“We want to win.
We want to win big.
We want to win the whole thing.”
Shaquille O’Neal
One
If someone had told him he’d end up in Chicago, asking his nemesis for help, he’d have told them they needed to stop smoking crack.
But here he was—Daniel Osei Gilbert, one of football’s toughest defensive players—on Jamie MacNiven’s doorstep, about to swallow his pride and lay himself prostrate at the newly retired footballer’s feet.
It wasn’t a good moment for him. If anyone found out he was here…
Anyone?He shook his head. The media and fans were bad, yeah, but who was he kidding? There was one “anyone” who was the worst—his dad. His traditional Ghanaian dad would call himokotobonkuand then give him The Look as he said, “I’m disappointed in you, Daniel.”
He didn’t fancy being called a pussy, but it was The Look that cut him to the core.
Danny had only gotten it once—the summer he was seventeen, when he’d met his dad for the first time. He hadn’t known offering to help the women clean up after dinner, the way his mom had taught him, was not how a man in Ghana acted. His dad had given him The Look and called him a Nancy boy before ignoring him the rest of the night.
Danny had vowed right then and there never to earn that expression again. So far, he’d managed to avoid it.
So far.
He stared at the shrouded office’s sign. He had to lower the dark sunglasses he wore to read it.
Winners Inc.
It was discreet, a simple sign to contrast the large double doors at the end of the ritzy hallway. Nothing at all like what he’d have expected Jamie MacNiven to use. Not that he knew MacNiven well.
Hell—off the field, he didn’t know the guy at all. The only thing he knew about MacNiven was that he had wicked aim and a singleness of purpose that Danny had been hard-pressed to rock despite his best efforts. It’d really been the media that had turned their natural opposition into a rivalry of epic proportions.
The media was always into his shit. Had been from the moment he’d started playing football professionally, when he was eighteen.
Danny made a face. If he were honest, he’d admit that hemighthave helped rumors of their rivalry through his actions during their matches. He couldn’t help that sometimes things got heated on the field. MacNiven pushed him the way no one else ever had.
Truth was, Danny respected MacNiven. Despite being born with a silver spoon up his ass, the guy was a workhorse. You didn’t get to their level of play by being a slacker. He knew that firsthand. And while MacNiven was on the field, he’d been excellent.
Which was exactly why Danny was here. If anyone could coach him to come out on top from this situation he’d gotten himself into, it was MacNiven. If he had to swallow some pride to do it, so be it. He’d worked hard to earn everything he had—he wasn’t about to let it all go up in a puff of smoke. He’d seen it happen to other players. They started dabbling in women and drugs and every bad thing that went with them, and soon they lost their starting jobs and then their families and their self-respect.
He didn’t do any of that shit. He didn’t think his dad or younger half brother Kofi, who were both living with him, did either. But the guys his dad had met in London did—all of it—and they did it inhishome, where they’d started to camp out.
And Danny couldn’t get them to leave.
Which was why he was here: to ask MacNiven to help him figure out how to move them out—quietly, without alerting the media or ruining his relationship with his family.
He shook his head in disgust. Him—Chelsea’s biggest, baddest, scariest enforcer—couldn’t get a few people to vacate his house.
He’d brought it up to his dad once, a few weeks ago, and his dad had been affronted. “They are my brothers, Daniel,” his dad said to him. “They are from my country, and therefore family, and it’s a man’s responsibility to support his family.”
He’d been of two minds about that—he still was. Danny had grown up in an old apartment in Encino, California, with his single mom. Encino had a lot of wealth—what area of Los Angeles didn’t?—but his mom, who’d been working toward becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon back then, had lived frugally. Their apartment had worn linoleum and puke-green appliances. He could still smell the funk of the carpets from whatever smoker had lived there before they’d moved in.
Having come from a humble background, he understood the difference between a hand up and a handout. He was the first to help out a person in need—it’d been why he and his best friend growing up, Immanuel Ortiz, had started The Aurora Project, their nonprofit for kids. They’d wanted to do something to help kids who’d been like them: without two parents, on their own, and struggling to make it. Based in Los Angeles, Ortiz ran the day-to-day. Danny handled the finances on the down-low. He hadn’t wanted everyone to know the extent of his financial involvement there.
“Everyone” in this case was his dad. His dad wouldn’t understand why Danny would give money to people he didn’t know. A man took care of his family, period. “Other people won’t care about you the way blood will,” his dad said.
Well, his “blood” was currently in his penthouse in London, snorting away the money that was supposed to go toward improving their lives.