Page 10 of Enemies

Evidently, she wasn’t pleased with my reaction.

A single social media post condemning my business caused the door income of my best club to drop by half overnight and spurred a bloody mountain of paperwork and hostile media inquiries my team had to deal with. Most of them made their way up to me and ruined a string of otherwise good days.

A small consolation was that she exploded in an equally destructive way.

My PR staff told me that while a few fans had applauded the move, many were ambivalent. More importantly, no club owner from London to Miami would touch her for fear she’d find fault with their operations.

Part of me envies her idealism. We were all naïve once, even if the last time I knew so little of the world I was still in knee socks.

“Whisky, Mr. King?” the upstairs VIP bartender asks, and I nod.

“In my booth.”

“Sí, señor. You have a visitor.”

Before I can demand who the fuck is in my private space, the bartender’s gone. I round the corner of my booth and stiffen.

“Let me guess—half your renovation budget was for the club and half for whisky.” The last person I’d expect is sitting in the booth in khakis and a polo shirt, nursing a drink.

“Ash. I didn’t realize you were coming.”

My brother Sebastian is a decade younger, and has a propensity to avoid me unless he wants to lay blame at my feet.

“Premier League has been over for a week.” He flashes a grin. “Thought I’d raid the bar at your newest club.”

“I’ve bought two more since.”

“Yet you’re still here. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were hiding.”

Ash doesn’t miss a thing. He’s the smarter of the two of us, yet he plays professional football and I’m the one running a corporation.

“I’m not hiding. I’m relaxing.”

His smirking gaze runs from my dress shoes up the suit to my tight face.

“You look positively rejuvenated,” he quips. “When will you stop this relentless quest for acquisitions? When you own every entertainment venue in the world?”

I accept the thirty-year-old Glen Scotia whisky the bartender brings on a monogrammed napkin. “We’ll find out.”

“Our parents wouldn’t want you to do this,” he says.

My grip on the glass tightens. “You don’t know what they’d want. You were a boy when they died.”

My brother shifts out of his seat. He has the same hair and eyes as me, but he’s a few inches shorter. He’s made the most of what he’s been given and is now a forward for the second-best professional football club in England since getting drafted out of uni last year.

“I thought you’d started to mellow when you were with her.” My brother leans over the railing next to me. “You stepped back from the business. Started genuinely enjoying life a little. It was good to see, Harry.”

I sip, and the smooth alcohol lingers on my taste buds. “Love is an illusion. I was a fool to think it was more.”

The tabloids paint me as a richer-than-Midas entertainment mogul with no greater pleasure than adding to the piles of money I’ve made.

It’s easier for me that they do.

Their needling over superficial flaws and supposed weaknesses doesn’t bother me.

It keeps them from digging at the real ones.

The crowd below us is dancing, losing themselves in the music pounding through the speakers, reverberating off every wall.

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