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He shifts his eyes back to me and smiles thinly.
“Fuck off and fly away, little boy.”
The tinted window rolls back up and the car glides away, sending up wet gravel and mud that splatters my shoes and shins.
But I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything as my heart begins to calcify, turning to stone inside of my chest.
“You’re the other man. A fling. A dalliance. You were never the end game.”
My lips curl into a snarl as I drop my eyes to the soggy invitation, welcoming me tocelebratethe eternal bond of the girl I love to some other man.
My heel slams into it, crushing it to a wet pulp before I turn and walk in a daze back towards the hole in the ground holding the man who raised me, and the man standing beside it who will guide me into the next phase of my life.
Without her.
Jean Margaux may think he took a win today. But he’s wrong. My life will not be insignificant. It will not be petty.
I am destined to be aking.
And one day, he, like everyone, will bow to me.
Chapter 1
Adrian
Four years later, London:
I grunt as the alarm drags me from sleep. My brow furrows, and the tinge of a hangover starts to bite into me as my body wakes.
Christ, I can still taste the scotch on my lips.
With a groan, I reach over and slam the alarm off. My fingers find and stab at the button for the automatic shades on my bedroom windows. Slowly, with a soft mechanical hum, the blackout shades roll up, letting the sunlight in.
My eyes squeeze shut, wincing. But I have things to do today. And there’s no rest, as they say, for the wicked.
Or the hungover.
I fling the covers back and then roll out of bed directly onto my toes and fingertips on the hardwood floor. My muscles coil and flex as I push up and down, pumping out a set of pushups that gets my blood coursing through my veins, chasing away the lingering remnants of alcohol.
Heart racing, I instantly roll onto my back, gritting my teeth as I alternate elbows to knees, feeling my core clench with each crunch. When that fresh hell is done, I roll back over for another round of pushups, then flipping again for more brutal crunches. Lastly, it’s rapid high-intensity dumb bells until my arms and shoulders scream.
But at least the hangover is fading.
I pad naked across the elegantly-wainscoted bedroom on the top floor of my three-story townhouse. I can faintly hear the new Velvet Guillotine record blasting from my kitchen, reminding me that Noel crashed here last night after our night of apparently bottomless scotch.
But for Christ’s sake, the man needs tostopwith that fucking album.
The shower is cold, which has me gritting my teeth and hissing. But it’s what I need, and the hangover retreats further as I rinse off. I step out to shave quickly—with hot water, thank you very much. The silver straight razor gives me pause, and I allow myself ten seconds of melancholy, remembering the man who this once belonged to.
It’s been six months since Jonathan passed—cruelly and ironically to the same pancreatic cancer that took his brother, my father. But in the two and a half years he had me under his wing, I grew in ways I never imagined I could.
Now it’s me who sits at the head of the Cross table. It’s a delicate balancing act, considering I’m both the leader of a billion-dollar criminal enterprise as well as a student in my final year at Lords College graduate school of business.
There’s a chance this tightly-wound balance is a contributing factor to my Thursday night scotch shenanigans.
I dress for the day quickly: dark charcoal gray suit, crisp white shirt, midnight blue tie and pocket square, dark brown shoes. By the time I’m heading down the stairs to the first-floor kitchen, my hangover is just about gone.
Velvet Guillotine’sWreck Me Gentlyseems to be on its fifth rotation of the morning as I step into the kitchen. Worse, Noel is bloodysinging alongto it in his goddamn boxers and t-shirt as he flips something on the stovetop, his back to me.
