Delilah was indeed right. My need for control was my greatest priority, as my actions had indicated. I had won her for one night, won the Vale empire we had—and for what? For me to feel like this?
Only now did I realize Delilah did more for me than just get my dick off last night. She challenged me to be better—a better man. She challenged me to discard personas and public appearances and show the real man. Being with her had started off as a thrill, but it had morphed into something better.
And if I were ever,everto have any chance of getting her back, I had to become someone better without her help.
Yet, the very thought of that seemed outright laughable.
“If you ever want totrulytalk, if you ever want to truly seeme, then you know where to find me. But if you come, Adrian? Don’t come to find me. Find therealme. And make sure you bring yourself, not the King of Diamonds.”
Unfortunately, right now, that seemed downright impossible.
Separating me, the man, from me, the King of Diamonds, seemed like asking the impossible.
To become a better man without the woman who had made me realize such a thing was possible.
CHAPTER 24
Delilah
Monday morning came. The newsroom I came to was as buzzing as it would be at any point this week. I was back in my professional element, and unlike a few days before, when I’d come to escape pain, today was the first day where it felt like I was coming to a source of comfort and reward.
But even still, the scars remained.
Every time my phone rang, a small—not so small, truly—part of me wondered if it might be Adrian Vale. It had not yet been, and I had no rational reason to think it actually would be, but that didn’t stop me from fooling myself.
Every time I passed by the conference room nearest my desk, I thought about the fight we’d had. It had been so damning, so breaking, and yet so… honest. Raw. Real. I was coming to realize that while it was easy for me to pin all the blame on Adrian, I had also been the one to retreat to work when things got stressful. Yeah, we both had meaningful jobs, even if one just happened to have a much larger bank account.
Was that worth using as justification for putting love way at the back? So far back it had fallen apart?
I had certainly all but told Adrian to fuck off. I had been the one to tell him he needed to change, or else he shouldn’t come to me. By that logic, I had made my bed; now I had to lie in it.
“He chose his empire. I chose the truth.”
That was a mantra I had taken to repeating to myself when the hours stretched long or the nights were restless. It only worked when I took it at superficial face value; every other moment when I probed made me realize that, like all stories in life, there were far more nuanced reasons for why things had gone the way they had.
And did I really want to neuter the King of Diamonds? Did I really want that hard man to disappear? I wanted to date Adrian Vale, but discarding the King of Diamonds entirely was a fast way to end up with a man who lost his edge, lost his appeal.
“Delilah? A moment?”
I jerked up from my desk. Eric, my editor, stood there with a nervous smile on his face.
“Sure,” I said, happy to have some distraction from my thoughts. Apparently, it didn’t matter that I was in my element surrounded by my peers; Adrian’s grip on me had been strong.
I followed Eric to his office—which, mercifully, wasnotthe conference room Adrian and I had dissolved in—and shut the door behind me. He had an expression on his face like that of a proud father.
“How’d you like to move to Reno for the chance of a lifetime?”
The what?
“I… I’m sorry?”
Reno? As in Reno, Nevada? As in the city far, far north of Las Vegas? Almost a day’s worth of driving and a couple of hours of flying away?
“What are you saying, Eric?”
“Long story short, there are rumors of major crime rings building up in Reno that have ties to the King’s Men,” Eric said. “There are rumors that those who escaped the destruction of the King’s Men realized they could never rebuild in Vegas, but they didn’t want to leave the lifestyle afforded them. So they’re rebuilding in Reno. Rumors, of course. Nothing has been published. But we want our best journalist to head up there and to do an investigative series on the rise of underground crime rings in Reno. We don’t know what you’ll encounter, but rumors abound of new biker clubs, mafia associates, and even assassins for hire.”
My jaw all but hit the floor. Reno? With the most dangerous group of men in the world?
