Chapter 5
CASSIUS
Get a grip of yourself, you fucking fool.
It was a damn good thing I had years of experience keeping a poker face better than professional poker players. I should never have fucking extended a handshake to make a deal with someone whose brains I’d once fucked out. Who I once… cared for, who I liked, I would allow myself to admit.
The instant her hand came into touch with mine, I felt the heat of desire overwhelm me.
My face never showed it, of course, but fucking hell, I was caught off guard by how much I wanted to fuck her right there.
Shit, it had been so strong, I was very close to telling the guards to not let anyone in while I railed her right there in Allure.
I did no such thing, of course. I maintained my professional demeanor, found a justified reason to leave, and walked away.
If I cared to see Sarah Carpenter that night, I knew where to find her.
And even if I didn’t, it would take all but ten, maybe twenty minutes of an assistant’s work to track down her contact information.
The only problem was that the Red Court gala was two nights away, and I had to find some way to occupy myself. Some way to be productive without letting thoughts of Sarah Carpenter fill my fucking brain.
The thought came to just go to our nightclub, find the two hottest women I could, and engage in a threesome.
It would satisfy me physically, yes. But I knew myself well enough.
I knew even when we were naked and I was deep inside them, I would still see Sarah on their faces.
It wasn’t that I cared that it would make it less enjoyable for them; they’d still cum.
But it would fuck with my mind.
And I already had enough fucking headaches up there thanks to Sarah, even well before tonight. No, sex would not solve my problems.
But spending time with a different group of people might.
An hour later, back on the top floor of Ruby, I sat on a chair outside.
The evening had gone black, and a cool, dry air brushed over me.
There was something about being outside that was more relaxing to me than being inside.
Inside, at that glass window, I felt like I was a king overlooking his empire; outside, I felt like I was above all the games.
It wasn’t a feeling I wanted to stay in for too long; there was money to be made, power to be obtained, and empires to be broadened.
But sometimes, especially after a clusterfuck of an evening, it was good to clear the mind.
It made things easier when I returned to being the King of Hearts over Las Vegas.
I checked my watch, wondering where the hell the rest of them were, but fortunately for their sake, the three of them opened the door and stepped outside a moment later.
Dante, Adrian, and Lucas.
The Vale brothers, co-owners of the casino empire here in Las Vegas.
I was CEO of the whole venture; Adrian, CFO; Lucas, COO; and Dante…
something of an everything man. Officially, his title was Executive Director of Hospitality, but the reality had him in the streets, in police stations, and in prisons, dealing with people we couldn’t afford to be seen with in public.
Dante was the least public of the group, but that was to his liking, anyways.
Unlike me, he didn’t want magazine articles written about him.
I suppose if he had a nickname like mine, it might be King of Clubs, but he saw no value in the nickname.
Too bad. I’d make it stick at some point. Just as Adrian was King of Diamonds for how he dressed and wore his wealth; just as Lucas was King of Spades for all the tricks he had up his sleeve.
“Get tired of the art gala?” Dante said as he pulled out a cigar. He handed it to me before handing two more to Lucas and Adrian, then one for himself. “I told you, that wasn’t your thing. Unless you found some ass you want to pull.”
“The King of Hearts found someone that would steal his,” Adrian said with a laugh. “How ironic.”
“If someone were to steal my heart, do you think I’d be up here with my brothers?
” I said darkly, lighting my cigar and taking the first puff.
I let the silence sit; the other Vales knew me and knew why I liked silence, but that only made it marginally less effective.
“The four of us haven’t been together in months like this.
We rarely get to sit down for something that isn’t business.
Forgive me, for how few other people there are we can trust unconditionally, I thought it might be pleasant to spend some time together. ”
“No one’s disagreeing with that,” Lucas said. “It’s just very unlike you to suggest it. I would have thought Adrian would ask for it.”
“The fuck you say me for?” Adrian snorted.
“You? You want all of us around all the time. The photo ops, the press… don’t act like you don’t love it, Adrian. You’re the most camera-obsessed of all of us,” Lucas said.
“I’m half-surprised you didn’t invent duck face,” Dante cracked, drawing a laugh from Lucas. Even Adrian smirked. I feigned a smile, but my mind wasn’t here.
Fuck me, it was still on Sarah Carpenter. Every time I tried to put her out of mind, every time I tried to think of a witty interjection, her smile, her eyes, her fucking curves brought me back to her. It really was fucking stupid what I had done, wasn’t it?
Ah, well. It was good for the soul to atone—and then crush her. That was still the goal, I reminded myself. The person most responsible for Virgil’s death did need to suffer.
“Why did you really call us together, Cassius?” Dante said. “Even if the art gala’s not your thing, I would have thought you’d retreat up here alone. Maybe call a girl up for the night. Certainly not the three of us.”
I shrugged.
“Why can’t what I said be taken at face value?
” I said, but even I smirked when I said that.
All of us were too good at saying one thing and meaning another, and all of us knew that the others could intuit well enough what the others were thinking.
“Fine, let’s speak the truth. How often do you all think of Virgil? ”
Silence filled the air, and not the kind meant to elicit comments elsewhere.
“The fuck you bring him up for?” Dante said glumly.
“Cassius,” Adrian said, a hint of warning in his voice.
Lucas said nothing.
“Because he’s come up a lot more in my mind recently,” I said. “I’m not here for a fucking therapy session. We’re too good at what we do to need to dig deep. I’m just curious if the same has happened to you all. Call me interested in knowing what’s going on in my brothers’ minds.”
An even longer silence came. Fuck. I should have just said let’s meet at a nightclub, have some bourbon, and place some bets and pick some women. This was a fucking stupid idea, and it wasn’t even why I’d invited them over. I just wanted company that wouldn’t make me think of Sarah.
Instead, it made me think of the person who made me hate Sarah.
“Every. Fucking. Day,” Dante finally said. “He was the smartest of all of us. Kid would’ve been a trillionaire with the way his brain worked.”
“Musk, Gates, he’d put Vale right up with those names,” Adrian agreed.
“Couldn’t say it better,” Lucas said.
OK, good enough, I thought. I didn’t need this to turn into a memorial.
We’d done that the week after Virgil’s actual death with our parents.
Mom and Dad were gone now, dead from natural causes.
That meant the four of us were all that we really had left, and I didn’t need to fuck it up by digging up old scars.
“Glad he’s still in our minds,” I said. I snapped my fingers, and a servant from the shadows came out with some bourbon and some glasses.
He knew what to do from prior sessions like this.
“Let’s toast to him. May we continue to bring this city under our control, may we continue to live like kings, and may we never forget him. ”
“Amen,” the other three said, and we all toasted and quietly sipped our bourbon.
The four of us are all that we really have left.
Unless someone takes our hearts. Unless someone finds love deep inside us.
Sarah, perhaps.
Fuck!
“Now then,” I said, eager to change the subject. “Adrian, how goes preparation for the opening of Nightfall?”
Adrian was more than happy to dive into everything we had set up for our marquee nightclub, set to open a week from today.
I let him take the reins of the conversation; when he wanted to speak, he could do so for hours on end.
Although I was requested to do the most interviews as CEO, the person we put forward the most was Adrian.
He could charm just about any journalist or PR person with quotes that could be highlighted in a social media post, yet not damn us in the press.
It also let me fight internally to get Sarah fucking Carpenter out of my mind. I’d have my hands full with her in two days; I did not need those forty-eight hours to be filled with her.
Yet thinking of her… her body… fucking her… taking her under my grip… controlling her…
It was more intoxicating than the bourbon in my hand. And that made this game very dangerous for me. There were very, very, very few things in this life I could not control.
My brothers.
The memory of Virgil.
Apparently, the Black Reapers.
And now, for some reason I could not yet figure out, the presence of Sarah Carpenter in my mind.
Well, with the first two, I was fine. The third would eventually bow to me and my family, one way or another.
And the fourth?
I’d wrangled her once before. With age, maturity, and an awareness of the broader goal to destroy her—yes, that was still the plan—I could handle her in her mind.
Maybe that’s how I’d spend the next forty-eight hours. Plotting in a bit more detail how to bring her down in a way that didn’t come back to bite me.
An hour or so passed, the four of us chatting about business, about traveling, about stories of the past that weren’t quite so emotionally sour as Virgil’s death.
I couldn’t say I was fully invested in the conversation or fully focused, but that was actually a luxury.
Sometimes, I needed to be in a room and not have to focus on every little detail, lest something slip past me that I’d need to use later.
Sometimes, it was good to just relax with an expensive drink, my closest people, and the Las Vegas evening around us.
Shortly after that hour passed, Adrian said he had to go.
I was not really in the mood to talk further; I’d gotten what I wanted out of the meeting, which was a palette cleanser from Sarah.
She wasn’t gone from my mind, but the lingering excitement mixed with disgust for myself had subsided.
I walked Dante and Lucas to the elevator and thanked them for coming.
“And Cassius,” Dante said after embracing me. “We’ve got your fucking back. If something’s troubling you, don’t fucking hide it from us. We’re blood. Understood?”
I nodded. I knew very well. I trusted my brothers more than my security guards. Dante, especially, would take a knife to the neck for any of us. What he’d taken in the past to secure our family’s power wasn’t that far removed from that image either.
“What he said,” Lucas said with a smirk.
“Get the hell out of here,” I said, although I returned the facial expression.
Seconds later, the elevator doors closed. I sipped the last of my bourbon, sighed, and let my shoulders gently sag.
It had been a very interesting early evening and a very relaxing evening.
And now, it was time to turn my attention to vengeance.
Destroying Sarah Carpenter’s life for the way she fucking destroyed ours.