Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 66732 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 334(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66732 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 334(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
Is it considered breaking and entering once a number is agreed upon and paperwork finalized even if money hasn’t changed hands? Not that it matters for my purposes tonight. I need to get inside because I have a sense that time is running out.
I think about my meeting last night with the Foxes. How smug they are still, even when they come to me, their enemy, for money. I should have made them beg, but I remind myself that is not the goal. My game is a long one. I will swallow what I need to now to have the final laugh in the end.
But I know it hurt arrogant, self-satisfied Sly’s ego to have to come to me for money.
My father is a self-made man. His money is as new as it comes, and as filthy.
Born dirt poor, Sly was an only child, which maybe explains his inability to play well with others. His mother, my grandmother whom of course I never met, waited tables at a greasy diner in Boston while his father, a goliath of a man, worked in construction all his life. Both were hard working. Together they made ends meet, giving the best they could to their ungrateful son and working themselves to their graves before either of them reached fifty-five.
My father took after his mother physically, and, I imagine to everyone’s surprise, he had a talent for numbers that was discovered fairly early on. That talent got him into a prestigious private boarding school for boys on scholarship. Well, that talent and his Colombian heritage on his mother’s side. His father came from a white, working-class family in the Midwest. I guess I don’t really blame Sly for having used his background to his advantage and land a scholarship. I may have done the same to get ahead if I’d needed a scholarship. With Sly paying for my education, though, I’d wanted to bleed as much money from the man as possible.
It's not so much how he got that scholarship that bothers me, though. It’s what he did afterward that shows the kind of man he would one day become. He distanced himself from the less white part of his heritage when, after graduation from an Ivy league university, it no longer served him. Although maybe that’s not fair because truly, he essentially cut off ties with both of his parents as soon as he left high school.
Sly always was clever, calculated, cunning even. Maybe he didn’t completely forget his parents because he worked for a real-estate developer, the same one who owned the construction company his father worked for. He climbed the ranks, slowly at first, which I know because I researched his career path for years.
Then, when he was in his mid-thirties, boom! He catapulted to the top, replacing much of the management once he got there.
I know how he did it, although I don’t really have proof because no one will talk, of course. It’s the nature of blackmail, after all.
My father collected secrets. He always had his ears open, and he held on to whispered words spoken in confidence until the time was right to topple one man after another after another.
So yeah, dirty money.
When he made the comment about him knowing how I operate—that he is my father—after all, I know what he was referencing. My own climb to the top of what is now called Emerald Cross Ventures, a commercial real-estate development firm—yes, like father, like son, almost—took several years. I didn’t destroy anyone to get to where I got.
Well, not anyone who didn’t deserve it, at least. I was more discriminating than my father, but I do admit to similarities.
So, he is right in some regards. I am like him. I also inherited his talent for numbers. For business and finance. For the deal.
Ethan doesn’t have an ounce of that. I wonder if it bothers Sly. It must. His acknowledged son is an idiot, essentially. He will only get ahead on his name and his inheritance—of which, if I have anything to say about it, won’t be much. If anything, Ethan is inadvertently helping me by burning through his trust at super-human speed. I blame that on Mira. She coddled Ethan, which is another thing Dad and I agree on.
I’m guessing that if it was left up to Ethan alone, he’d bankrupt the family in his lifetime. But I can’t wait for that. Sullivan Fox is my target. Ethan is just a bonus.
The loan Sly needed—the one I generously provided—injected blood into a firm on the brink of bankruptcy. If I hadn’t stepped in, they might have died out naturally, but what would be the point in that? I want Sly to know it was me who hammered the nail into his coffin. I want him to feel those consequences he’s always been so fucking happy to dish out.