Chapter 2

“Success is a weapon.”

 

In a penthouse suite in OldMouth Bay, a tall, thin man with black skin and grey eyes smeared a ball of shaving cream across his face. The man, a hedge-fund executive called Andrew Phillips, had sorted all the pieces of his morning routine at the sink top—moisturizers beside the aftershave, exfoliators beside the cologne. It was a rare day he gathered them all in force.

Through the mirror, he watched his wife Alisa plod toward him. Her six-sizes-too-big hoodie drooped over her shoulders. With the sagging skin under her eyes and the general dampness about her, she looked like she’d crawled through a dumpster on all fours. But as far as he could tell, she hadn’t left the apartment in weeks. In fact, she hadn’t spoken face-to-face with another non-Andrew person for months.

She didn’t even look at him. “Has the viscount moved the meeting time up?”

“Nope.”

“It’s still at two?” she asked as she slid beside him and reached for the floss.

“And I’ll be there at two, too,” he said.

“Andy, it’s nine,” she said. “Gwen’s quite a whip, huh?”

Andrew smacked his lips and turned back to the mirror. Gwen, his old partner back at the firm, hadn’t pushed him to work harder at all. Truth was, she’d begged him to retire for the past three years.

A few years after they founded the firm, she stopped coming over for dinner. At work, she’d duck around corners to escape him. These days, she and her cattle on the board wanted to keep selling to lordlings with loose pockets and chavs who’d won the lottery. But Andrew had tasted momentum. Eighty-million marks from where he started, and he wasn’t slowing down. The market was up, his wallet was fat, and the competition was dissolving like cotton candy. And yet, he hadn’t vied for a single Lord in all of his company’s five years.

Unacceptable.

Six years ago, Gwen had pried him off that piss-stained dorm-couch and shown him a world of ballrooms and penthouses and yachts. Even after all she’d done to break ties, Andrew planned to return the favor.

“After this deal,” Andrew said through a mouthful of toothpaste, “we should do something.”

Alisa squinted at him and spat into the sink.

“We used to go out, you know,” he said.

“So I’ve heard,” she said, walking away.

For a moment, Andrew eyed a makeup kit on the sink’s corner. Scanning himself in the mirror, he noticed an inflamed spot on his chin. But if he fixed it—would Lord Bradley be the kind of man who preferred natural skin? The profile he read had hinted as much. But something nagged him about it. Aside from vague conservative statements, the viscount had avoided the public eye for decades. That left Andrew without a strategy. He grimaced.

Andrew emerged from the bathroom in time to watch Alisa shamble into the kitchen and pour herself a bowl of milkless cereal. She took the bowl over to the ceiling-high picture-windows that overlooked the city. Outside, skyscrapers loomed over the bay’s grey waters like trees by a creek, their bases connected by the tangled roots of rowhouses down below. Behind them, five broad, pink planetary rings arched off toward the horizon, just slightly off from where the sun rose in the west. The endless traffic looked tiny from this height, as did the blighted stretches of shanties at the city’s south end.

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Alisa had craved that view. When the realtor first opened the curtains, she’d bought the flat on the spot. But that was back when she wore dresses every day. Fresh out of university, almost as rich as a Lord. Monthly political rallies. Pathmen rights marches down the Kingslane. Pseudo-Anarchist dabbling at dinner—titter about welfare programs, unions, and on rare nights, elections—and not just from Alisa, from Andrew as well. Those were the days of long nights, parties, and week-long hangovers.

Alisa still had the hangovers, but they weren’t the kind she could laugh about anymore—these days, she’d just go quiet, close her eyes, and clutch her temples tight. When the Anarchists in Trant stopped making speeches and started making corpses, that dabbling made her a pariah. They’d struck her name from every invitation list, every contact sheet. Over the past two years, Andrew had dragged his own reputation out of the gutter. But she hadn’t. And she never would.

“If you don’t want to do anything, that’s fine,” he said.

“I’ve not said a word.” She took a bite of her cereal.

He smiled, but then furrowed his brow. “You’re eating? Didn’t you just brush your teeth?”

“It’s awful,” she said. “You should try it.”

Tapping his foot, Andrew took a sharp breath. “Right,” he said. “We’ll do a cruise. We don’t have to talk to anybody, we can just go and relax. We get sun, water, drinks, and if we’re alone, we could just sail around.”

“Hard to sail around when you’re working.”

Andrew’s shoulders fell. “There’s a million things I have to do before I retire, Alisa.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“It’s only been five years,” he said.

She sniffed and bundled up in her jacket. “We’ve got a pool and a mini-bar and a home theater.” She looked back at him and smirked. “Did you know the fridge has wi-fi? Just figured that out last week. It talks, too. If you order food, they rush it over in less than two hours. Two hours! How long have we had that?”

The financier shrugged. “We bought it together.”

“I hate it,” she said.

The two were still for a few minutes. Andrew teetered from one foot to the other but didn’t say anything. She never looked at him, anymore. He didn’t know why—it might’ve been the way he’d forget to say goodbye when he left for work, or the way he tugged on his shirt collar and swallowed when she started talking politics. It could’ve been anything. But she never said a word, so he could never tell.

He straightened his shoulders and stood tall. “Alright, I’ve got to head out. I’ll be back tonight. We’ll go out. I’m thinking seafood? Let’s do seafood. It’ll be great.”

With that, Andrew marched out the door. That was the last time he ever saw his wife.

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