Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Tristan
My alarm assaults my ears, and my eyes snap open, ready to begin the day while most of Westhaven still sleeps.
Five a.m. sharp. Every day. Rain or shine.
Two hours to strengthen my mind and body before the inevitable, endless working day ahead of me.
Workout, eat, meditate, repeat. Seven days a week, regardless of the time I crawled into bed the night before.
You do not get ahead of everyone by being lazy, distracted, or dispersed across too many useless impulses.
I have trained my body to follow me in all my endeavors, which means it needs to remain alert, sharp, and able to react at any time.
It needs to feed my mind the right nutrients so my brain can function at high speed, keeping my head clear enough to see the whole picture while most people remain fixated on the details trembling before them.
When the Vodianovs prepare for battle, I am already planning a war.
Father taught that as well, starting with chess at age five. He used to say, Expect it all–every move, every betrayal, every possible scenario–so that when it happens, you already know what to do. You will never be taken off guard.
I grip the metal bar tighter as I finish my last set of pull-ups.
She was not in my plan, though. This little brunette breaking a frame in my office, then running away and forgetting her purse.
A purse I stored in my vault for…safety concerns.
It did not sit right with me to imagine anyone else touching it.
The bag, I mean.
Was she a spy? A clumsy worker? Why had she been looking at the framed photograph of Nate, Maddie, and me standing together at last year’s office Christmas party?
After she left, I opened the building’s security feed and watched her get help from Ronny, my doorman, and another woman I assumed was her coworker.
I doubted a spy would have stayed there to stop her hand from bleeding, so I supposed she was not one.
Cole Vodianov is not especially bright, but even I give him a little more credit than that.
When Ronny came up, breathless and asking for her bag, I pretended to be busy. A bold move at one in the morning, but it worked.
“Is she okay?” I asked, sharper than I should have.
“She is, sir. Her coworker is a nurse; I think she has it under control.” I didn’t give anything away, looking at my laptop: four black-and-white squares, four cameras directed at her.
My fingers tingled against the sleek surface of my desk, and I closed my hand into a fist. Why did I want to go downstairs and check on her myself?
And why did it irritate me that I was not the one taking care of her?
“She…um, she’s asking for her bag, sir,” Ronny said. “I believe she forgot it here.” The obvious elephant in the room, dressed in a tired piece of leather barely holding itself together, rested right in front of me.
“Tell her to come here and get it tomorrow. I don’t have time for that now. That will be all, Ronny.” I spoke through my teeth, ignoring his questioning gaze until the thickness of silence made it clear I needed to repair the damage.
“Thank you for your help,” I added, which seemed to appease his concern.
He turned to leave. “Wait,” I said. Ronny paused.
“Tell Paul to drive her home.” He nodded once before leaving again.
According to the numerous tutors who had wasted years trying to civilize me, looking inside a woman’s bag is unforgivable.
I’ll say it was a safety concern. Purely.
I was absolutely not doing it to know more about this girl.
Not at all. Inside was a copy of The Great Gatsby that had clearly seen better days, the spine so torn I could tell she had either read it several times or bought it from one of those secondhand stores where books go to be loved past repair.
There was also a pale blue sweater with a supermarket logo I recognized from a storefront near the service entrance, a pair of torn earphones with the plastic barely holding the wire beneath, lip balm, and hand sanitizer.
No keys. No phone. No bus card. Nothing to identify her.
Logic dictated that I should call Brenton and have him find her name for me, but for some inexplicable reason, I wanted to hear it from her.
Those pillow-soft lips, pleading silent words I could not catch.
Why had I not heard her voice? Had I been so caught in the moment that I blocked out the sound?
Once she left the hall with her colleague, obviously refusing my offer to get home with my personal chauffeur, which was not a bad decision since she did not know him, I closed my laptop and shut down the surveillance app.
Then I opened my vault and stored the bag inside.
Next to stacks of dollars, gold bars, sensitive documents, and my gun.
As if that tired piece of leather were worth the same.
Her scent, vanishing away from my memory.
What I’d give to be close to her once more, like last night.
Once my workout is finished, I shower and let the steam wash off the strangeness of the night. I need to focus and find out what that number combination means.
11 40 64.
It could be anything. Coordinates. A door code.
A password. A reference number. But the real question is not what the numbers mean.
The real question is why a Vodianov would give me information at all.
Could the girl have been trying to work for us too?
Could this be an attempt to pass along something valuable?
A warning? A request for help? Whatever it is, I need Brenton ahead of it.
There are moves I need to make in this chess game my family has been playing with the Vodianovs for generations.
My father beat them territorially. He took land, influence, alliances, and pride.
I intend to be the one who goes for their jugular.
Total and complete economic death. Power domination over their assets, businesses, and men.
Their name reduced to an old legend that once meant something, dissolving into a cloud of smoke as thin as dust beneath my shoes.
I get dressed, choosing a suit from the twenty nearly identical custom ensembles occupying the center of my wardrobe.
There are more, of course, but the essentials are here, clean, pressed, and ready to wear without requiring a single unnecessary decision before sunrise.
Charcoal today. White shirt. No tie until after the gym, because I despise the feeling of silk at my throat before my mind has fully settled into its day.
I fasten my watch around my wrist and leave my house, its silence a second presence, taking up too much space.
I have lived here for five years, ever since he died.
My flat no longer met my requirements. I needed space, air, and a semblance of normality, away from my office.
Driving into the heart of the city, toward the Ashford Building, is a daily reminder that power is never abstract.
From the back seat, I watch people move along the pavements, chasing buses, balancing coffee cups, gripping their children’s hands at crossings while traffic cuts around them.
There are real people at the end of my business strategies.
Men, women, families, entire households depending on my ability to make the correct decision, to let them come to work every day, earn a decent living, pay their mortgages, fund their children’s education, and maintain faith in an economy that would not hesitate to devour them if men like me grew careless.
“Morning, sir,” Paul greets me in his usual mechanical voice as I slide into the back of the black Land Rover facing my gate.
“Morning,” I answer sharply, watching him press play.
Opera fills the car at once, low at first, then swelling beneath a piano arrangement so precise it loosens something between my shoulders.
I have perfected my environment in order to prepare myself mentally for any situation.
I have tried contemporary songs, motivational speeches, silence, business podcasts, and whatever else men with too much money pretend sharpens them.
None of it reached me. Only piano or foreign voices in opera allow my synapses to hear myself think.
“Sir?” Paul says after several minutes. His tone has changed. “I, um, I’d like to ask you something.”
I look up from the file on my tablet. “Shoot, Paul. I don’t bite.
” The slight flinch in his neck almost amuses me.
I have always liked him. He served my family with the discretion of a human vault.
No ego or complaint. Enough humility to do the work, and enough dignity not to make his service feel like submission.
He’s close to retirement now, which is why i’ve been driving my car more often to prepare him when it does happen.
I don’t want it to be too harsh, not after helping my family for so many years.
He deserves to be valued properly. Which is why I pay the college tuition of his two granddaughters without allowing him to make it sentimental.
“Maya and Celia’s graduation is next Friday,” he says, eyes fixed on the road. “I was wondering if…”
“Of course you’re off duty, Paul.”
His shoulders release by one barely perceptible inch.
“Thank you, sir.” His eyes return fully to the road, his expression smoothing back into its usual emotional discipline.
I do not tell him that I’ll make a significant transfer to each of his granddaughters’ accounts on the morning of their graduation, courtesy of Ashford Holdings, in recognition of his years of dedicated and irreproachable service.
The city is grey this morning, as if ash has fallen through the night and permeated the air until every building, street, and passerby seems caught inside an old black-and-white film.
The kind I used to watch as a boy with Nate, listening while cowboys stood in the dust bargaining goods over people’s lives.