With Hattie gone, the days are an inhuman blur.
One miserable minute stretches into a wretched week.
They drag by, wretched and empty, torturing me with knowing I created this mess.
I lost control.
Even my phone never stops ringing unless I shut the damn thing off.
Blackthorn Holdings in crisis. A legacy that makes me soul sick.
Every executive officer desperately trying to reach their MIA head.
Mom, calling to apologize, trying to talk me down from becoming a different kind of bastard after revealing I basically am one.
Dad, echoing everything she says, and asking if he needs to step in and appoint a stand-in for the company while I’m ghosting it.
I don’t care.
Not my problem.
Not my fucking circus.
It’s hard enough to wake up sober and grind coffee after finding out your entire life’s been a lie.
I’m not here to sort out my parents’ guilty conscience.
Mom never gave me this much attention in her life.
Dad isn’t even my blood father, and I think he knows the company won’t be mine in a few more weeks.
That was only locked in if I married Hattie—if I worked one more fucked up little puzzle crafted by Gramps like a trained monkey—and since I haven’t so much as called the office, I’m expecting my CEO title to be stripped any day now.
That’s fine.
Better to get it over and done with.
Then I can stand to look at my phone again.
Hell, what do I care if it falls apart without me?
I have no special talent in real estate. I’m still inexperienced.
Blackthorn Holdings was always the boulder Gramps shouldered, and he’s not passing it off on me anymore.
I don’t want his passion.
I don’t want his life.
Not after he lied to me, along with everyone else.
The old man used me.
This warped marriage game was just his way of rubbing it in one last time, I think. Making sure I behaved like a well-trained dog from beyond the grave, humoring him even when he wasn’t alive to see it.
Fuck that.
It’s my turn to figure out whatIwant.
