Page 13 of Ashes of Sin

I don’t know why he hasn’t fucked her yet.

“Message me the details and I’ll have the funds transferred in five minutes,” I reply. “I’ll send you the address to bring—”

I catch myself. I don’t want Mitch to be involved in any way. No one can know that I’m kidnapping Ms. Fox. Getting the room set up in my penthouse without leaving any footprints has been a challenge in itself.

“I understand,” the man’s scrambled voice says.

Then he hangs up.

We pull up outside my building and I climb out, staring up at the Sterling Tech sign on the Manhattan skyscraper. It’s a level of success even my father has never reached.

He won’t be unaware of who I’ve become.

“Take the rest of the day off, Mitch. I have meetings until late, so see you back here at six.”

“Yes, sir,” Mitch says. “I might take my boy out to play some ball.”

“You do that.” I smile as I shut the door and stride into the building.

Some days I envy Mitch. He might be divorced, but it’s amicable and both of them are dedicated to raising their son, Denzel. He’s a good kid who loves math and baseball. Little does he know, but I’m going to pay for him to go to college.

I’m not some nice guy.

I turned my inheritance into a billion-dollar empire with a single-minded vision of destroying my father. I have such an enormous amount of hatred inside me that the world feels like it's black and white.

People are either good or bad.

Of value to me or not.

Except my brothers. Nobody else gets inside my world, my heart, my soul, to see the dark truth.

So, when someone like Denzel slips inside by accident, I notice. I should never have let him ride with us that first time, but the kid was sick, and his mother was working.

“Pick him up,” I told Mitch as we headed to a meeting.

“We’ll be late, sir.”

“Fuck the meeting. The kid is sick. Pick him up,” I demanded.

“Are you sure?” Mitch glanced at me in the mirror.

I nodded.

Well, fuck me. That little face, full of snot, and just six years old, sat up in front with his father and talked nonstop. Finally, Mitch shut him up and told him that I was his boss.

Denzel swiveled around and stared at me like I was an alien or something.

“Why are you in the back seat if you’re the boss?”

Fucking kid.

I nearly laughed.

I didn’t want to tell him that his father was my driver. Something just didn’t feel right. I wanted him to keep looking at Mitch like the sun shone right out of his ass.

“I can’t drive,” I replied, then glanced away.

“You should learn. Dad could teach you,” Denzel said, “Right, Dad?”

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