Net Worth by Amelia Wilde
18
Mason
A week isan eternity to think about what I’ll do to Charlotte Van Kempt. I feel cursed, somehow. Every second feels like an hour. The world continues at a breakneck pace while I’m trapped. Waiting. Thinking of her.
I thought the weekly schedule would intensify things for her. I’ve had to live with a certain sick dread for fourteen years—why shouldn’t the daughter of my enemies feel something similar? Why shouldn’t she lie awake nights afraid of what’s coming?
I was right—it has made things more intense for Charlotte. The weeklong intervals between Fridays have her breath shallow and her cheeks flushed by the time she steps off my elevator. Her emotions have become more outsized. The crying—
The crying is exquisite.
But my emotions have become more outsized, which, like a fool, I didn’t anticipate. I didn’t think the urge to bend and punish and lick and taste could get any stronger, and it has.
It has.
Stronger and infinitely more complicated. Sometimes I can’t sleep for how much I want her in the bed next to me. My lungs ache from it. My muscles burn. The pillow and sheets on the other half of the bed badger me. This is how the blanket would fall over her shoulder. This is how it would pull and curl as she turned over on my pillow. This is how her blonde hair would spread out on the pillow case. You can see it now, can’t you?
It’s unbelievably fucked up. Because the other side of that want is a need that bristles and burns. It has the shape of anger but it’s more than that. Anger is too simple, too blunt, for what I feel. Retribution requires more. It requires patience. It requires commitment. Above all, it requires focus. It took several years for me to be able to set aside my seething rage and grief and see the way forward. Planning for this has been another one of my projects, nested inside the others the way every property I fought for in those early years was nested inside rebuilding Phoenix and keeping my siblings alive and together and regaining the fortune that had been taken from us.
So. My conflicting feelings about Charlotte won’t have any impact on the ultimate goal.
I won’t let them.
Regardless, I’m hard as steel from thinking about her when Scott pulls up to the Cornerstone development late on Friday afternoon. I’ve waited as long as possible to make the visit. Set it up as the final task between the interminable week and the moment when the elevator doors will part to reveal a nervous, blushing, wet-between-the-thighs Charlotte Van Kempt. A reward of sorts for surviving the agony of not fucking her for another week.
I step out of the car into a golden summer afternoon. The sky is the color of Charlotte’s eyes.
“Mr. Hill,” Dave says, approaching from deeper within the site. It looks more like a building now. “Do you have a few minutes? I wanted to show you some of the progress on the ground level.”
Cornerstone’s a building now, which is nice. There was a certain stark possibility to all those steel beams. There’s more in framing and floors. I’ve hired extra people, extra teams, to accelerate the construction. Pushed it to the very limit of speed. I half regret it now, climbing around inside a space that’s nearing completion.
But.
An accelerated timeline on the development means an accelerated timeline with Charlotte. At the beginning of all this, I thought I could strike the perfect balance between terror and loss. Break her. Ruin her for every other man. Turn her into a panting, crying slut for me, and then drop her by the wayside. Long enough to bask in the fullness of my revenge, and no longer.
My knee doesn’t hurt nearly as much moving around on the inside. That’s the mark of real progress, if a person with a permanently fucked-up knee can get around without trying to surreptitiously search for a bench.
Dave rattles off plans and figures and I pay attention to him. I really do. It’s just that I pay more attention to thinking of Charlotte.
Charlotte on her knees in my living room.
Tears racing down her cheeks while she tried her best to take my cock in her throat.
The taste of her—fuck. The taste of her, the swollen heat of her, the way she sobbed when she realized what was happening. When it finally set in that I was going to make her come on my tongue. Sometimes pleasure is a far more effective revenge. It’s all in how well you blend it with pain.
My cock throbs as we make our way down to the main level. It’s a matter of hours now. I have some decisions to make. Some pain to prioritize. Some pleasure, if she’s very good.
Ah, fuck. Especially if she’s not.
“—ahead of schedule,” Dave is saying. “I’ll have the information to you by the end of next week unless something else comes up. Don’t foresee that happening.”
“You have my number,” I tell him. “Remember—”
We step out of the building, and the thing I was going to tell him to remember disappears in a puff of smoke.
Off to one side of the site, Cyrus Van Kempt stands near a pile of bricks. Charlotte’s father. The years haven’t been kind to him. He looks older. More bloated. More gray, but I see the same hardness in his stance. The prick scowls at the building. His expression is visible even with his hand shading his vision. His hand falls, and he says something—not to anyone, because there’s no one around. It looks like a curse.
And then he sees me.
The scowl shifts to bare his teeth.
The part of me that wants to kill him bares its teeth.
“Mr. Hill?”
“Go back to work, Dave.”
I don’t look back to see if he follows my orders or not. I walk toward Cyrus, every muscle involved in the effort. My knee already throbs from his presence alone.
It takes so much work to look invulnerable. To cover up the signs of pain. To keep my guard up. I have no choice but to meet him this way. Turning your back on a man like Cyrus Van Kempt only invites him to chase after you. I won’t allow it. Not only because I’m not a fucking coward, but because running for any real distance hasn’t been on the table for years.
I’m two paces away when he comes to an abrupt stop and shoves a finger into my face. “You made a deal with my daughter.”
I cock my head to the side and furrow my brow. “Of course I did, Cyrus. You signed off on it. Did you have too much to drink and forget about it?”
A wild grin spreads across his face, his teeth clicking together, and my god. He came here drunk. “I don’t have to be sober to know you’ve been fucking her.”
“Have I?”
I wish.
The grin melts into a sneer. “I know my daughter. I know what you’ve been doing to her. I hope you’ve had a good time, because that’s the only thing of mine you’re getting.”
The only thing of mine.Like he owns her. Like this man, this drunk piece of shit who’s standing on my property, has any claim to Charlotte.
“Do you still think she’s yours? That’s cute, Cyrus. Why don’t you concentrate on making some money for your wife instead of obsessing about your daughter?”
“Don’t you say shit about my wife. Or about Charlotte.”
“How does she afford the latest season of Dior?” I ask, putting on a mystified expression. “Right. She doesn’t. Your wife must not go out in society anymore.”
“Not my fault the economy’s a mess.”
I snort. “How convenient. When you’re on top it’s because of your hard work. But when you’re failing, it’s because of the economy.”
“You don’t know fuck-all about my business.”
“Actually, that’s not true. I’ve read every document. That’s what the majority stakeholder can do. And you signed that over to me.” A pause. “Along with your daughter’s body.”
“You son of a bitch.” Cyrus overemphasizes every word, but he comes down hardest on bitch. “In the flesh. Your mother was a bitch. Natalie Hill was always a frigid—”
The punch I throw is so hard it hurts my knee. Of course it fucking hurts my knee. The force of a punch comes from the ground up, and the twist in my body puts too much pressure on the knee. But fuck this guy.
His head snaps around and he stumbles back a step, then loses his balance completely and crumples to the ground. His palm splays out to catch him and he lets out a soft grunt. I hope a piece of building shrapnel went through his hand. I hope it breaks all his fingers.
Gingerly, he lifts his hand from the ground. That’s all the time I give him before I put my hands in the front of his shirt and haul him off the ground. Up toward me. So I can get into his face. He’s too heavy to do it and goddamn it, if it weren’t for this bastard maybe it wouldn’t feel like a knife through the knee to do this.
If he had helped me, if he had done any fucking thing, then I’d have had a chance. I was supposed to spend six weeks in rehab to fix my knee. I was supposed to spend three more months in physical therapy. But there was no money. There was no money, and if I’d gone away to repair the shattered knee they would have taken my siblings. They would have taken them. I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t let it happen. Fucking ever. They’re my family.
Rage feels pure, and hot, and deadly. It feels like sitting in a hospital bed while some unholy shrew from social services looked up from her clipboard and told me that there was nothing to be done while my six-year-old sister sobbed in my arms and the morphine wore off. It feels like tens of thousands of excruciating steps. It feels like fire.
“If you ever say her name again, I’ll kill you,” I growl into Cryus’s face. “You’re a piss-poor excuse for a man and the world would be better off without you.”
His eyes go out of focus. He’s had more to drink than I thought. Did he drive here? Another spike of fury. I don’t give a fuck if he wants to drink himself to death, but he’s not going to take anyone else with him.
“Why don’t you do it then?” Cyrus doesn’t slur, but I can tell it’s a near thing. He’s had years of practice with this. He wraps both of his hands ineffectually around mine but doesn’t have the strength to shake me off. The counterweight of his body is too much for the tendons, too much for the muscles. “Or are you as much of a pussy as James? Like father, like son.”
The world drops behind a red curtain. Fuck it. Fuck him. It’s over. I’m ending it. The muscles in my shoulder tense. Have to plan for this. Have to stay on my feet. Let go of him and draw back the fist—
Shouting all around us breaks into the act. Somebody’s got a hand on my shoulder, and somebody else is unhooking my hand from the front of his shirt and pulling him away. I try to throw off the hand that’s on my shoulder but he doesn’t let go. Doesn’t put any backward pressure on me, either. A hand comes around to my chest. “Stop. Jesus.”
“You okay?” It’s Dave, with Scott coming up on my other side. Scott takes one look at me and goes to supervise the removal of Cyrus from my sight. “Mr. Hill. Mason. You okay?”
Scott and two other guys hustle Cyrus around the stack of bricks. One of them glances back over his shoulder at me.
“He’s drunk,” I shout. “Get him a ride.”
Get him a ride before I kill him.Everything I am wants to chase after him, to run until I can catch him in a flying tackle and put him down forever, but I can’t, because I can’t chase him, because I can’t risk the damage.
Ha, ha. What a goddamn joke. The damage has already been done.
“Mason,” Dave says again, and I feel it then—my face. The expression on my face. Cyrus didn’t land a single blow, but my knee hurts like a motherfucker. I know I’m letting it show—all that pain and hatred, and underneath that the shock and confusion of hearing that prick tell me he wasn’t going to help. I can feel the shape of It’s for Remy on my tongue. See the shake of his head, and the self-satisfied smile.
“I’m fine.” Dave hasn’t let go. “I’m fine. I’m not going to go after him.”
“You want me to get people out here?”
Security, he means. Beyond the company we already use. People to make sure he doesn’t come back. The technicalities of our agreement are such that while the building is under construction, the property is effectively mine. I can bar him from the site. “Monday. Have them here on Monday. You can let go of me.”
Dave hesitates, then pats at my shoulder and releases me.
Like my dad did when he was alive.
Scott reappears, moving directly to my side. “Car’s waiting, Mr. Hill,” he says. “It’s a good time to go home.”
