Chapter 6
ALEX
The profiles covered the entire conference table—pictures, faces, names—pretty much all the personal data we might need was splayed out like an expensive crime scene.
I stood at the head of the long glass table in the conference room at Westwood and Sons, staring down at the impressive spread with a flicker of satisfaction in my chest.
Everything we needed to get the job done was right here. Nate was standing beside me and he tilted his head as he studied one of the photos. It was of a board member from Thayer Steelworks, a man in his late sixties with thinning hair and a smile too forced to mean anything but guilt.
Nate’s eyes narrowed, sharp and calculating, his mind already running through probabilities, angles, and pressure points. He and I often operated on a sort of hive mind, our shared brainwaves sometimes closer to twin-tuition than those of our actual twin brothers.
I nodded once, giving him a small, wry smile. “I’m not sure this is totally legal.”
“Probably not,” he agreed with a shrug, completely unfazed either way. “My contact has her bases covered, though. She always does. Don’t worry.”
I hated when he did that, dangling information like bait and waiting to see if I’d take it. Nate had studied finance with a pinch of computer engineering during college. He’d claimed his brain needed hobbies, and somewhere along the way, he’d met a ghost.
A hacker. A mole. A phantom he’d never named, never described, and never even hinted at. Until now.
Apparently, she was a mastermind, able to find out everything about everyone, and she was my brother’s most closely guarded secret.
“I didn’t realize your mole was a woman,” I said, glancing at him.
He didn’t so much as flinch. The guy handled spreadsheets for fun, but when it came to keeping secrets, he was a vault wrapped in steel, set on fire, submerged in concrete, and then launched into fucking space.
Eventually, he tapped the corner of a profile. “This definitely isn’t totally illegal either. All this information is already public. My friend just did some extra digging, looking into memberships to clubs, ties to other families. Hobbies. Interests. Wives. Mistresses.”
“Useful things,” I murmured, pacing slowly around the table with my hands in my pockets as I thought it over.
“Things we need,” Nate corrected, his tone calm, but underneath it, there was that slight hum he got when he was excited.
When a puzzle was laid out in front of him and he knew he was going to solve it.
“If we’re going to infiltrate the Thayer board and start making friends, these are things that will make our lives easier. ”
I exhaled through my nose and glanced at him, those typical Westwood blue eyes of his blazing with intellectual fire. These kinds of deals were his playground, the ones that needed a little something more intricately thought out than just knowing where to sign the check.
This wasn’t going to be a normal acquisition by any means. Buying out a company was easy. Money on the table. A handshake. A signature.
This?
This was buying out a person—or people—for a vote. It would be a slow game of pressure and persuasion, digging through lives, finding the weakest link, and then deciding which one to yank at.
“We need four votes on the quorum to hold majority,” I said, circling the table again to look at each face individually. “Nora Thayer holds two. The rest hold a single vote each.”
“It’s an odd setup,” Nate said.
“It was given to her to make it look like the Thayer family still had a say. She got it in the divorce to save face, but she doesn’t have majority, so it doesn’t matter.
” I pointed at two of the profiles, waving my finger slowly from one to the other.
“We’ll take these two. They have memberships at the same club as Dad.
It won’t be hard to pin them down and start getting friendly. ”
Nate skimmed the sheets. “Both are past retirement age.”
“Exactly. Let’s make that idea sweeter for them.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “What’s our budget?”
“No budget.” I stood up a little straighter. “We’ll buy Nora out of her votes if we have to, but otherwise, pin these two down, offer them the world, and seal the deal.”
He nodded and gathered the selected profiles, but my attention drifted back to the remaining faces. A room full of unsuspecting players who had no idea the wolves had already circled the rotting carcass of the company they’d ruined, but still, all I could think about was her.
Jane Margaret Thayer according to the company docs. My Killer.
Her scent had lingered in my car long after she’d slammed the door and marched up her icy steps like she wished the earth would just part already and swallow me whole. It wasn’t the patchouli that had gotten to me, though.
I would know that scent anywhere. Charlotte used to take those same basement studio torture classes and she’d always smelled like she’d been rolled in incense afterward.
No, Jane smelled like clean fabric, money, and class. The patchouli hadn’t been able to hide that.
I lifted one of the profiles again, but I didn’t even see the board member’s face. Just hers. Those gray eyes that never softened, the perfect posture, and the way she’d held her mother’s wrist so gently, but spoke like she would knife anyone who interrupted her.
Something told me she was right to speak that way, too. If her family hadn’t been in that dining room, she probably would have stripped every Westwood in attendance down to the bone and left us there to rot.
“Are you good?” Nate asked, glancing up at me. “You seem a little out of it today.”
I blinked a few times too many but nodded. “Yeah, of course. I’m fine.”
He didn’t believe me. None of my brothers would, because I didn’t get out of it. My head had never even met the clouds, let alone been in them, but he let it go, stacking the folders into a neat pile and sliding them into a leather briefcase.
“I’ll prep the pitches,” he said. “Anything else?”
I straightened up a little and turned to the window, watching the snow slowly drifting down outside. “We move fast on this, Nate. The moment we get one vote, the momentum will shift. I want every angle covered.”
“Done.”
I was still watching the soft white powder gathering on rooftops and windowsills all around as I thought back to that moment in my car, drifting again even though I knew I shouldn’t.
But when I’d leaned over her lap to shut the door, trapping her in a cocoon of safety and warmth, I’d caught hints of suede and cashmere dusted with vanilla.
Clean. Refined. So subtle it had to be natural because Jane Thayer didn’t bother with perfume. She didn’t need it either.
When she walked into a room, the atmosphere shifted. When she’d sat in my passenger seat, the car had felt too small. When she looked at me, I felt like I’d done something wrong.
She’d effectively invaded my mind and I didn’t even understand her just yet, but for whatever reason, I was desperate to. “I want your hacker to look into Jane Thayer.”
“She already has.” Nate crossed the room to the side table, fetched a file, and extended it toward me.
The second it touched my fingertips, adrenaline ripped through me. I sat down again and opened it, and time slowed to a crawl as I looked it over.
Well, this isn’t what I expected.
She wasn’t just another once-rich, ex-socialite thrust into her family’s business against her will. Nor was she some damsel in distress, waiting around for a rich savior or corporate raider to swoop in and free her from responsibility.
Frankly, she wasn’t someone to fuck with, which was exactly what I was doing by going after board votes.
She was Dr. Jane Thayer. Twenty-nine. A three-time graduate of Yale.
Her undergrad had been in business management, her MBA was in Advanced Management, and her PhD was in Organization and Management.
I’d met CEOs twice her age who didn’t have that pedigree. People who built empires without ever touching a classroom after graduating high school, but this woman had collected knowledge like weapons.
I exhaled slowly, barely breathing as I turned the page to find offer letters by the dozen. From some of the most prestigious companies in the world.
Her future had been sealed in gold. She was a genius. A business prodigy. A one-in-a-billion mind, the kind of person entire institutions salivated over and people designed roles around.
Yet she worked for Thayer and she was sinking with the ship.
I flipped another page, then another. It continued for what felt like ages, a list of opportunities anyone else in her age group would’ve sold organs to have, yet she’d declined them all.
Why, though? She has no club memberships. No invitations to galas. No social life. No footprint in circles she should have dominated.
Then I got to the page about her family ties. She was the eldest, but I’d known that. She’d mentioned it in the taxi. Her brothers ranged from seventeen to twenty-six, most still in college. Good colleges. Expensive colleges.
Which was odd, considering the financial breakdown Nate’s hacker had compiled of their company, on top of what I’d seen from Thayer’s internal numbers. So who’s paying for school?
She wasn’t making a single percentage of what a COO in a company like theirs should be making. Not even close. In fact, what she earned was barely more than what a manager at one of our subsidiary departments pulled in a month.
Her family had lost everything during the trial, their trust funds seized and the entire estate gutted. Offshore accounts had been confiscated to pay fines and fees. Their father’s legacy had been salted and burned.
The house where she lived had been paid off long ago, a relic from the turn of the nineteenth century. Beautiful, cold, and falling apart probably, but still theirs.
And from what I was seeing, she was the one holding it all together. Barely but hanging on.
This is such a goddamn mess.
I didn’t know how I would handle watching my family lose everything. How I would survive watching Westwood and Sons be stripped down to bones and ashes in the press while strangers dissected centuries of work with glee.
Somehow, that was exactly what Jane had done for the past year in her role as COO—and it wasn’t her fault. It had never been her fault.
I closed the file slowly and realized the office was nearly pitch black. I’d been sitting here for hours. Nate was gone. My phone had buzzed a few times.
I hadn’t heard it and I honestly didn’t care. My mind was stuck on the image of her, wrapped in her long coat with snow melting in her hair, her gray eyes burning through me when she’d said no to sharing that cab.
Reaching for the front page of her file again, I found the contact sheet and my gaze skimmed it until I spotted her phone number, her email, and her address. All of it.
My thumb hovered over her phone number after I’d programmed it into my contacts. Jane Thayer.
Just having her name there felt like a warning, but I still sat there, staring down at my phone with my thumb resting next to the green telephone icon. It had been years since this had happened to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to call.
I was like a fucking teenager all over again, rendered completely immobile by the thought of dialing up a pretty girl. It was completely ridiculous and yet everything about my reaction to her had been.
It almost made me wish I didn’t have to go after those seats on her board, but this really was the deal of a lifetime—and she wasn’t the only one trying to make their own mark in their family.