Page 49 of A Man of Wealth

“Yes. I did what I had to do, what was expected of me. I knew that…well, being my father’s son, I needed to protect myself, otherwise, I would just be his next collateral damage. That’s what initially brought the three of us together. We loathed our fathers. And we all had lost someone we loved. We always knew we’d someday find a way to bring them down. It was always a long game. We just didn’t know how it would end.”

“Wait? You were always going to bring down your dads?” I don’t know why I’m surprised by this admission, but I am.

“Yes. We just never contemplated taking down the brotherhood with them.”

“But…aren’t there more. I mean, TOD is a national fraternity, and they have new members all the time. Aren’t you just going to cut off a leg and the body will regrow it somewhere else? Like Hydra.” I motion to his tattoo. “Can we really take the brotherhood down?” Doubt creeps into my mind. We’re attempting the impossible. I look over at Conner. Just a few weeks ago, I loathed this man, and now I’m about to burn down one of the oldest secret societies in my country with him. We’re risking it all, together.

I shake my head at the craziness of it all.

“What?”

“How could I have been so wrong about you?”

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” he muses with a slight chuckle as he turns off the interstate, but this time at a different exit than our previous trip.

“We have,” I whisper as the air in the car seems to grow thin. We’re really doing this. I’ve done plenty of semi-dangerous things in my life, but this…well, it takes the cake, and the entire kit and kaboodle. “Where are we going?”

“There’s a back way onto the property. Once”—he pauses and looks over at me—“when I was a delinquent teenager, my friends and I broke onto the property so we could target practice.”

“Uh, didn’t anyone hear you?”

He shrugs. “We managed to fire off a few rounds before the security guys started circling.”

I shake my head. “That was stupid.”

“We were stupid,” he agrees. “Anyhow, I assume we can still get through there. I guess we’ll find out. I wish we’d had more time to plan.”

He pulls over behind an abandoned warehouse several blocks from his father’s property. He looks over at me.

“Why are we doing this again?” I ask, half joking.

“Because we can’t trust anyone else and we need to know,” he answers as he opens the car door. I follow suit and we walk quietly to the corner of the building. He turns to me once we are flush against the old brick. And without warning, he leans down, grasps my face in his hands, and crashes his lips to mine. I moan into his mouth as his tongue caresses mine. My hands fly to his waist. My eyes close, and I take a minute to feel him. His kiss leaves me breathless as I pull back.

“What was that for?”

He presses his forehead against mine. “For fucking up and for good luck.”

“You’re forgiven. And we need all the luck we can get,” I mutter.

He smiles and leans down to kiss me gently once more. “OK, let’s do this.”

He takes my hand and I follow as we walk around a maze of buildings. He points out some cameras as we walk along in the shadows. When we reach the edge of the property, he turns to me.

“Whatever happens, if I say run, you run. Don’t look back. Don’t wait for me. Understand?”

“What happened to leave no man behind?” I murmur as I look at what appears to be a slight bend in a fence where it connected flush to a building once upon a time, but now the building has started to lean. The building is on the neighboring property, which is probably why it hasn’t been fixed. A part of me wonders why Sterling Corporation doesn’t just buy it.

“I mean it,” he says as he tugs my hand and brings it to his lips.

“I’m not leaving you,” I reply. I feel my lip tremble slightly as I say the words, partly because I mean them and partly because I’m scared as fuck right now.

He pulls me against him and rests his head on top of mine. I wrap my arms around his waist. Neither of us moves. “How did this happen?” he whispers as he kisses the top of my head.

“What?”

“How did I fall for you already?”

I pull back and look up at him, stunned.

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