It was more than enough. One person didn’t make much of a mess in an eighteen thousand square foot mansion.
Hell, in a place this big? One person might as well have been nobody at all.
My footsteps echoed down the main corridor as I moved toward the kitchen, but I became distracted when I passed my father’s study. In a few short weeks it would mark four years exactly since the day he died. Compelled by something I didn’t understand, I stepped into his study, leaving the door open behind me. It still smelled like him in there—like cigars, whiskey, and spoiled fruit. I breathed him in and went to his cherry-oak desk, a sprawling masterpiece of woodwork with gold accents. Tugging open his top drawer, a black velvet box slid to the back. I pulled it out, opened the lid, and smiled down at the eight remaining cigars tucked in a neat row within.
I’d bought him the cigars for his sixty-fifth birthday. That felt like ages ago now. Mom was already gone at the time, and he and I had lost what little connection remained between us. But the night I came home late from Luke’s with those cigars? Things felt different. Instead of retreating to his office and locking me out, he’d invited me to join him in the lounge for a drink and a smoke. I said yes.
We stayed up late into the night, the fire crackling beside us, puffing on cigars until the smoke and whiskey made us dizzy. We’d laughed about stupid shit, remembered my mother with fondness, and talked about the future of Thornton Enterprises.
That had been the night he told me the company would be mine no matter how the pieces fell. He’d written it into his will and he would see it be done. I had told him I would make him proud.
I reached into the box and ran my fingers gently over the cigars. He’d never acknowledged my endless pursuit of making him proud of me, and I’d never achieved it. He’d died knowing his son was the spoiled, arrogant, trust-fund brat the entire country thought him to be. And here I was, still behaving as such. Asking out models, pouting when they turned me down, and returning to an empty house that didn’t even feel like mine.
It never really had.
As a kid I’d have taken every opportunity to spend my hours in Thornton Woods. I would have rather been there than inside.
I removed one of the cigars from the box and fetched the matchbox. I brought them to my father’s favorite chair by the window, where I sat as I lit the cigar. Smoke billowed and the end burned orange, leaving a glowing reflection on the windowpane as I gazed out into the dark grounds of the estate.
I puffed smoke and thought of my old man.
I might not have been able to make him proud when he was living, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t honor his memory now, even if he had been a sour old son of a bitch. At the end of the day, he was still my father.
Cupid’s Arrows was the best shot I was going to get, and I couldn’t afford to squander it. If my old man was looking down on me, I’d show him and the board just how much I was capable of.
I would give them the best fucking marketing campaign they’d ever seen.
CHAPTER 8
LAILA
“Casey!”
My apartment met me with silence. I stood in the entranceway, fists planted on my hips, anger crossing my vision, waiting for my little sister to show herself. She was still here. I was sure of it.
“Casey!”
A head with long black hair poked around the corner from my in-suite spa down the hall that led toward the bedrooms. Casey’s hair was wet, and her cheeks were flushed, and I assumed since she was hiding behind the doorframe that she was also naked. Which meant that she’d not only helped herself to my clothes, my food, my bed, and my apartment all day but had also been indulging in my jacuzzi and steam room.
“What?” Casey’s features scrunched together in a scowl. She looked so much like our mother it was almost criminal. We’d both inherited Mom’s hazel eyes, deep skin, black hair, and freckles, but only Casey had been blessed with her small bones, dainty wrists and ankles, cute upturned nose, and slender physique. “You were gone all day. I was waiting for you to come home. Since when am I not allowed to make myself comfortable?”
I scoffed and shook my head. She’d done more than make herself comfortable.
Days on set always left me exhausted, so it felt like I had to drag my feet into the kitchen, where I opened the fridge and began pulling out the fixings to make myself dinner. My stomach growled as the promise of food drew nearer. Down the hall, I heard Casey muttering to herself as she dried off.
If my mother were here she’d tell me to take it easy on Casey. She’d remind me she was young and forever naïve and immature and deserved a bit of grace.
We all did.
But Casey never gave anyone grace, least of all me. She took, took, took, until there was nothing left to take, and then she’d turn everything around and make everyone else feel like the bad guy so she could run off into the sunset to chase someone else who was willing to keep giving.
The cycle never ended.
Still, she was my sister, and after losing our mother when we were teenagers, I knew that tomorrow was never promised, and family was family.
So I took a deep breath as I diced a cooked chicken breast and threw it into a pan. “I just wish you’d ask first before you helped yourself to my things. And maybe stay out of my shopping bags? It would be nice if I was the first one to wear the new things I bought. I have a whole closet of things you could choose but you had to dive right into the new stuff?”
Casey strolled into the kitchen. She’d tied her hair up in a towel and wore a spaghetti-strap tank top and sweatpants. Little beads of water glistened on her bare shoulders. “Everything in your closet is new, too. What’s the difference?”
“It’s my shit, Casey. Mine. It doesn’t matter whether or not there’s a difference to you because there is to me. You and I both know you like posting those pictures for clout. Otherwise you wouldn’t tag me in them.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course, because everything I do hasn’t always been in your shadow.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Look at everything you have, Laila!” She threw her arms wide, turned in a dramatic circle, and gestured at the entirety of my apartment. “The best view in New York City from a five thousand square foot penthouse full of furniture that costs more than my monthly salary. Why does it bother you so much to share it with me?”
I poured oil over the chicken and cranked the heat under the pan. “It doesn’t. I just… fuck, Casey, you’re so hard to talk to sometimes.”
Casey laughed. “In other words, I’m right and you’re wrong and you’re too proud to admit it.”
My little sister had also inherited my mother’s uncanny ability to spin things in her favor.
I pushed the chicken around the pan with a spatula and listened to the oil simmer. Sometimes she just made me feel used. She never came here to see me, never felt the urge to check in on me, never considered the fact that I might need someone just as much as she did. No. She only ever thought about herself and her Instagram followers and the attention she’d get posting content from inside my apartment.
“You can be so selfish sometimes,” Casey said. “If you don’t want me around, that’s just fine. You can enjoy your fancy apartment, and your fancy shoes, and your fancy clothes all by yourself. See you around.”