4. Drake
CHAPTER FOUR
A kaleidoscope assaulted me from all angles. Colors clashed, voices bellowed across the room, different layers of cologne and perfume amassed until one jumbled headache throbbed against my temples. Layers upon layers of annoyances and pointless back and forth to discuss a disruption.
Dante, Julian’s uncle and head of the Rossi family, shot from his chair. He slammed his fist on the table, pointing an incriminating finger at Danny Chun, head of the Chun family. I crossed my ankle over my knee and leaned back in my seat, passively watching the show unfold.
Every so often, my eyes darted to the end of the table at Charlotte and Antoine Montgomery. Both of their children were missing from the meeting, and I turned potential reasons over in my head as the arguments continued volleying back and forth across the long conference room table.
Arthur Montgomery was a known fool. Poor old Arty grew up slated to take after his mother for most of his life, but access to money, sex, and drugs sent him tumbling ass over tit downhill.
Dumb motherfucker hadn’t even finished college and went on to fail spectacularly at every task his parents gave him until they removed him from his position.
A disappointment of an eldest child that Charlotte kept away from their businesses.
No one worth a grain of salt noticed or cared about his absence.
At the opposite end of the table, the head of the Santiago family began listing off recent events that stood out to him.
Several break-ins at their storage facilities where weapons were housed had them on high alert.
At first, he believed one of the other families was attempting to steal from him, but the call for a council meeting from Charlotte eased his mistrust, if only a fraction.
Antoine Montgomery jerked two fingers at a bodyguard in the corner.
The bulky man came forward, delicately set a black briefcase on the table and unclasped it.
The guard stepped back with a nod from Antoine, who extracted a black, featureless mask from within.
Dried flecks of blood at the edges surfaced images from the attack on my penthouse.
Finding out she had been at their office the night the Montgomerys were attacked made my stomach clench.
That had to be indigestion, surely. It wasn’t like it mattered to me if she was there, or if anything happened to her, I flagrantly lied to myself.
And I didn’t keep looking at her parents because I wondered where she was.
Helen Montgomery was Charlotte’s protégé, the heir to everything under her family name.
Of their two children, she was the bright one, the clever one, the feisty little Montgomery princess.
Her lack of presence at the meeting sat heavy in my ribs.
Not because I missed her or wanted to see her and her ridiculous head of hair or that pinched know-it-all look on her face, or the way her blue eyes sparkled in the light.
Antoine whispered something in French to his wife. Both their eyes cut to me, and I stiffened in my seat as if they’d been reading my mind. No, I wasn’t thinking about your daughter, and please kindly stop looking at me.
“Mr. Graham, was this mask worn by the men who attacked your son?” Charlotte asked my father, avoiding looking at me again. Silence snuffed out the idle chatter and lingering arguments around the table.
“The very same,” he answered. “None survived for questioning.” His eyes flicked to me and back, slowly enough to be noted and convey a message. A muscle in my jaw tightened.
He wanted everyone at that table to know that the rumors about his perfect attack dog were true. To him, I was a bullet in the chamber. Most seemed wary enough around me, but the old fuck loved to increase the tension in his favor.
Charlotte swept into a beautifully crafted briefing about their attack from the numbers of assailants, the time they appeared, how long it took her security team to neutralize, and who arrived on scene first. My heart skipped a beat when she mentioned her arriving and one attacker who’d survived shooting the bodyguard next to her.
Something about that didn’t sit right with me.
Call it instinct, but something snapped in my head.
The guard took the bullet and died, but right off the bat, I didn’t believe he was the target. If the masked man had shot at her and missed, why was Charlotte glossing over that? A threat to the heir of her empire would be important to disclose since it mirrored the attack on me, my father’s heir.
Why wasn’t she at the table? I returned to that thread again and again. It tangled my thoughts in a knotted web, wondering why their daughter wasn’t sitting beside them recounting her experience at the scene of the attack.
That wasn’t like her. Granted, we hadn’t seen one another in about ten years. No fault of her own. It was better that way. She had to know that. She had to have realized it was better that we?—
Dad kicked my leg under the table, dragging me back into the conversation. I picked up my queue and briefly summarized my dance with the masked fuckers. The time of night, how they arrived, the weapons they had, what we found on them after, and all that fun bullshit.
“We have to assume an outside force is grouping resources against us.” Danny slammed his fist on the desk.
“There hasn’t been a movement like this in almost twenty years. Now, more than ever, we need useful collaborations. We’ll have to collaborate to uncover who’s responsible.” Dante twisted the heavy golden family signet ring on his pinky.
I sank back in my seat, appearing bored with the entire ordeal. Part of me stayed alert, tracking the only exit—the set of double doors, watching the subtle movements of hands and legs at the table, checking expressions for nerves or tells. The conversation rolled on without me.
Danny Chun had a cousin married to one of Dante’s nieces (he had too many to count).
Dante’s nephew, Julian Rossi, was my best friend and practically a member of my family already.
Charlotte’s husband, Antoine, was distantly related to Dante’s French brother-in-law.
There were countless small connections that bound our families in insignificant ways.
Those meager connections weren’t enough to set the foundation of the needed partnership against a rising common enemy.
But the Grahams had no discernable connection to the Montgomerys.
In fact, our families had been the fiercest of rivals for the past several generations.
Since the days of my grandfather, our sides had crossed the lines and skirted an all-out war more times than I knew about.
The grudge between our bloodlines ran deep and long.
That was why, I reminded myself. She had to know that was why.
“—Helen.” Her name falling from Dad’s tongue sent me on high alert. A frightening flood of adrenaline rushed through me to the point I felt like I needed to jump from the table and bolt.
Charlotte and Antoine bent their heads together. They whispered in rapid French, and I regretted not learning more of it when I had the chance. But the younger me had more interest in learning Italian with Julian so we could chat up girls during summer trips to the Rossi estates in Italy.
“We’ll need to discuss this with her, of course,” Charlotte drawled, elegantly returning her hands to the table. A pinch in her brows and the way she kept side-eyeing me made my insides turn acidic. “But we agree to the union.”
“Fantastic!” Dad slapped me on the shoulder.
Color blanched from my face as my mind caught up with my ears and the situation dawned on me.
He turned to me with a grin on his face like he was the cat who got the cream.
“What do you say, son? I’ll give this one chance to back out, but I know you’ll do your duty to your family. ”
Duty. Family. Honor. That was what I had to my name. A future empire of backhanded deals, drug running, smuggling, aiding (and abetting, naturally), and anything dark one might imagine.
If there was a light at the end of the tunnel for me, she—it—had always been out of reach. That brightness, that light, it wasn’t for me. I sacrificed my happiness ten years ago. I gave it up. I let it go. Fuck me, I ran away.
And what were they doing?
Throwing it back in my face. No, handing it over on a silver fucking platter. The one thing I never thought I could have, and it was being handed over. A fucking gift in disguise.
Elation climbed through my chest, and the sensation disgusted me.
The conversation happening around me, the formation of a new union—a marriage to her.
It should have been a saccharine, warm, bright feeling after all those years of squashing down my misery.
Instead, it was a vengeful agony that twisted inside my chest like a hydra.
No matter how many heads I cut off, they always returned, more and more and more.
I wanted to laugh, and then I wanted to throw up.
But, fucking hell, I was a selfish man.
“Of course, sir,” I agreed quickly. Perhaps a bit too quickly. Steeling my nerves, I faced her parents, the heads of the Montgomery family. “I’d be honored to marry Helen.”
If she’ll have me. She was more likely to stab me when she heard the news, but I couldn’t help smiling internally. A dangerous thrill seized my features, and I almost smirked for everyone to see. It took more effort than I’d like to admit to bully my returning hope into submission.
Something flashed in her mother’s eyes. Just a flash before it vanished behind a poised mask. Glacial and sharp once more, she returned to her discussion with my dad about the details I should have been focusing on.
Oh, fuck. What did she know? Helen and her mother were close to an extent, but were they that close?