“And do you want to keep coming back to me?”
I sighed. No bullshit, right?
“Yes.”
Adrian drummed the table with his fingers, nodded, and then shrugged.
“Alright, you answered my question. Now, what do you have for me?”
What, I was supposed to flip the switch just like that? Just like that, I was supposed to pretend that all was answered, and that we could go back to professional mode?
If only it were that fucking easy.
I turned the recorder on, but my fingers were shaking. I’d just admitted to Adrian I wanted to come back for more. He had taken it with barely a shrug. What did that mean for both of us?
And what if I was asking the wrong questions? Once again, why was I placing my professional well-being above my personal one? I knew the rational answer—old habits died hard. A smoker could try to quit and know smoking was terrible for them, yet the habit of a pack a day didn’t die just because of mere realization.
“Now then,” I said, taking a sip of my espresso, trying to ground myself. “In an attempt to make this a bit more back on what I actually wanted to talk to you about. To be a bit more professional. A few years ago, before you became the powerhouse family on the Strip, you bought a family casino on the outskirts of Vegas. Rumors say you waged a dirty game to drive the business into bankruptcy when you bought it on the cheap. How do you respond?”
Adrian scowled. My heart rate, already high, rocketed up even further.
He looked down at my recorder, looked back at me, and grunted.
I was terrified about what was about to happen—and worst of all, I was terrified about what it meant for us.
CHAPTER 15
Adrian
“An interesting question,” I said.
I actually had figured this topic was going to come up at some point. When we realized the Morrils would wage a PR war against us—better than an actual war, something we couldn’t discount in the long run, especially as more and more men in Black Reapers jackets appeared in the city—we listed out every past event they could use as blackmail against us. Not every item had to be actual blackmail, but every item could be twisted to make us look bad.
Virgil’s death was one of them. The purchase of the Hilliard Entertainment Corporation, the one Delilah had just referenced, was one of them. And there were others that had more to do with my brothers than me, though an attack on one of us was an attack on all of us.
“I’m going to give you the honest answer, and whether or not you believe it is up to you. You’ll get different perspectives from whoever fed you this, obviously.”
“I’m aware,” Delilah said. “You don’t need to tell me how to do my job.”
I chuckled. Right, of course. Delilah looked a little firmer after she said that, as if she’d needed to regain her footing.Reasonable, I supposed. I still had plans beyond this. No need to blow it up so early.
“Something that goes without saying, Delilah, is that the diamond trade, the diamond business as it were, is a ruthless one,” I said. “When our youngest brother was killed, we all vowed we would pursue our ambitions without hesitation and without fear of failure. After all, there was no worse fate than what happened to Virgil. If we failed in trying to build the strongest casino empire in Vegas, who gave a shit? A business failure was nothing compared to the loss we felt.
“In any case, Cassius, as the oldest, became the mastermind of sorts. Dante became the strongman, and Lucas became the plotter. But the task of making us look good, of charming those we might eventually overtake and negotiate with, fell to me. That meant that as we grew, the smaller casinos that might have threatened us became targets for acquisition or, failing that, targets for destruction. But something interesting happened with the Hilliard Corporation and Aces Up Casino.”
I didn’t think I’d shared this story with anyone before. Certainly, no journalists. My brothers knew the story, but they mostly knew it as a series of facts and events. They’d never known it as a narrative, or at least never had it framed for them as such.
“If you would,” I said, pausing for a second. “Turn off the recorder for a second. I want to tell this story off the record before I tell it on.”
Delilah hesitated but did turn it off. I figured she knew I would tell it on the record; I just didn’t want my first time sharing it to be with someone who affected me the way she did.
“See, most families in Vegas are like us,” I said. “I could sit here and bullshit you about valuing our employees, doing good for the community, blah blah blah. You know what’s good for the community? Maximizing our profit by creating the mostextravagant experience while also only paying what we have to, not what we can. I know, it’s terrible to say, and if our employees heard it, they’d raise a fit. Maybe even understandably. But we didn’t get to the top by playing nice. Neither did any of the other families, the Morrils included.
“But therewasone notable exception. The Hilliard family.”
I took a second to think about how to present this.No bullshit, just the truth.
“They owned Aces Up Casino on the north side of town, not quite where we are but more out in Henderson,” I said. “A lot of our employees, after being with us for a couple of years, would go over there. Unlike us, they paid their employees extremely well. They didn’t have ambitions of expanding beyond Aces Up. The Hilliards had actually owned the casino since, well, since Vegas was ever a thing. I looked at it and came to a conclusion that I never had before. We would never win a PR battle with them.”
