The King - S.R. Jones Page 0,16
the middle management is bloated, and the senior managers have wasted huge amounts of money. They should be industry leaders, in both their fields, but instead they’re stagnating. The last few games they’ve released have done badly compared to normal. The talent is still here; they just need shaking up.
Instead of buying this company to asset strip, I’ve bought it to turn around. I’ll hive off the IT side and take it over. It will become a fully-fledged part of Silvanov Asset Management’s stable. The game side, they get to keep, but with a period of input from me and my team and some investment. The deal is I get to cull some of the useless management who have helped fuck things up.
Time to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Alistair drones on next to me, and I glance out the window, thoughts drifting. To her. The girl who I found in my kitchen yesterday morning. The girl from the coffee shop who somehow wormed her way into my cold, hard heart with her sunny smile and her love of literature.
The girl who I walked away from six months ago when I learned she was engaged, only for her to come back into my life when her file landed on my desk, an employee of my new corporate toy.
Cassie. Bright, happy, shiny Cassie who these days seems anything but.
Cassie, who not only landed on my desk, but then turned up at my house. What are the odds? Infinitesimal, probably. It’s fate, has to be. The universe keeps throwing her in my path, and she’s shit out of luck because now I don’t just want her, but I need her.
I’ve not looked directly at her, but my peripheral vision is shit hot after spending years in war zones.
The girl who takes up far too much space in my head is currently hiding behind her friend thinking I won’t see her. I’ve seen her. With her head down, she studies the carpet as if it isn’t bland gray but a fascinating pattern. I bite back a smile, not wanting to give my thoughts away to the room.
I’ve not seen anything as seductive as the hot mess that was Cassie standing in my kitchen for a long fucking time. Seeing her there, in my space, it punched me in the gut. I could imagine her being there all the time, far too easily. For a while, I’d let myself indulge in a stupid fantasy of coming home after a hard day of busting balls and making money to my own sunny, happy respite in the form of a young woman still full of ideals.
The stupid fantasy screeched to a bitter end when I went on to see me not being able to give her what she wanted, until she withered away, a shell of her former self, hating me, resenting me. It’s bad enough I can’t show my own stepson the affection he needs most of the time; I don’t need a woman in my life reminding me over and over of my inability to love like a normal human being. Or, at least, not a woman like Cassie. If I ever did decide to bring a woman home for a long period of time, she’d be hard, like me. We’d fuck, and we’d play house, and she’d get a lot of trinkets, then when it was done, she’d leave, no questions asked. Something tells me Cassie doesn’t like trinkets, and she craves love, emotional connection, and affection. All the things I can’t give.
How would Cassie feel about me if she knew I’d ordered the death of my own father? How would she feel about me if she knew that I’d murdered people for less than her little rebellion of kicking my car door? How would she feel about me if she knew that, even now, with all the power and money I have, I still run arms to the West Coast of the US and oversee a crime empire in Moscow? Would she still want me? I fucking doubt it.
Doesn’t stop me from wanting to screw her brains out, though.
If I wanted her when she served my coffee, it was as nothing to the savage way I wanted her when I woke up to find her in my home, drinking my orange juice in my kitchen. Her makeup was smudged under those huge, warm-green eyes of hers. Long, tangled, red-blondish-brown hair fell over one shoulder, darker than I remembered, not as golden. She