Series: Cobalt Empire Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 220
Estimated words: 215301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 861(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 861(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
“What’d he say to you?”
“That he was there at the Hamptons last summer.” He rubs his lips back and forth, wrath flaming his eyes. I can almost feel the heat radiating off him. He rips at a thread in the comforter. “He reminded me what I watched.”
I cover my face with my palms. “Dude. No way.” My brain hurts. My chest hurts. Everything fucking hurts.
Eliot had been invited to a summer pool party in the Hamptons, hosted by some hedge fund manager. The upper echelon. Despite my family being loaded, we don’t typically socialize with other billionaires.
We might cross paths at ballets, charity galas, other high society functions, but our parents preferred to raise us in Philadelphia next to our aunts, uncles, and cousins on a handful of acres in a gated neighborhood. We didn’t grow up in a seven-story brownstone in the Upper East Side with play dates arranged by nannies.
There were no birthdays at private clubs or forcing us to take fencing classes and piano lessons. Our mom grew up that way and despised it, so she’s been determined to keep us on the periphery of those social circles.
Eliot has always loved stepping into that world. He calls it his greatest performance. Where he gets to work on his acting chops and pretend to be someone else for the night.
Last summer, I went with him to the Hamptons party. In solidarity. We both thought it’d be the usual affair: free champagne, horrible conversation, and fake laughs.
I spent most of my time outside where the DJ was taking music requests. I wasn’t inside with Eliot when the host dropped down a projector screen and started playing porn.
Specifically, our parents’ porn tapes.
They were illegally filmed having sex decades ago. They’d been in their early twenties, and the guy who filmed them went to jail. But the internet is forever.
I’ve been fortunate enough to never catch a glimpse of it. Charlie said he stumbled on a thumbnail once. And Eliot, to this day, will tell everyone who listens that he’s never set eyes on five seconds of the footage.
That would have been true up until last summer.
I still remember him striding casually to the pool, hands in his pockets, like nothing was wrong. “Time to leave, brother,” he whispered to me. I just barely detected the fury in his eyes. Subtle, enflamed shards of ire.
The car ride home, he told me he’d given them zero reaction as the porn played. He’d grabbed his glass of wine and taken a calm sip, acted like Bloomberg was playing, then went outside to find me.
The only thing keeping Eliot calm was knowing he had to get me out of there. He didn’t want me to see or hear our parents having sex.
There is no amount of therapy that’d erase the damage for me. I’ve thanked him a billion times. For Eliot—his brain is a fortress. Whatever tries to plague him, he will battle away with purpose and rage.
So it’s not shocking that the Hamptons is surfacing volatile emotions in my brother. It’s not shocking a Rochester is attached to those same feelings.
Eliot lets go of the unraveling comforter thread. “The bastard wouldn’t shut up about me watching their porn tapes. He probably wanted me to hit him, and if it weren’t this play, if it weren’t my entire career on the line, I would’ve had him on the floor.”
“So what can we do now?” I ask. “Track him down?”
“Nothing.” Eliot stares hard at a gold-framed oil painting on his wall; an identical one is hung in my bedroom. It’s called Destruction and depicts the sack of an ancient Romanesque city, a civilization up in flames. “I retaliate, and I’ll be fired, Tom. Volatility has been my whole life. When things go right, I figure out how to blow them up and not in the good way.”
“Yeah, I know the feeling,” I tell him.
We share a heavy look. I think it’s the first time in our lives we’re both together in this position, trying desperately not to be the caustic forces that’ll topple our ambitions.
My phone buzzes on the comforter, and I flip over the screen to see a text.
PHOENIX WOLFGANG
Let’s reschedule. We don’t need to work this morning when you’re hungover.
My stomach roils. “He thinks I’m hungover.”
“Tell him you’re radiant. Full of life. All truths.”
“Indeed.” I comb a hand through my bedhead hair. “I mean, does he not know who I am? I can defeat a hangover.”
“Precisely. Remind him.” Eliot leans into my shoulder, but he’s not reading the text. It’s just habit. So I read Phoenix’s exact message out loud, and then he grins, “Didn’t you say he was a raging dick? Because that sounded on the verge of sweet.”
“He is still a dick. This one text proves nothing.”
“I should meet him to verify,” Eliot tells me. “Invite him.”