowed newspapers to publish, the better. I had an image I had carefully cultivated, but what Hollywood types failed to get was you didn’t want the maximum media coverage, but the absolute minimum to establish a reputation.
Me? I was the King of Hearts. Reporters, bloggers, influencers all called me that because I was the most handsome billionaire. Why go for a fat, older billionaire one heart attack away from croaking when you could get someone like me?
I didn’t disagree with the notion.
But I liked King of Hearts for its twisted irony. I grabbed hearts. I swept them into my world.
And I made it very clear that if they crossed me, I would crush them.
And they would certainly never, ever have mine.
Except…
There had been one.
I didn’t dare think of her name, lest all the complexities of her existence spring to mind. But I could practically feel her presence, even now, over two decades later.
“You are mine. No one else can have you.”
“I don’t want to belong to anyone else, Cassius.”
“Then say it.”
“I’m yours.”
“Say it again.”
“I’m yours.”
And then, just months later, when you got my brother in a car…
“Cassius!”
I barely turned my head. My older brother, Dante, had decided now was a good time to arrive. For the direction my thoughts were headed in, it probably was a damn good time.
He was just as savvy a businessman as I was, but he was rougher around the edges. When our family needed someone to connect with, shall we say, less marketable gentlemen, we sent Dante. In a suit and tie, he looked like me, albeit with a dash more gray around his beard and a thicker build.
But take the suit and tie off, and the tattoos and scars from stories not even I knew of made it very clear what kind of man he could be.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he said, annoyed. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you all evening. You ever think to check your phone?”
“You know better, Dante,” I said. “No one is important enough for me to carry my phone, waiting for a text or call from.”
Not currently, anyway. Even two decades ago, I wouldn’t have said anyone was important enough. But looking back, it was almost embarrassing. I may have said no one was important enough, and yet…
“Yes, because to hear your phone, you need to be physically touching it,” Dante said with an eye roll. “For fuck’s sake, Cassius. We’re your brothers. Act like a dick to the world, it’s good to be feared. But don’t forget who the fuck we are.”
I snorted. I never could. How the fuck could I? The instant that first article came out calling me King of Hearts, I knew I could never trust anyone new in my life at that point. Only the people who came before we went from middle-class rough riders in New York to casino moguls in Las Vegas.
It was a shame, really. Contrary to popular belief, I could be perfectly pleasant to those I liked.
So long as they didn’t cross me. So long as they didn’t destroy part of my world.
Like…
“What do you want, Dante?”
“Well, for starters, the mayor has come back to us,” Dante replied. “He’s willing to give us tax breaks for the next five years if we agree to build another property off-Strip. Said something about it building jobs.”
“Jobs, right,” I said, bemused by the silly talking points. “Did you push for eight? Ten years?”
“Well, you didn’t let me finish. He started at three. I made it very clear if we didn’t do six, there was no conversation to be had.”
“And you settled,” I said darkly. “Vale brothers don’t fucking settle, Dante. You especially know that.”
Dante knew this. So did Lucius. So did Adrian. So had…
“Then you go talk to the mayor yourself,” Dante said before a pause. Too long of a pause. “Or, are you up here, throwing a pity party to remember—”
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
Dante stopped where he was. He knew better than to bring up that topic. Not tonight. Not on a night when we should be celebrating.
Well, celebrating as much as broken men could celebrate.
“The other thing I came here to tell you,” Dante said after several tense seconds, “is that we got the bribes to the cops taken care of. Allure is all set to go, and we won’t have to worry about police presence weighing down the event.”
“So everything can proceed as planned,” I said. “Lovely. You do good work occasionally, Dante.”
Dante snorted. He knew I was not one to give high praise easily; “occasionally” might as well have been like a normal person giving a standing ovation. But there was a reason I was up here on the seventieth story of Ruby. And it wasn’t because I patted everyone’s back and said good job.
But there was something Dante hadn’t mentioned yet.
“What about the Black Reapers?” I asked. “Or at least Prince and Crush.”
Dante shook his head.
“They’re tough nuts to crack, Cassius,” Dante said. “You can’t threaten them. They don’t give a shit about money, not in the way most people do. They’re content to carry on their lives as is with the women they have.”
I bit my lip and squeezed my arms against my chest. It was a bad habit when I faced something I couldn’t easily bend to my will. Fortunately, that wasn’t very often, but the issue of the Black Reapers was the exception.
Yes, they had never taken over the city in the last four years as I had wondered they might.
They had never vandalized Ruby as we built it, they never caused issues with our employees—minus a couple bar fights that led to them being ex-employees; I didn’t tolerate anything that fucked our image up—and even as the Vale family became more notorious around town, they never made any noise. Not directly, not intermediaries.
But I didn’t do well with having potential threats out of my reach.
And while the Black Reapers were not a threat today, there was no reason to think that one of their kids or one of the younger Reapers would never think otherwise.
And God forbid if they ever got in the way of my pursuit of someone…
“Keep trying,” I said. This wasn’t like the mayor or even the governor, who you could squeeze by the balls with a few well-placed articles or cash offers. This would require time, patience, and a careful touch—skills I hadn’t exactly needed to exercise in some time.
A knock came at the door.
“Enter,” I barked.
A second later, my assistant, Ellie, walked in with a pile of papers.
Ellie was an older woman in her fifties, married to some real estate developer out in Summerlin.
She was exactly what I needed to keep my operations professional and efficient—effective, damn good at her job, and not at all a temptation to do something stupid.
She knew Cassius the billionaire businessman perfectly well and Cassius the man not at all, exactly the way I wanted it to be.
“A feature just published in the Las Vegas Sun,” she said. “Looks like someone wrote a column detailing all the ways you’re the King of Hearts. They went quite heavy on the moniker, it seems.”
“Anything we need to sue them into silence for?” I asked. It didn’t always work, but it was remarkable how many people stood down at a mere threat. I had my limits, of course; I was ruthless, not a psychopath. But there was nothing illegal about suing for what I believed to be slander.
“They say you’re the King of Hearts because you control the hearts of Vegas like a corrupt king,” Ellie said.
It was tough to tell whether she was quoting the article or summarizing it.
“It says something about how the mayor shouldn’t give in to your demands…
something about how the world’s smallest big city can’t stop gossiping about your love life…
something about making sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of the King’s Men… and so on and so forth.”
“You know me well, Ellie,” I groused. “Do we need to sue them, yes or no?”
Ellie shook her head.
“There’s nothing in here suggesting you’ve harmed anyone or done anything worthy of a crime. Just that you’re tough and worth paying attention to. I wouldn’t call it glowing, but I also wouldn’t say it’ll harm you.”
“And if it does, it will be the right kind of harm,” I said, nodding. “Very good.”