Page 37 of The Enemy

“Thank you, son, for taking care of my little girl.”

“What are big brothers for?”

I was going to throw up.

I didn’t throw up.Nor did I see Neo for the rest of the day. I would have been able to locate his whereabouts but for now, I was grateful. But at some point, during the day, he had come into his office, because right before the end of the day, a sage green box appeared on my desk.

How was it possible that the asshole made me hate him, yet he still made me cry at how thoughtful his gift had been?

He got me my own watch because he knew my grandfather wouldn’t be giving it to me. And that meant everything to me.

TEN

LOURDES

Twenty-six years old

Three yearslater

Time was a funny thing.Sometimes, it moved so fast that you felt like you couldn’t blink because you would miss a vital thing, and other times, it moved so slowly you wondered if you had entered a hellish dimension. In the end, it didn’t matter because time was still moving, and even though it felt like things hadn’t changed when you looked back, nothing was the same.

My life had been a lot of the same bullshit in the past three years. My grandfather still bitched and moaned because I was breathing, but the bastard wasn’t getting any younger. He had been having some health issues, and he’d been talking a lot about who would be taking the throne after he croaked.

It’s not like my father would be retiring anytime soon, but he wanted to make sure he had some input on who would be the next person to lead the company.

Dinners with him were much the same, but I had gotten better at being two-faced, smiled when he expected me,apologized even when I didn’t do anything wrong, and never shared my input because it wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

My relationship with my father was improving. We had weekly Friday dinners, and since my father knew Pricilla and I would get along better in public, they were usually at a restaurant. Once a month, he would insist on taking me out to lunch.

He made more of an effort when I moved out of the house.

It had hit him harder than I had realized when I told him I would be moving into my own place. He had not expected it, and to be honest I wasn’t sure about my decision, because home was all I’d known. It was filled with memories of my mother, and it was the room I refused to change because she had designed it. But my home also stopped being home the moment she passed away.

There came a point in every child’s life where they had to spread their wings and find themselves, and that’s what I had been doing for the past three years.

I hated thinking about that day—the day Neo left. It felt like I had gotten everything I didn’t know I longed for and then had it ripped away the next second, making me wish I had never hoped for it.

Neo left his imprint on my skin, and I have been making him pay for it ever since.

The bastard left without a word. As if having his precious little fingers inside of me and gifting me a watch because he knew my grandfather wouldn’t be doing so excused him for leaving in the middle of the night without any explanation.

Asshole.

If I loathed Neo before, I hated him now. Time didn’t make the heart grow fonder. Time made my heart grow barbed wire and fill with poison. Sure, the company was having a minoroverseas crisis, but that didn’t mean he had to leave and never return.

I was dead to him, but he wasn’t dead to me. His mother loved to brag about all the changes he was making. His friends loved to post whenever they visited him. Beautiful models always hung from his arms.

Everything felt like a lie.

What happened in the dark didn’t count in the light.

“Lou, leave it to me. I’ll make him pay.”

Nothing made me feel stupider than believing his words. Did he laugh at how naïve I had been? Share a drink with Tatum and laugh at how they had played me.

Years passed, and the asshole saw no retribution. Whenever I saw him, he gave me a smirk, acting like he owned the whole damn world.

But I guess one good thing did come out of Neo leaving. His department became mine, and I was advancing the corporate ladder faster than anyone would have thought. Even grandfather had been impressed.

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