Page 9 of InfraRed

The person I want to take my anger out on isn’t in his office, so I make my way to the next ones on my list.

I swing the door open without knocking and walk in. All the members of Sons of Sin are in the room, and not one of the fiveheads looks up. Not the two on the sofa playing a video game. Not the other two by the windows hunched over sheets of paper on a table, one holding a guitar, the other holding a guitar and a baby. Not the one with another infant on the floor turning ten shades of green as he changes a diaper.

I blink. Then blink again, wondering if I’m hallucinating, but the sight doesn’t change. Thisofficelooks like a daycare—for adults and children.These people have been running a business?

I’m so shocked I just stare, forgetting to speak.

“Something we can do for you, Davis?” Ryder Jamison asks without turning his head away from the guitar in his lap.

“This is how you run a multi-million-dollar company?” I bark. Like I said, I want to fight, even if starting it this way is ridiculous because numbers don’t lie. However unorthodox, the label hasn’t just thrived under them. It’s excelled. I saw the financials before I signed on the dotted line.

For the last five years, I’ve built a fortune and a reputation on my ability to take bankrupt companies and revive them by any means necessary, for hostile takeovers of the weak, and several other lucrative, if sometimes borderline illegal, business choices. It became the distraction I needed to keep my mind off a leggy blond I shouldn’t have been thinking about. But Sin Records is not like those companies. Their last quarter showed more profit than the company did in the last decade under my father and his business partner, Nichols Lockwood.

I took the position because it was always supposed to bemine.The company was supposed to bemylegacy. I spent years learning everything I could about every aspect of business, from supply and demand to finance to branding. Not a single micro or macro was neglected. Most of it had nothing to do with the music industry itself, but I wanted to build my knowledge andprove myself beyond the Davis name, so when the day came that I took over L&D records, people would know it wasn’t just my DNA that got me there.

Then my father and Lockwood quietly sold the company. There were no formal announcements, no bids—they just sold it. By the time rumors circulated they were taking offers, the ink was already dry.

When I confronted my father, demanding to know why I wasn’t given the chance to buy it, he looked at me with apologetic eyes.

“I’m sorry, Graham. We weren’t considering it, but Trey Masters and Sebastian Delrie made an offer.

I threw my hands in the air. I knew who Trey Masters was. Everyone in the business world did, but I had no idea who the other guy was. “So, you tell them no!”

Dad looked at me as if I’d grown an extra head. “No one tells Delrie no.”

“For fuck’s sake, Dad. You act like he’ll toss you into the Potomac.”

“More like the Gulf,” he muttered. I shook my head and walked away.

I did some digging on Delrie, shocked to find he was a major stockholder and COO of Diamond Industries—a small but booming company founded in Louisiana that expanded rapidly over the years—a graduate of Loyola with a degree in architecture, and a renowned tattoo artist but nothing else. Even on the dark web, it was like he was a ghost. Once my lawyers told me the sale was airtight, I didn’t dig any further.

My bodyguard, Will Lucchese, told me my comment about the Potomac wasn’t too far off. The man was mafia, but according to my bodyguard, Delrie was wild but didn’t just drop bodies because he didn’t get his way.

The same wasn’t necessarily true of me. I didn’t go around killing people per se, but Imighthave been known to use whateverpersuasionI needed to get what I wanted.

Then, six weeks ago, I received a phone call from Jamison offering me the CEO position. I was more than a little stunned, given that the last interaction I’d had with him or Masters was in high school, and that ended with black eyes and broken noses. Also, it was no secret that Liam Parsons had become part of their inner circle, and I was the son of the man who destroyed his marriage and career, not to mention help keep him and his daughter apart.

I did not hesitate to take the job. I’m not sure anything would’ve stopped me. There were no cons as far as I was concerned. But ever since that party, I’ve wondered…

“Did you plan all that bullshit at the party? Coordinate her arrest to coincide with announcing me being the new CEO?” It didn’t take me long to realize the entire thing was orchestrated.

“Why would we do that?” Ryder asks, this time deeming me worthy enough to cut his eyes my way.

“I don’t know why. Maybe you thought it would be some kind of good publicity to offset the bad. Or maybe you just thought it would be publicity period for the former owner’s wife to be carried out in handcuffs while his son takes over the company. I’d be a fool not to question the timing of it all since it’s no secret that Masters didn’t even want a CEO.”

The strumming of the guitars stops. The video game goes silent. All eyes turn to me. Seems like something got their attention. I assume they don’t like being called out or questioned.

“Man, I don’t know if that makes you one cocky motherfucker or a pathetically insecure one,” Angel Martin tells me from his place on the sofa. “The ink is barely dry on that contract, youknow? I’m sure we can still cancel the whole thing.”

My teeth grit, biting back the retort burning on my tongue. Iamcocky, but more so, I’m distrustful and a little paranoid. The business world is cutthroat, andeveryonehas an agenda. I’m wondering if I should’ve questioned what theirs was a little more before I took the offer. But I was thinking from a place of entitlement and arrogance. My dick may have been involved, too.

And there was no way the contract could be nullified without meeting very specific requirements. Because I pissed them off and called them out wasn’t one.

“Calm down.” Maddox shifts the baby on his lap, sets the guitar aside, and turns around to look at me, then points to the other men in the room. “I told all of you he would think it’s a setup.”

“That’s because you’re a paranoid prick, too.” Dane Pierce, the band’s drummer, says as he carries a baby girl in one arm like a sack of potatoes while holding the diaper away from him. He passes the baby off to Jake Martin, the band’s bass player and his brother-in-law, and walks out the door muttering something about nuclear waste.

“For the record, yes, the shit with Krista was planned.” Maddox nods toward the door. I turn and find the man I want to pick a fight with standing there.

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