Chapter 14 Everyone Wants to Prove Themselves
EVERYONE WANTS TO PROVE THEMSELVES
Brendan
“Clearly, this is the only way to go. Brendan, what do you think?”
Out the windows of the Blackguard executive conference room, Boston stretched to the horizon, a blanket of concrete and history.
In one direction, the city was dappled with the green expanse of the Common to Downtown Crossing and the Harbor beyond.
In the other, high-rises and brownstones cluttered Back Bay to Fenway Park and south toward the gray corner of Jamaica Plain I’d visited last night.
I was fourteen when Blackguard took over this building and my father took me into this exact room, swept his hand over the view, and told me all of it was basically our family’s for the taking.
Like I was the Lion King or some shit like that, and he was the benevolent father, not the terror who had raised me to be little more than a bulldog waiting for its turn in the pit.
It didn’t last long. By that point, the backyard fights had morphed into group lessons on ruthless greed and cutthroat tactics. The world could belong to us, he said, but only if we were hungry enough to take it.
Love and winning never went hand in hand in the Black family, that was for sure. Whatever consciences were in his children, Niall Black had cut out like a surgeon.
Behind me, four executive officers, my three siblings, and too many lawyers sat around the table, arguing over the agenda while Dad was out of commission.
The board meeting Liza had called after we’d announced Dad’s condition had been delayed until tomorrow—a frustrating delay for many considering that half of the executive members who weren’t part of the Black family were sprinkled around the globe like finishing salt.
I stared at the view, barely paying attention to the debates raging behind me. Was that the decaying brick building Simone Bishop called home? Was she still there, or had she decided to make her way to my side of town?
I hated being wrong. But it was five o’clock, and there hadn’t been so much as a phone call from the girl since I’d left her apartment one week ago. At this point, I half expected the contract I’d given her to make the five o’clock news.
Strangely, I was less concerned with that than the way the memory of her mouth seemed to cling to my every waking thought.
All week, my mind kept trailing back to Simone standing in her kitchen, her nose dappled with flour, mouth open and swollen from that ill-advised kiss, looking adorably flummoxed by my offer.
I couldn’t blame her for her silence, of course. I still couldn’t believe I’d actually had the stones to leave it with her. So many things could go wrong.
The itch to check the tabloids was almost unbearable.
“Big brother?”
“Hey, asshole, you want to weigh in here?”
“Brendan!”
With a heavy sigh, I turned back to the table. Eight pairs of eyes were trained on me.
“Say that again,” I directed whoever had just been speaking. I didn’t know, nor did I care.
“Christ.” Ronan’s eyes blazed from a few seats down. “Need a little break to do some soul-searching over there, big brother? You can backpack across Europe if you want to. Or maybe go do some fucking yoga. Would serve us better than being ignored.”
I scowled. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Ronan gave one of his patented, devil-may-care shrugs. “I don’t know. Do you even want to be CEO? Or should the rest of us be putting our hats in the ring too?”
It was meant to be a joke, but I could hear the intent behind it. And so could everyone else at the table, judging by the way they all tensed. Beneath his humor lurked teeth as sharp as any of ours. Ronan was just another shark circling the water, waiting for the scent of blood.
“Never doubt it.” I stared at him for five long seconds until he looked away.
The others looked away.
Owen cleared his throat. “As I was saying, we should put the Ventnor acquisition up for a vote tomorrow after the interim CEO decision.”
I started pacing at the head of the table. “No. Pushing new risky acquisitions isn’t a good idea right now. Leave Ventnor for the next scheduled board meeting, after things calm down.”
“But that’s three fucking months from now. I’ve been working on this deal for years, and it could all fall apart.”
Shea shook her head at Owen. “Oh my God, don’t poke the bear.”
Owen just dug his heels in deeper. I would have bet ten million it was because I was saying no. “I think we should vote sooner rather than later. Before the board even considers saying no.”
“The answer’s no. It’s just common sense.” I turned to Joe Kefler, a vice-chair and investment officer who had been Dad’s money manager for the last forty years. “Joe, you agree with me, don’t you?”
“I do. If anything, we should be trimming the fat. Adopting more austere measures until Niall’s back so that shareholders don’t scare.”
“Measures like what?” Owen’s tone was bordering on nasty. The guy always had to spoil for a fight, like we were still kids forced to spar in the backyard.
“Seriously, don’t bother,” Ronan muttered. “He’s got the old guys on his side now.”
Kefler, however, kept going like my brothers and I weren’t engaging in our daily power struggle. “The luxury food sector of Blackguard has a lot of potential for cutbacks. But the most obvious deadweight is in the property. We’re losing millions on taxes alone.”
“Real estate is my division, not Joe’s,” Owen cut in, his voice sharpened like a weapon.
“Plans have already been drawn up for four different luxury developments under the Ventnor brand. Two in the Catskills, one in Maine, another in Vermont. We’re creating a whole new form of ecotourism for the Northeast. You have to think beyond the next quarter. ”
“Is all the property secured?” I asked. “That was an issue the last time you wanted us to vote.”
Owen looked uneasy. “Most. The rest…we bought a bunch of bad mortgages. But that’s the whole point of this acquisition. We buy the mortgages, and then—”
“Evict the owners if they don’t do what we want with the land?” I interrupted.
Shea looked genuinely shocked. “Do we really do that? Evict, like, families and stuff just to make money?”
“Welcome to reality, Pollyanna.” Ronan patted her on the head like a child.
I didn’t even bother to answer her. Shea only attended board meetings when she was forced to vote. I didn’t think she’d ever come to one of these non-voting meetings, but since seeing Dad in the hospital, she’d renewed her quest to become his princess again.
It wouldn’t last. It never did.
“Dad signed off on it,” Owen pointed out. “Just like he has signed off on every other expansion of this project. This has been in the works for years, Brendan.”
“That’s irrelevant.” I stopped pacing and braced my hands on the back of my chair. “The time to prove yourself is over. It didn’t work. Time to move on. You’ll have another chance to prove yourself.”
Owen’s face flushed the approximate color of one of the red brick buildings circling Copley Square. “How fucking dare you—”
“Besides Dad has only signed off on selling mortgages, not assuming debt.” I straightened and started a lap around the table. “I would be shocked if he knows you want to turn us into slumlords.”
“I don’t want to turn us into—”
I turned to Liza before he could finish. “What can we lose quickly? Something that will appease the board but won’t look too bad on the bottom line. I don’t want to take a hit on the market when this falls through.”
Liza tapped away on her computer. “Off the top of my head, investments in the cheese, wool, and syrup pipelines in New England haven’t been panning out.
Some in New Hampshire and Connecticut, but mostly in Vermont.
Farms that are just sitting there while we wait to see if they are going to produce anything. ”
“But we just made those investments last year!” Owen exploded. “It’s too early to abandon ship. Or did you forget that luxury goods take time to make despite being in the fucking business of luxury?”
“I don’t give a shit if we make a profit on cutting grass as long as it benefits shareholders. Project time is over, Owen. Your plans need to work, or they’re toast.” I turned back to Liza. “What do you recommend? Sell or evict?”
Liza tipped her head back and forth. “We could just consolidate. Sell the less profitable farms to the ones that are already profitable. Trim workers instead of assets. It won’t affect our total holdings, but it would increase our profit margins in the short term.”
Owen looked like he was about to erupt. “That literally defeats the whole concept of the small, luxury travel niche we are trying to promote. It’s the entire brand identity of the project.”
I didn’t bother to respond. “Liza, draw up the contracts and get me a list of properties marked for consolidation, and we’ll sell them in bulk. Instead of finishing Ventnor, see if there are any other developers willing to bite on the assets or the plans. That should make shareholders happy.”
The people in the room that I was related to didn’t look the slightest bit happy. Everyone else seemed to think it was a good idea, though, so my siblings could fuck off. As heads of their own divisions, they were generally only concerned with their personal projects, not the company as a whole.
That was my job now. Or would be, come Wednesday. Especially if Simone came through.
Fuck. I had to stop thinking about her.
“I already have that list,” Liam called out from the end of the table, where he sat with the other lawyers. After he finished law school, Liza had lobbied for her son to work in the legal department, and after almost ten years at Blackguard, this was his first executive meeting.
He slid the document to me, and I paged through the list.