But while McKay is part of this Company world, he’s not an Untouchable like Donovan and Adam. He sees the world just a little bit different from them. He LOVES Indie. That might be the only true thing in this entire book. McKay loves that girl and he has loved her for as long as he’s known her. Which brings a whole lot of other ethical and moral questions up that I didn’t have a chance to explore yet. And if one of these four people has to be “the good guy” then I guess I vote for McKay. Because he feels this shame very deeply.
Donovan starts out at the most “evil” of the three men. His justification for wanting Indie to go home with Adam is simply that. Justification. He needs her for something. Now, I’m sure along the way he changed his mind about his original plan. People do that. I just spent several pages explaining how I do that—so I’m not gonna judge Donovan over his choices as a fifteen-year-old boy. But we see him in a very specific role in this book. Indie’s… conscious. Her sanity. Her truth.
What we don’t see is what Donovan is doing away from the others. We see interviews where he’s the one in charge. He’s the one asking questions. He’s the one in control. His chapters are deceptively simple until we get towards the end and then—BAM. Donovan is not who we thought.
There’s a lot more to Donovan coming. He’s not bad, he’s not good, he just is. And he’s young, so he’s still learning.
I don’t begrudge anyone their learning.
Adam is the one we’re supposed to hate. Adam is set up as the bad guy from chapter one. But I hope you realize he’s not the bad guy. We haven’t even met the bad guy yet. And if you think it’s Carter, well… don’t get ahead of yourself.
Adam wants to quit when he buys Indie at that auction. He sees no point in living other than he was gifted with this privileged life and he feels honest-to-God guilt over not making the most of it. So buying Indie and taking her home to McKay under the pretense of building a Company clean-up team is just a way for him to feel like he’s participating in life.
But… there’s this one chapter where he admits to what he’s become after the brain injury and after the Company fell. It’s actually not that many words. But they are powerful words.
“And a few years later I was the leader of the most ruthless private army to walk this Earth since the Ten Thousand brought terror and fear to Ancient Greece.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…”
So we get a hint at what’s coming at the end.
Adam is in control of this shit show. He has always been in control.
Keep that in mind going forward.
And that leaves us with our last boy, Nathan St. James. If you’re not sure what to think about him, that’s good. After all, we get four very different opinions about this kid. Indie loves him. But I think we can all agree her character judgment is… not really up to par. But she paints an almost idyllic picture of her childhood and teen years with Nathan. I can’t really object to that since her life was so fucked up from the beginning, if she wants to believe it was perfect—who am I to say it wasn’t?
But Nate does very strange things with Indie. Most notably was the first time they had sex. If you were thinking… Uh, what the fuck, Nathan? Good. That’s what you should’ve been thinking.
Adam was on to something when he started questioning who he was and where he came from.
“I don’t even know where Nate came from. Just… one day he was there.
He wasn’t a baby. And there was never a mother over there. Just the grandfather and then the kid. He was about four, maybe, when he showed up. Five at the oldest.
And it occurs to me that I should look into this shit. It occurs to me that I should’ve looked into this shit a long-ass time ago.”
But of course he ends up in the hospital that night and looking in to Nathan slips his mind or… it’s possible he didn’t even remember his suspicions. It’s also possible that he was afraid to get too close to Nathan after Indie almost kills him. So that revelation will have to wait.
Nate’s story is far from over. So don’t worry. You’ll understand soon.
And then, of course, we have Indie.
If you formed an opinion about her I’d like to caution you here. Nothing about Indie is what it seems. You think you know—but her part of this story is slanted, and fragmented, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s not that she’s LYING. She just sees the world from her own, internal perspective and with her own “Indie Blinders” on.
Here’s something else I want to say about Indie. And this ties in with how the world of Creeping Beautiful fits into the larger world of the Company, Rook and Ronin, and The Misters.
She is no Sasha.
I made this point several times in the book on purpose.
If you want to compare Indie to any of the Company girls I’ve written before, compare her to Sydney in Meet Me In The Dark.
Sydney is a case in the extreme. Not only was she a Company girl, she was owned by a sadistic son-of-a-bitch. Her life was a living hell.
I wrote Sydney that way on purpose. I think I even spelled this out in the EOBS for MMITD. Because up until that point the only Company Girls we knew were the “lucky” ones. Harper and Sasha are about as different from Sydney and Indie as night is from day.
Gonna go on a little tangent here for a sec. When I first published MMITD I got a LOT of weird comments from some of my early readers. Some of my closest early readers. They didn’t get it. They didn’t like it. And for a while there—maybe a year—I had second thoughts about writing that book. But then the reviews were so positive, and people fell for this couple with all their dark imperfections, that my own opinion about the book settled in.
But I remember writing in the EOBS that the reason we NEEDED Sydney was because there was no other way to show you, the reader, just how fucked up this Company world was. If you only ever saw Sasha and Harper, you might think, I dunno. It’s not so bad.
No. It is. That’s why Sydney needed a story.
I needed to put you into the mind of a “real” Company girl and let you experience that life for yourself. There was no other way. There is no other way to BE SOMEONE ELSE. To feel what they feel, to see what they see, to love, and hate, and long for the things they feel, and see, and love, and hate, and long for.
And Indie is like Sydney in that she was left behind.
Not by a man the way Sydney was, but by the Company itself.
She had Adam, and McKay, and Donovan. But they were left behind too.
This is the real reason I wanted to write this new series.
In The Company we saw the heroes.
We saw James, and Harper, and Merc and Sydney, and Rook and Ronin, and Ford and Ashleigh, and Spencer and Veronica, and Sasha and Jax.
But we never saw the bad guys.
Oh hey. I guess we do have a bad guy in this story.
It’s all of them.
In Creeping Beautiful we meet the villains.
And nope. We’re not done with Nick Tate just yet.
If you re-read that ending several times just to make sure you got it right – yes, you got it right.
Need me to spell it out for you, just so we’re clear?
NICK TATE IS ALIVE.