Mitchell “Match” Saltonstall, another of Kingston’s lifelong friends-slash-business partners, gasped,“What did we do?”
Maybe kidnapping would’ve been preferable.
If Kingston laid right back down on this couch, maybe he would wake up in his own bed after a weird remnant of a dream.
Or maybe he would die. Whatever.
Jericho Parr, the last of the foursome, asked, “I say, Match, what have you got there?”
Match said,“We’re in trouble.”
The horror in Match’s voice alarmed Kingston right down to his maybe-bleeding toenails. He writhed on the couch, flipping over to get a better look.
Match was holding trembling leaves of paper, maybe full-size photographs, and staring at them.
Jesus, what could they have done that wasso bad?
Snapshots of them with hookers and blow wouldn’t matter. They were venture capitalists. If they’d lived in the eighties, alackof snapshots with whores and cocaine would have shocked potential investors.
So,deadhookers? Drunk driving arrest warrants? What the hell were the papers Match was holding?
Oh, Jesus is Lord. He hadn’tmarriedone of those debutantes who’d been on the hunt last night, had they? The cream of the New York ton, carefully coiffed and cut into pastiches of the ideal female form, had swarmed the party with their parents the night before, hunting rich bachelors. Had he been set up and roofied? He could probably get an annulment for that.
Morrissey rubbed his face again, grumbling, “We spent New Year’s Eve at an exclusive country club in Rhode Island, not the casino in Monte Carlo. Surely, we haven’t gotten ourselves involved with international arms trafficking or Bitcoin speculating at one of the oldest, stodgiest, most boring parties on the face of the planet.”
Match covered his mouth with his hand and stared at the pages, flipping them back and forth as he studied. “Jesus, it’s notarized. How did he get somebody to notarize this thing in the wee hours of the morning at a country club New Year’s Eve party?”
Notarized? Probably not a marriage certificate, then. Also, that was a lot of paper for a marriage certificate unless the girl or girls had come complete with a no-prenup contract.
Kingston swallowed harder, trying to hold his gorge down and himself together. Nothing fucking rattled him. His element was bedrock stone. He needed to damn well act like it. He croaked out, “Considering the types of business deals that have been closed in this room over the past century, I imagine several of the staff are also notaries public so that contracts can be finalized and deposited before the signatories have a chance to rethink and back out.”
Whatever it was, whatever had happened, Kingston would rectify the situation.
He was sharp, aggressive, and ruthless as fuck when it came to business and especially to safeguarding Last Chance, Inc., theventure capital firm that he and those three hungover corpses around him had built over the past few years.
The four of them had been friends since high school.
Morrissey, Jericho, and Mitchell had been there for Kingston when he’d hadno oneelse.
Kingston would be their sword and shield anddestroythis situation, whatever it was, no matter who he had to ruin, murder, or blackmail to do it, and no matter the cost to himself.
He stretched, lengthening his overbuilt arms over his head. Waking shivers ran through his broad shoulders and thick arms, stiff from sleep. He needed to get to the gym to sweat this poison out of his muscles. “What did we sign?”
Match shuffled through the document, hesitating.
Jericho asked him,“What did we sign,Match?”
“It’s a bet,” Mitchell finally said. “Was Gabriel Fish here last night?”
Jericho rubbed his face. “I saw him early in the evening. He had a model fresh from fashion week in Milan on his arm and said he was in town because his grandfather was tottering near the edge of his grave. WasThe Sharkin on the bet?”
Match nodded.
Kingston winced inside. Gabriel Fish, the mythological shark of their high school, must have been at the party the night before. The Shark crashing a party was like playing a neighborhood pick-up basketball game for a couple of C-notes, and your nemesis’s old buddy LeBron James wanders over and slides onto the other team.
But The Shark never made a bet for mere hundreds of dollars.
Kingston had watched Gabriel Fish financially ruin people in their industry for the hell of it by yanking projects that he could afford to overpay for out from under them when they hadcontracts already signed. He’d misrepresented who and what he was to responsible organizations and then pulverized them.
