Page 4 of Confessions of Pain

Chapter 2

Exactly one hour and seventeen minutes later, I was sitting in the board room of Morganston Textiles, with three Morganston brothers, two secretaries, and, of course, Ethan. Kelsey, according to Wayne Morganston, was on the floor taking care of a manufacturing issue and would be joining them soon. My heart thundered wildly in my chest as I sat among my enemies and waited for the precise moment when I would get to deliver the death blow. They were pretty obviously bored, mumbling quietly to each other, joking about something that happened over dinner last night, while I was watching a tiny film inside my head of the last ten years of my life.

The film was a tragedy and began with that last night I held Kelsey in my arms, taking his body with all the finesse a seventeen-year-old, hormone-driven teenager could muster. I didn’t have a clue that it probably hadn’t been all that great for him because his smile always possessed the ability to make me think I ruled the fucking world. Then my mind replayed the betrayal, detail by disgusting detail. After that, there was just a blur of hopeless and helplessness. The hunger. The prostitution. The loneliness. The need to be loved, but knowing it wasn’t going to happen. I saw it all in my head and knew the family sitting around me was responsible for every damned, horror-filled moment of it.

And they didn’t have a fucking clue who I was.

They were the people who had made such a horrific impact on my life. They were the people who had driven me to stay alive long enough to exact my revenge. My nightmares were plagued with these men, but they didn’t remember me. I’d made virtually no impact on them. I was about as insignificant as humanly possible where they were concerned.

Would Kelsey even recognize me? Did I even give a fuck if he did?

Ethan was about as tense as a whore in church on judgement day. He had to know what their indifference did to my heart and soul. He knew how devastating it was…and how angry it made me.

They thought they were meeting with their local bank and were only slightly surprised when unfamiliar faces had shown up. Accustomed to getting everything they wanted, they’d merely arched their brows, shrugged, and led us to the conference room. Morganston Textiles was leveraged to the wall and their last three years had been unprofitable. Business had dropped significantly, as most of the industry was being forced to take their business out of the country in order to remain competitive, and still they hadn’t adjusted their lifestyles to fit the limited sales. The brothers continued to rape the company of all assets and credit lines to finance their outrageous lifestyles. They’d given themselves raises, but their employees hadn’t gotten a pay increase in over four years. The building was in disarray, crumbling down around them in some places, but instead of making any improvements on the property, they’d each built themselves a summer home in Key West. All of their personal finances and properties were tied into the company, so they would lose virtually everything when it finally tumbled down around them.

All the brothers, that is, except for Kelsey. No amount of digging could uncover the true state of his finances. He hadn’t gotten a raise with the rest of his brothers. He hadn’t built a summer home on the island, nor did he have a private residence on the Morganston estate like the rest of the boys. His bank account was always in the black, but never held more than a balance of five hundred dollars. The money from his paycheck went into his account and then disappeared as monthly bills were paid. It certainly wasn’t the financial empire I’d expected, and Titus and I both had determined that he probably had hidden bank accounts that protected the bulk of his assets. When Titus was able to uncover those, I would somehow find a way to take those from him too. I wouldn’t stop until he possessed nothing, just exactly what he’d left me with.

“I don’t know where the fuck the kid is,” Wayne grumbled with a roll of his eyes and a smile in my direction, which I suspected was supposed to be categorized as good-natured. It failed. I could see straight through his shit. “Can Barb grab either of you anything while we wait for him to show up?”

Of course, he wouldn’t consider getting off his ass and grabbing anybody anything. The way he said it made me suspect poor Barb’s existence at work was a total horror show. I’d hate to imagine all the bullshit she put up with on a daily basis.

“No, that won’t be necessary,” I answered. No need to make Barb do any extra running; after all, she was about to be out of a job. I didn’t remember her, but she looked older than me so our paths might not have ever crossed. The other secretary was a young beauty, Courtney Solomon, barely legal would be my guess, and evidently her role was simply to be something pretty to look at. Her attitude was cocky enough that I immediately picked up on a vibe that she felt confident in her role at the plant. My guess was she was sleeping with at least one of the brothers, if not all of them. The contents of my stomach curdled when I imagined her legs wrapped around Kelsey, or her artificially enhanced lips wrapped around his cock.

Fury tore through me and I had to mentally force myself to calm the fuck down. This wasn’t about who Kelsey was or was not fucking. This was about revenge, damnit. I didn’t care in the least who the lying bastard took to his bed as long as it wasn’t me. Regardless of that fact, though, I immediately cast her into the pit with the rest of the clan.

Barb, on the other hand, looked tired and defeated, literally worn out and used up by the Morganston family. Jobs were scarce in the small town I used to call home, so she probably didn’t have any choice but to stay and put up with their bullshit. Maybe I would prove to Ethan that I did have a heart after all and give Barb some kind of severance package on her way out the door. I’d used the biggest chunk of my savings to purchase the failing textile mill but could probably manage to scrape up a few thousand to make her transition less painful. Yes, I’d spent a fortune to purchase a failing company that I planned on closing by the end of the week. It hadn’t been an investment, it was my revenge.

I would never sell it to another buyer, even at a loss, because of the fear that they would open it back up and one of the Morganston boys would manage to weasel their way back into it. No, it would sit empty until the day I died as a reminder to me of all I’d lost—my home, my family, my integrity, my soul. Correction, I hadn’t lost it. It had been stolen from me.

“Barb! Run down to the plant floor and find Kelsey. We don’t have time for his shit this morning. These gentlemen are busy, and I’m sure they don’t have time for baby-brother to do his babysitting job with the employees. Hell, if they didn’t need all of our signatures for the loan, I’d fire his ass, but Daddy dearest insisted on all of his sons owning a portion of his empire, whether they deserved it or not.”

His tone was irritating and his grin was lethal. Before I even realized it, I found myself angry at him for talking about Kelsey like he was useless. Several seconds ticked by before I forced myself to stop feeling anything at all, other than hatred, for the boy I used to love. Barb, however, didn’t bother to try and hide her irritation. Her face was red with anger, and it was all directed toward Wayne. Looked like my ex-lover had a protector watching his back. Interesting.

As Barb got up to leave, I could hear her mumbling something under her breath, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was. I heard the wordbabysitting, but that was it. As the door closed behind her, Wayne said, “Where are you boys from? I haven’t noticed either of you around town before. Has old man Winters finally decided to hire some new blood down at the bank? It’s about fucking time, in my opinion. I get tired of looking at the same tight-assed old men day after day. Hell, he won’t even hire any pretty girls to operate the teller lines. I swear he must interview only old and ugly women!” He guffawed at his own words and the rest of the room laughed alongside him.

Well, everyone except Ethan and me. I’m sure my friend was as disgusted by Wayne’s mouth as I was. Ethan had some high fucking standards on how people needed to be treated, regardless of their position on the social tree. Wayne’s remarks could only be interpreted as sexist. I had no doubts that he was picking up on the same shit as me and it had to be pissing him off. Good, maybe he’d start hating them so badly that he wouldn’t hate me for what I was about to do.

“I’m not from around here,” Ethan answered with an incredibly fake smile on his face. Yeah, Wayne was getting to him. “I think Gabriel grew up here though, didn’t you, Gabe?” He turned his fake smile on me but I saw straight through it. He was ready to kill Wayne Morganston himself.

Wayne’s eyes squinted when he turned to look at me. No, he hadn’t had a clue who I was…at least not until Ethan opened his big mouth. I returned Wayne’s angry stare with an intimidating one of my own. I wasn’t the little boy they’d run out of town anymore. I was a grown man, more than willing and able to kick all of their asses. I also held the golden ticket to their destruction.

“Gabriel? What did you say your last name was?” Wayne practically hissed. “You damned well better not be that Maverick kid who assaulted and raped my baby brother. I hope you wouldn’t be stupid enough to show your face in this town again.”

Beside me, I felt Ethan’s body tense when he heard Wayne’s words. I guess I was mistaken—Jeremiah hadn’t shared all the sordid details with him. Just when I feared that he might believe the bullshit, I felt his heavy hand on my knee and when he gave it a tight squeeze, I knew he wasn’t going to judge me without hearing my side of the story. I should have never doubted him.

“Gabriel Maverick—the one and only,” I answered Wayne in a deadly calm voice. “That’s me. The Maverick kid who ‘raped’ your baby brother. And I’m right here in your boardroom, breathing your same uppity air. How about that? Did you miss me?”

“Get the fuck out of here!” he roared as he jumped to his feet. At the same time, the boardroom door opened and Barb walked back in with Kelsey right behind her.

I felt the air hitch in my lungs when my eyes landed on his face. It had been sheer determination on my part to not ever Google a picture of the boy that had owned my heart and then tossed it away like a piece of trash. The first thing I noticed was that he hadn’t changed much. He was still the most beautiful man I’d ever laid eyes on in my entire life. His blond hair was still just as seductively sexy, with just enough curl to make it always look like he’d just crawled out of bed. I remember thinking it was tousled enough that he looked like he’d just been thoroughly fucked. His body appeared to be as lean as when he was younger. His eyes, bluer than any blue in the fucking crayon box, were still framed by the longest lashes in the history of mankind. Those eyes used to look at me with love, lust, and admiration…or at least I’dthoughtthey had.

I wasn’t sure what I expected his expressive eyes to say the first time he saw me after nearly sending me to prison for twenty years. When I’d fantasized about this moment, I’d envisioned seeing fear in those blue orbs. A terrified fear because he knew he was finally going to pay for his sins. Maybe he would look angry because I’d somehow managed to survive on the streets. Sometimes, I’d thought the warm blue would have turned to a cold arrogance, like you saw when you looked into the eyes of his brothers.

Of all the things I had expected, none of them were what I was actually witnessing at the moment. After widening in surprise when he saw me, they’d brightened with joy—the same as they used to in the old days when he would see me coming his way. He caught his breath in surprise and a smile curved his full lips, but that smile disappeared when Wayne’s angry voice interrupted the moment.

“I said get the fuck out of here, you asshole!” Turning to Barb, he said, “Call security, Barb. I want this piece of trash out of my building right the fuck now! What the hell was Winters thinking? Hiring a rapist to handle his money? You only handle cock, right, Maverick?” He reached for the phone. “I’ll have Winters take care of this immediately.”

This was going beautifully. Absolutely beautifully. I kept a lazy smile on my face as I watched Wayne’s tirade play out in front of me. Barb, God bless her, hadn’t made a move to call security. The other Morganston brothers were looking about as confused as they used to look in high school in Algebra class. Kelsey was looking at Wayne like he was an idiot.

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