CHAPTER ONE
AXEL
A gorgeous fury.
That’s what New York City had; what drew me in.
It was the “starving hysterical naked” madness of Ginsberg, but it was more than that. Way more.
NYC throbbed with a pulse—one that you could see, feel, taste, and fuck.
It was the fury of ambition. The need to not just rise but explode.
That’s what brought me to this fascinating shithole.Shitholebeing laced with love, of course. The way fraternity members love their house; that distant, codependent, beer-stained love. The type of love that would absolutely ditch you in a heartbeat if something better came up; except what could be better than being a billionaire in New York City?
My brothers and I might have been Kentuckians by birth, but we were New Yorkers by creed.
Ambition brought us, the gorgeous fury snagged us, and the sprawling, unchecked future made us stay. That and a little unfinished business.
We came to explode.
And I was a motherfuckin’ firework, baby.
“Axel. Earth to Axel.” The annoyed intonation of my brother Trace’s voice jostled me from my reverie. I’d been staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Manhattan. Looking out at the mess of Manhattan always got me thinking about where we’d started in this gorgeous, furious city.
“What?” I tuned into the conversation. A bit too late for my brothers’ tastes. They both rolled their eyes in unison. Sure, I should have been listening. But this damn cityscape was so damnsexy.
“I said Francis is coming so we can discuss the list of new properties he scouted for us.” Trace’s big leather chair creaked a little as he leaned back in it, arching a brow at me condescendingly. He was older and taller than Damian and me, but he really showed his older-brother superiority through his unflinching use of judgmental eyebrows.
“That’s great,” I said, steepling my fingers as I turned my attention back to the world beyond the window. It was a gray day, early summer. The clouds were so thick and low I could practically touch them from this floor of the building. I could imagine the humid bite of the outside air, even though here in the conference room, it was a perfectly conditioned sixty-seven degrees.
“Why do you look like you’re passing a kidney stone?” Damian asked me. I was the youngest in our family board room, but not by much. Damian and I were the same age for roughly one month, which meant we’d been in the same grade all through school.
“I can barely hear either of you over Trace’s eyebrows.” I winced as Trace rolled his lips inward, trying not to laugh. “Calm your brows, bro.”
“You are such a fucking twatnugget,” Trace said, launching his pen in my direction. Our pens were custom-made and heavy enough to double as a weapon should the need arise, so I dodged it as best I could from my chair.
“That’s a new one,” I said. Some people exercised their brains with sudoku or crossword puzzles or that incomprehensibly annoying new game, Wordle. My brothers and I chose to keep our cerebellums active by inventing new insults for each other. “I give it an eight out of ten.”
We might have moved millions of dollars an hour but we were still brothers to our cores.
“Eight out of ten? The scale is rigged. Listen, can we get back to this property?” Trace motioned to a fresh-faced young man on the other side of the glass wall of our conference room. The guy popped in, a big smile on his face, eager to please. And he should be, because we paid really fucking well at Fairchild Enterprises.
We had no other option but to play the game our way. To the wealthy, elite assholes of Wall Street and Manhattan in general, we would always be the hillbillies. It didn’t matter if I flew to my house in the Hamptons in my helicopter. To them, being self-made meant we were new money, which only resonated as an insult on their side of the aisle. Because my older brother Trace made our first half-million by squeezing Wall Street—a financial move that some of these dickheads looked down on—they thought we were dumb money on top of that. And because we refused to dress, look, or act the part of the snide holier-than-thou jerkfaces they wanted us to be, we were also considered ugly money.
New. Dumb. Ugly.
I’d cry about it if I didn’t have so many zeroes at the end of my bank balance.
But this wasn’t an empire for empire’s sake—no, we wanted a community to go along with it. One designed strictly for the so-called new, dumb and ugly. We weren’t those Monopoly fuckers who freebased dollar bills and set fire to the competition. We actually had morals, thankyouverymuch.Rigidmorals, at that, though we were inclined to embrace slight hedonism.
Because nobody said you had to be celibate as one of the good guys. Even though, to most of the elite circles here, we were unequivocally, hands downthe bad boys.
“Can you pick up that pen and bring us a fresh round of espresso?” Trace asked the new hire, Kyle.
Kyle nodded effusively. “Of course. Of course. Anything you want.” He picked up Trace’s pen, returned it to him with a strange sort of bow, and then hurried out of the conference room.
“He gets five stars for the bow,” Damian murmured. “Does he have Asian heritage?”