WREN
Goddamnit, Wren,I mentally scold myself. My foot taps anxiously against the marble lobby floor. I look around the building. Everything looks…insanely expensive. Service people everywhere. Marble and crystal mixed with some more modern features…and this is just the lobby.
I can’t even take it all in right now, though, because I’m too busy mentally beating myself up.
I can’t believe I volunteered for this. Who do I think I am? Some sort of badass vigilante? I mean, outwardly, yes. But the real me is in bed by nine with a romance novel and a cup of tea.
But no. I had to go and open my big mouth.
I had to do it for the glory—that may never come.
My therapist is going to have a field day with this one.
My mind flashes back to the conversation I just had with two of the richest men on the planet.
“I’ll do it,” I had stupidly offered. All their heads whipped around to me.
“What?” Keaton, the middle brother, had asked me.
“Absolutely not,” Julian, the brooding oldest, had said.
“No fucking way,” Sawyer, Julian’s fiancée, had added. But I thought about it.
“I don’t know that we really have a choice,” I told them. “If we do nothing, then some other unsuspecting woman gets hired and goes through this same shit. It can’t be one of you two,” I had said, motioning to their women, “because they know you. It has to be me.”
Now, I want to go back in time and kick myself.
What experience do I have taking down an evil billionaire mastermind?
Exactly zero.
But how badly do I need this to go right so I can have my breakout story?
Pretty much everything I got riding on it.
The ding of the elevator zaps me out of my internal panic, and I step on. I let out a long breath. Living in New York City and having severe claustrophobia is not a good match. Scared of elevators? New York may not be the place for you.
Yet, here I am.
The doors close, and I am locked in a tiny box. Like a little coffin where all my worst nightmares and thoughts are coming back to life.
I try not to focus on how slow it feels like the elevator is moving and, instead, try to think of something a little less anxiety inducing. Like, you know, meeting with the billionaire brothers who I will be working with to take down their father in what could become one of the most insane stories in history.
The fall of one of America’s madmen.
A man who has preyed on women for God knows how long and who could finally get what’s coming to him.
AndIcould be the one to tell the story.
The problem is, I have sort of offered myself up as bait in order togetsaid story.
But Julian and Keaton seemed to be confident that they could equip me with all knowledge necessary to get what we need. They also said they could provide protection.
Well, they said their brother, Brooks, could provide protection.
Which I found funny, considering he has been a no-show to every meeting I’ve had with his brothers so far, despite the S.O.S. communications they sent him. And each time, I got some sort of newsflash on Instagram about some yacht he was on with some international supermodel.
Definitely seemed more important than his family’s impending doom.
