“The King of Hearts found someone that would steal his,” Adrian said with a laugh. “How ironic.”
“If someone were to steal my heart, do you think I’d be up here with my brothers?” I said darkly, lighting my cigar and taking the first puff. I let the silence sit; the other Vales knew me and knew why I liked silence, but that only made it marginally less effective. “The four of us haven’t been together in months like this. We rarely get to sit down for something that isn’t business. Forgive me, for how few other people there are we can trust unconditionally, I thought it might be pleasant to spend some time together.”
“No one’s disagreeing with that,” Lucas said. “It’s just very unlike you to suggest it. I would have thought Adrian would ask for it.”
“The fuck you say me for?” Adrian snorted.
“You? You want all of us around all the time. The photo ops, the press… don’t act like you don’t love it, Adrian. You’re the most camera-obsessed of all of us,” Lucas said.
“I’m half-surprised you didn’t invent duck face,” Dante cracked, drawing a laugh from Lucas. Even Adrian smirked. I feigned a smile, but my mind wasn’t here.
Fuck me, it was still on Sarah Carpenter. Every time I tried to put her out of mind, every time I tried to think of a witty interjection, her smile, her eyes, her fucking curves brought me back to her. It really was fucking stupid what I had done, wasn’t it?
Ah, well. It was good for the soul to atone—and then crush her. That was still the goal, I reminded myself. The person most responsible for Virgil’s death did need to suffer.
“Why did you really call us together, Cassius?” Dante said. “Even if the art gala’s not your thing, I would have thought you’d retreat up here alone. Maybe call a girl up for the night. Certainly not the three of us.”
I shrugged.
“Why can’t what I said be taken at face value?” I said, but even I smirked when I said that. All of us were too good at saying one thing and meaning another, and all of us knew that the others could intuit well enough what the others were thinking. “Fine, let’s speak the truth. How often do you all think of Virgil?”
Silence filled the air, and not the kind meant to elicit comments elsewhere.
“The fuck you bring him up for?” Dante said glumly.
“Cassius,” Adrian said, a hint of warning in his voice.
Lucas said nothing.
“Because he’s come up a lot more in my mind recently,” I said. “I’m not here for a fucking therapy session. We’re too good at what we do to need to dig deep. I’m just curious if the samehas happened to you all. Call me interested in knowing what’s going on in my brothers’ minds.”
An even longer silence came. Fuck. I should have just said let’s meet at a nightclub, have some bourbon, and place some bets and pick some women. This was a fucking stupid idea, and it wasn’t even why I’d invited them over. I just wanted company that wouldn’t make me think of Sarah.
Instead, it made me think of the person who made me hate Sarah.
“Every. Fucking. Day,” Dante finally said. “He was the smartest of all of us. Kid would’ve been a trillionaire with the way his brain worked.”
“Musk, Gates, he’d put Vale right up with those names,” Adrian agreed.
“Couldn’t say it better,” Lucas said.
OK, good enough, I thought. I didn’t need this to turn into a memorial. We’d done that the week after Virgil’s actual death with our parents. Mom and Dad were gone now, dead from natural causes. That meant the four of us were all that we really had left, and I didn’t need to fuck it up by digging up old scars.
“Glad he’s still in our minds,” I said. I snapped my fingers, and a servant from the shadows came out with some bourbon and some glasses. He knew what to do from prior sessions like this. “Let’s toast to him. May we continue to bring this city under our control, may we continue to live like kings, and may we never forget him.”
“Amen,” the other three said, and we all toasted and quietly sipped our bourbon.
The four of us are all that we really have left.
Unless someone takes our hearts. Unless someone finds love deep inside us.
Sarah, perhaps.
Fuck!
“Now then,” I said, eager to change the subject. “Adrian, how goes preparation for the opening ofNightfall?”
Adrian was more than happy to dive into everything we had set up for our marquee nightclub, set to open a week from today. I let him take the reins of the conversation; when he wanted to speak, he could do so for hours on end. Although I was requested to do the most interviews as CEO, the person we put forward the most was Adrian. He could charm just about any journalist or PR person with quotes that could be highlighted in a social media post, yet not damn us in the press.
