“Gideon.”
He interrupted Balthazar. “With the company folded, everyone we employ—the whole damn town—will lose their jobs. The savings they invested with us. Everything.”
Translation: my parents will be jobless, homeless, and broke.
“As long as there’s no evidence of embezzling,” Balthazar began, but I didn’t stick around to hear the rest.
Scum.
Ma and Dad devoted their entire savings to Winthrop Textiles stock. If the company collapsed, so did their futures.
I withdrew from the foyer as quietly as I had come, dipping past the kitchen and into the Winthrop’s laundry room, where Ma had left the old suit Gideon had gifted me for tonight’s cotillion.
I slipped into it, stopped by the storage room, and tucked the joint I’d confiscated last week from my brother Reed’s selfie-obsessed high school sweetheart into the outer pocket of the suitcase Gideon took on business trips. A little gift for the T.S.A. And people say I’m uncharitable.
After Gideon had finally left for his daughter’s cotillion, I didn’t think twice as I snuck into his office to search it. Eight years ago, when my family had moved into the cottage on the edge of the Winthrop estate, I had made it a point to possess every key, every password, every secret this mansion held.
Ma managed the household, while Dad maintained the grounds. Making copies of their keys had required no effort. Extracting the password to the office safe, however, meant creating a make-believe game for Reed and his best friend, Gideon’s daughter Emery, to play.
I entered the code into the safe and sifted through it. Passports, birth certificates, and social security cards. Yawn. The desk drawers held nothing interesting outside of employee files. I yanked the top one completely off of its track and felt around the hole it left.
Just as I had finished up my search, my fingers brushed against buttery leather.
After pulling off the tape, I latched onto the leather and plucked it from the cavern. Held up to the light, the journal boasted dust on its cover and nothing else. No name. No brand. No logo.
I flipped it open, taking in the rows of letters and numbers. Someone had kept meticulous records.
A ledger.
Leverage.
Proof.
Destruction.
I felt no guilt as I stole what wasn’t mine. Not when its owner wielded the power of destruction, and my parents stood in his line of fire. Dressed in Gideon’s suit, I looked like an Eastridger as I strolled out of his mansion with his ledger tucked into the inner pocket.
When Ma called, I told her nothing as she begged, “Please, Nash. Please, don’t cause a scene tonight. You’re there to drive Reed home if things get out of hand. You know how those Eastridge Prep kids are. You don’t want your brother catchin’ no trouble.”
Translation: Rich kids get wasted, find trouble, and the kid with the secondhand uniforms and academic scholarship takes the blame. Tale as old as time.
I could have admitted it then, told Ma about Gideon’s misdeeds.
I didn’t.
I was Sisyphus.
Crafty.
Deceitful.
A thief.
Instead of cheating death, I’d stolen from a Winthrop. The latter proved more dangerous than the former. Unlike Sisyphus, I had no intention of suffering eternal punishment for my sins.
The ledger couldn’t be heavier than a skinny mass-market paperback, but it weighed down the hidden pocket of my suit as I weaved a path through the tables in the Eastridge Junior Society’s ballroom, considering what to do with what I’d learned.
I could turn it over to the proper authorities and bring down the Winthrops, warn my parents to find new jobs and sell their Winthrop Textiles stocks, or keep the knowledge to myself.
For now, I would keep it to myself until I formed a plan.
A sea of suit-clad businessmen and manicured women—born, bred, and raised in Eastridge, North Carolina to be nothing more than trophy wives—blurred together in front of me. Not one of them piqued my interest.
Still, I ran a palm across a Stepford wife’s exposed back to distract myself from the fact that I’d taken something from the most powerful man in North Carolina—one of the most powerful men in America.
Katrina’s lips parted at my touch, and she let out a shaky exhale that had Virginia Winthrop cutting her frosty glare in my direction. From a table over, Katrina’s step-daughter Basil took a vicious stab at her white-truffle Kobe strip steak, her eyes trained on where my fingertips rubbed at Katrina’s bare back.
The steak reminded me of my little brother—glistening on the outside, full of blood, and ready to burst at the slightest cut. His on-again-off-again girlfriend, however, wouldn’t be the girl to cut him.
As soon as Reed got his head out of his ass and realized she was in love with him, Emery Winthrop would own his heart.
Girls like Basil Berkshire were pit stops. They fueled your tank and helped you along the road, but they weren’t the destination.
Girls like Emery Winthrop were the finish line, the goal you worked for, the place you strived to reach, the smile you saw when you closed your eyes and wondered why you even bothered.
Reed was fifteen. He had time to learn.
“There’s a seat at the kids’ table,” Virginia offered, a chute of Krug Brut Vintage cradled between two fingers.
She resembled the Hera statue she’d had Dad place at the center of the Winthrop’s backyard tree maze. Pale beauty frozen in a towering, too-slender frame. Virginia wore her blonde hair straightened until it mirrored frayed bamboo skewers kissing the tops of her shoulders.
The glossy strands swung as she nodded at the table her daughter sat at. The daughter she’d molded into the spitting image of her. But Emery possessed quirks that slipped past the cracks, like sunlight filtering into a prison cell through a single pinhole.
An expressive face.
Too big eyes.
A singular gray iris only noticeable up close, but I’d once overheard Virginia demand her daughter to cover it with a colored contact that matched her blue eye.
Sitting eye-level with Katrina, Virginia managed to look down her nose at her as she threw at me, “You may sit at the children’s table.”
My finger twitched, tempted to finger fuck Katrina at the “adults’ table” to provoke her because I had no doubt Virginia took part in her husband’s embezzlement. If Gideon Winthrop was the head of Winthrop Textiles, Virginia Winthrop was the neck, moving the head whichever direction she pleased.
I kept my fingers to myself as Mom’s pleas bounced around in my skull.
Don’t cause a scene.
Easier said than done.
Without another word, I pivoted and nabbed the seat between Reed and Emery’s date, Able Cartwright. Able appeared as slimy as his lawyer dad. Black, beady eyes and blond hair slicked back like he’d come from an audition for the part of the vulture in that D-grade Laurence Huntington flick.
“Little brother. Emery.” I nodded at Reed and Emery, then quirked a brow at the rest of the table, some prepubescent teens desperate to hide beneath five pounds of makeup. “Teenyboppers.”
Basil’s flushed cheeks clashed with the almost-white shade of blonde on her head. She wore enough perfume to fumigate a gymnasium. It killed my olfactory receptors as she leaned toward me and tittered into her palm.
“Oh, Nash, you’re so funny.”