The Other Side of Greed by Lily Zante

Chapter Forty-Seven

KYRA

At home I curl up on the couch in tears. Silent tears fall; the tears of someone who has no fight left in her, no fight for a heart that cannot be fixed because it is so irreparably broken.

I hear another ping on my phone, and see that it’s another text from him. I turn my phone off.

The evening has been surreal. I no longer know what is real and what are lies.

I don’t know where Brad ends and Brandon starts.

He cheated is all I know.

I feel bad that the evening is all messed up and what should have been a great night out for Simona has been turned into the worst night of my life.

We’ll have to have a do-over for her birthday at another time because I refuse to let this man’s trickery affect us.

As I lie, like a fetus, cocooned in my misery, I try to work out why Brad would lie about his name, and it makes me think about the many other lies he’s fed to me, to us, to Redhill, ever since he joined.

Why did he join? Why did the son of a billionaire join my company? To achieve what?

And then I sit up.

Could it have been anything to do with Greenways? After all, he was the one who suggested we relocate.

Until recently. But now he seems to want me to stay. He’s been telling me to trust my instinct and to not listen to him.

I lie back down, because my mind can’t work around the implausibility of this idea.

I prefer to believe that Brad was the dreamer and idealist who went abroad and helped with the building projects of impoverished communities.

I wish I could erase all thoughts about our weekend. I wish I could rub away the scent and feel of him. I wish it weren’t so recent. I wish time would pass fast, fast, fast, and I could fast forward a whole year.

I get up to draw my blinds when I hear a knock at the door. When I look through the keyhole, it’s Brad’s face I see.

Hate rises from my belly. “Go away,” is the only childish comment I come up with.

“We need to talk, Kyra.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“You need to hear what I have to say.”

“I don’t need to do anything.”

“Jessica did that on purpose.” He knocks again.

“She’s a hero in my books.”

“You don’t mean that. The woman’s a vicious little—” He refrains from saying what he really thinks. “Please let me in.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Do you want me to have this conversation through the door?”

With hate in my heart, I open the door and let him in. I don’t ask him to sit down, and we hover around the door.

“I’m sorry about what—”

“I’m not.” I interrupt, not wanting to hear more lies. “How much longer were you going to lie to me for?”

“I kept meaning to tell you.”

“So, why didn’t you?”

He looks the most somber I have ever seen him. “It just never seemed like the right time.”

“But you lied to me. You’ve lied all along, and about so many things, about who you are, about what you do. How do you do something like this and live with yourself?”

“I’m not a cheat. I haven’t cheated on you, Kyra.”

“You’ve cheated on her then. I’m surprised she didn’t slap you.”

“She and I have a ...” He pauses to think and his hesitation puts me on alert.

“A great relationship.” I finish the sentence for him. “She’s more your type than I am. She’s exactly the type of person I see you with.”

“She’s not. She’s a nasty, nasty piece of work.”

“You two sound perfect for one another.”

His Adam’s apple bobs and he seems slightly anxious. “I made a mistake. I didn’t know what I know now.”

“And what’s that?” I shoot back. Each moment he stays here makes me hate him more because all I see is the lies woven through each and every interaction I’ve ever had with him.

“That I was so wrong, about so many things.”

I don’t want to hear his sob story. I don’t want to hear about the poor little boy who had such a hard life getting adopted by a rich man. Unable to control my rage I jab a finger in his chest. “What I want to know is what you, the son of a supposed billionaire, are doing at Redhill?”

BRANDON

This is my only chance to tell her. Jessica has forced my hand and it might have been the push I needed. Goodness knows I’ve had many chances, but I’ve been too scared to reveal to her my real self.

It makes me ashamed to say it out now. It’s the same shame that Emma must have felt when I first told her of my crazy idea to infiltrate Redhill.

“Jessica and I have never been romantically involved. Never.” I’m grateful things progressed so slowly that we never even made it to first base, but this isn’t the time to confess to Kyra that I had my eyes on that evil witch as a potential wife.

How I have changed. The other me couldn’t see past the dollar signs. Kyra saved me, and I owe her the truth. I owe her everything. “I lied to you about a lot of things. I stole into your company because I wanted to try something.”

Her head tilts, she stills, her eyes widening as she waits. “Try what?”

I have her complete and utter attention. “I wanted Greenways. It’s pricey real estate and it’s going to be worth a fortune in years to come.”

She moves her head to the center as if things are falling into place and the great mystery is getting unraveled.

“We’d watched as property development companies sought to buy the land from you. You and others on Greenways weren’t interested. Our people on the ground told us that some businesses were considering moving, but that a young and impassioned activist, the Katniss Everdeen of Greenways, didn’t want to give in. She had seen that this area was beginning to have better infrastructure and it was slowly being transformed. You convinced people to stay. We watched as companies came and went, each offering you good money, but you held firm. The other business owners looked up to you, they listened to you. To make matters worse, the media loved you. You were a rising star in the city, like Cardoza. Wanting to do good. How could any company go up against you and win? I mean, sure we could win. God knows corrupt government officials are easy to find and cultivate. But the people of this city love you. You wouldn’t go without a fight, and I couldn’t afford to have the stain of removing you hanging over my company. We stood to make millions from Greenways, and I didn’t want or need the bad publicity which would follow if people found out that we had underhandedly removed you.”

“So, you thought you’d seduce me, and charm me, and convince me to move, and you almost did.” Her face crumples like paper. “You worked on me.” Anger firebombs in her eyes. “You bastard.”

“I never meant to seduce you. I fell in love with you, Kyra. That part was real.”

Her mouth twists together, she glares at me as if I’m the devil. “You set out to deceive me.”

“Maybe—”

“Maybe?” she cries. “Listen to yourself. You’re trying to tell me the truth but you still can’t confront and accept it.”

I clasp my hands, perplexed and frustrated. I’ve never been in this position before. I’ve never had to explain my actions, or apologize for them. “My whole aim was to get you to

listen to me and to heed my advice. It was selfish and greedy and evil of me, but that’s the truth, Kyra. The rest of it, me falling for you, is another truth. It never even occurred to me that anything like that could happen.”

“You’re reprehensible. A monster. An evil, disgusting, repugnant monster. You preyed on me.”

I stride towards her and grab her hands because she needs to know that that part of it wasn’t made up. “I didn’t think we would end up together. We’re so different, or so I thought.”

“We’re not together. Not now.”

I try to plead with her. “You’re angry and upset, and you have every right to be. We started off hating one another—”

“I hate you now.” Her mouth sets in a hard line. I’m not explaining myself well. She’s trying to break my hand-lock but I won’t let her because I need her to listen but with a heroic burst of strength, she wrestles her hands away from my hold.

“I fell for it,” she snarls. “I started to trust you, and listen to you. Fredrich didn’t understand why I was changing my mind and considering moving.” She rubs her hands over her face, anguish pouring out of her. “How can you do this and look at yourself in the mirror?”

“You’re not listening. I started to fall in love with you, Kyra,”

“Don’t use that word. It’s not love. What you did was trick me.”

She’s got it all wrong. If there is a major falsehood, it is this. “I changed my mind. I knew I couldn’t go through with it.”

Rage stomps through her eyes as she pieces it all together; all the bits that once didn’t make any sense. “All this time you were making suggestions and criticizing our food event on the night of the fight, and you made me think I was stupid when I told you about my idea for the small business units. And your gripes and moans about the buckets and the leaky roof.”

“I saved your life.”

She blinks and mimics a damsel in distress. “Oh, yes, you saved me.” Her hands fly to her chest in a theatrical manner.

“I know that what I did was wrong, Kyra. To think that I could infiltrate your company and somehow persuade you to move.”

“It was morally wrong and completely stupid. ‘The’ Brandon Hawks—not Brad Hartley the traveler who worked on community projects—but a billionaire’s son infiltrating Redhill.” She scoffs in disgust.

Guilt grips my insides with its pincers and squeezes hard. “I was hiding from who I used to be. I wanted the old me gone. I reinvented myself. With a billionaire for a father, it’s easy enough to do. So, you see, nobody knew me. Though that might change now with that fucking photographer Jessica hired.” I shake my head in disgust. She has left no stone unturned. Her scheming, manipulative mind had it all planned out.

“You used me.” She steps forward and stabs me in the chest with a bony finger. “You used me.”

I blink, because my vocal chords fail. Her face twists as sure as if I’ve skewered her with a screwdriver, the pain of my words cutting her deeply. I want to put my arms around her and tell her that I’m sorry. I want to tell her that I made a mistake, that I could see that the work she did was good, and needed, and only a corporate machine would run over her dreams and raze them to the ground. But I have never seen so much anger in her before and I’m scared that any move on my part will make things worse. “Kyra, listen to me—”

“No! I’ve listened enough. I want you to get out of my life and never come back. You used me for your own selfish gain. For your greed. You stand for everything I despise.”

“I’m a changed man.”

“You’re the same old snake to me.” Her body sags with the weight of my deception. A moment passes, she looks away, wrapped in her own personal pain. “Was any of it real?”

I reach out, wanting to touch her face to comfort her, to show her that this is me now. What I feel for her hasn’t changed, and yes, it was real. These last few weeks, ever since Eli’s fight, they have all been real.

But she moves away, a shiver of revulsion making her shoulders jolt. I step towards her. “The way I feel about you now is real. I’m crazy about you, Kyra. I might not have fallen in love with you right from the start but the more time I spent with you, the more I grew in awe of you. At the start I was too busy pushing back on your ideas because they reminded me of who I was and where I had come from, and I hated that. I’ve spent twenty years trying to forget that unwanted child and to make my world be one in which I will never be poor, or hungry, or unwanted and forgotten, but you started to show me the world through your eyes, Kyra. You made me start to care.”

“Don’t ...”

“It’s true. I was wrong. I did a shitty thing. I lied and wheedled my way into Redhill for all the wrong reasons, but once there, working with you, going to those food nights, seeing the good work you do, the lives you transform, it made me see how wrong I was.”

“When did you have this epiphany?” she bites out. “A few hours ago, when Jessica had the balls to reveal to the rest of the world who you really are?”

“I was going to tell you.”

“When? In the helicopter? In the vat of grape juice? On the massage table? When? When did the lying ever stop?”

“What I did was so wrong, and so deceitful. It wasn’t easy to just come out and say it.”

“That’s why you didn’t come to city hall.” She puts a hand to her brow, as if this is too much information to understand all at once. Where once she had looked at me with such adoring eyes, now she looks as if she wants to stab me.

“I couldn’t.”

“I understand now why you couldn’t, because of Jessica.”

“And other business associates I might have run into.”

“And then your secret would have been out sooner, wouldn’t it, Brandon?”

The muscles along my jaw tighten with every passing second. She’s looking at me differently, as if the past weekend didn’t happen.

“I don’t want to hear any more,” she says, sounding as if she’s given up. “I can’t take any more. Not tonight. Not ever.”

“I want to explain,” I plead, because this could be my only chance.

“And you have explained.”

“Not everything.”

“There’s more?” she asks, her voice mocking.

I want to tell her who I was. I want her to know the real me even if it means peeling back the carefully constructed layers of wealth I have used to craft my new persona. I want this woman to be mine, because she is the only woman who has understood me, and I know now that it’s because we are cut from the same cloth. She didn’t have to rummage through trash cans to eat, but she has a heart, she has the type of heart and empathy I need to fix myself. To heal the hurt that broke me. I share more in common with her than I do with Philip Hawks.

“Who is Emma?”

“My PA.”

“Of course. Your PA. Why didn’t I think of that?” Her words fall out like an enlightened sigh. “That makes sense now.”

“And the reason why I rushed to her all the time was because I feel responsible.”

She frowns. “For what?”

“She was driving to my office to pick up some contracts I’d asked her to deliver to my house on the night of Eli’s fight. If I hadn’t asked her, she wouldn’t have had that accident.”

“You can’t know that.”

“But it’s true.”

“No. You can’t blame yourself for that.” She folds her arms, her face still hard as she tries to make me feel better. I shake my head, because I don’t want to have a pity party. I want Kyra to understand why I did what I did, I want her to hate me, and then to forgive me.

“You can blame yourself for this, though,” she says. “This is the mess you’ve created and deliberately.”

“I know, and I do. I feel awful. Emma hated the idea.”

Kyra plops down on the sofa, hanging her head. This was my plan, I knew the pieces, but for someone like Kyra, the unsuspecting victim, I understand that the entire thing is a cold, hard shock.

“I’m falling in love with you, K—”

She stares up at me, her nostrils flaring, her eyes wild with a thousand accusations. “You can’t possibly know the meaning of love. You don’t have that emotion inside you otherwise you wouldn’t have done what you did.”

I try to think of something to say, of finding a way to get her to forgive me.

“Will you do something for me?” she asks, her brow creasing, her lower lip wavering.

“Anything.” My heart leaps at the request. I will do anything. Anything.

“Leave. Never, ever return to Redhill again.”

I open my mouth, because this is not an option.

“That’s all I’m asking. Please.” The plea in her eyes slices through me like a knife through warm butter.

“But—”

“It’s the only thing I’m asking of you.” Her eyes turn glassy.

She’s asking me to do something I don’t want to do.

I can’t.

I’ve never met anyone like her before. I’ve never been able to open up to anyone before.

I need her.

“Can you do that for me?”