Ruthless Rival (Cruel Castaways)

Present

Principles. I had very few of them.

Only a handful, really, and I wouldn’t call them principles, per se. More like preferences. Strong partialities? Yeah, that sounds about right.

It was my preference not to deal with property and contract disputes as a litigator, for instance. Not because I had a moral or ethical issue representing either side of the aisle, but simply because I found the subject morbidly boring and entirely unworthy of my precious time. Tort and equitable claims were where I thrived. I liked messy, emotional, and destructive. Throw salacious into the mix, and I was in litigation heaven.

It was my preference to drink myself into a mini coma with my best friends, Arsène and Riggs, at the Brewtherhood down the street, as opposed to smiling, nodding, and listening to another mind-numbing story about my client’s kid’s T-ball game.

It was also my preference—not principle—to not wine and dine Mr. Shady McShadeson here, also known as Myles Emerson. But Myles Emerson was about to sign on a hefty retainer with my law firm, Cromwell & Traurig. And so here I was, on a Friday night, a shit-eating grin smeared across my face, tucking the company credit card into the black leather check holder as I treated Mr. Emerson to foie gras tarts, tagliolini with shaved black truffles, and a bottle of wine with a price tag that could put his kid through four years of an Ivy League education.

“Gotta say, I’m feeling real good about this, fellas.” Mr. Emerson let out a burp, patting his third-trimester-size belly. He held an uncanny physical resemblance to a bloated Jeff Daniels. I was glad he was feeling dandy, because I sure as hell was in good spirits about charging him a monthly fee starting next month. Emerson owned a large janitorial company that mainly catered to big corporations and recently had had four lawsuits filed against him, all for breach of contract and damages. He needed not only legal aid but also duct tape to shut his trap. He’d been bleeding so much money over the past few months I’d offered to put him on a retainer. The irony wasn’t lost on me. This man, who offered people cleaning services, had hired me to clean up after him. Unlike his employees, though, I charged an astronomical hourly rate and wasn’t prone to getting screwed out of my paycheck.

It did not occur to me to refuse to defend him in his multiple and deplorable cases. The obvious parallel involving the poor cleaners who went after him, some of them making below minimum wage and working with forged legal documentation, went right over my head.

“We’re here to make things easier for you.” I stood up, reaching to shake Myles Emerson’s hand while buttoning my blazer. He nodded to Ryan and Deacon, the partners at my law firm, and made his way out of the restaurant, ogling the rears of two of the waitresses.

My plate was going to be full with this tool bag. Luckily, I had a healthy appetite when it came to moving up the corporate ladder.

I sat back down, leaning in my seat.

“And now for the real reason we’ve all gathered here”—I looked between them—“my impending partnership at the firm.”

“I beg your pardon?” Deacon Cromwell, an Oxford-educated expat who’d started the firm forty years ago and was more ancient than the Bible, furrowed his bushy brows.

“Christian believes he earned a corner office and his last name on the door after putting in the time and the effort,” Ryan Traurig, head of the litigation department and the partner who actually showed his face between the office’s walls every now and then, explained to the old man.

“Don’t you think this was something we should’ve discussed?” Cromwell turned to Traurig.

“We’re discussing it now.” Traurig smiled good-naturedly.

“Privately,” Cromwell spit out.

“Privacy is overrated.” I took a sip of my wine, wishing it were scotch. “Wake up and smell the roses, Deacon. I’ve been a senior associate for three years. I charge partner rates. My annual reviews are flawless, and I reel in the big fish. You’ve been jerking me around for too long. I’d like to know where I stand. Honesty is the best policy.”

“That’s a bit rich coming from a lawyer.” Cromwell shot me a side-eyed glance. “Also, in the spirit of open conversation, may I remind you you’ve graduated seven years ago, with a two-year stint at the DA’s office upon graduation? It’s not exactly like we’re robbing you of an opportunity. Our firm has a nine-year partner track. Timeline-wise, you haven’t paid your dues.”

“Timeline-wise, you’ve been making three hundred percent more in this firm since I joined,” I countered. “Fuck the track. Make me equity—and name partner.”

“Cutthroat to the bone.” He tried to look unaffected, but his brow became clammy. “How do you sleep at night?”

I swirled the wine in my glass the way an award-winning sommelier had taught me a decade earlier. I also golfed, used the firm’s time-share in Miami, and suffered through talking politics in gentlemen’s clubs.

“Usually with a leggy blonde by my side.” False, but I knew a pig like him would appreciate it.

He chuckled, the predictable simpleton that he was. “Wiseass. You’re too ambitious for your own good.”

Cromwell’s view of ambition varied, depending on the person who possessed it. On junior associates who clocked sixty billable hours a week, it was terrific. On me, it was a nuisance.

“No such thing, sir. Now I’d like an answer.”

“Christian.” Traurig shot me a smile that begged me to shut up. “Give us five minutes. I’ll meet you outside.”

I didn’t like being tossed to the street while they discussed me. Deep down, I was still Nicky from Hunts Point. But that boy had to be curbed in polite society. Gently bred men didn’t shout and flip tables. I had to speak their language. Soft words, sharp knives.

After pushing my chair back, I slipped into my Givenchy coat. “Fine. It’ll give me time to try out that new Davidoff cigar.”

Traurig’s eyes lit up. “Winston Churchill?”

“Limited edition.” I winked. Bastard rode my ass for everything cigar and liquor related like he didn’t earn six times my wage.

“My, my. Got a spare?”

“You know it.”

“See you in a few.”

“Not if I see you first.”

On the curb, I puffed on my cigar and watched yellow traffic lights turning red and green vainly, as jaywalkers glided in thick streams, like schools of fish. The trees on the street were naked, save for the pale string lights that had yet to be stripped after Christmas.

My phone pinged in my pocket. I pulled it out.

Arsène: You coming? Riggs is leaving tomorrow morning and he is getting grabby with someone who needs her diaper changed.

That could mean either she was too young or she had ass implants. Most likely, it meant both. I tucked the cigar into the corner of my mouth, my fingers floating over the touch screen.

Me: Tell him to keep it in his pants. I’m on my way.

Arsène: Being jerked around by Daddy and Daddy?

Me: Not all of us were born with a two hundred mil trust fund, baby.

I slipped my phone back into my pocket.

A friendly pat landed on my shoulder. When I turned around, Traurig and Cromwell were there. Cromwell looked like he was the not-so-proud owner of every hemorrhoid in New York City, clutching his walking cane with a pained expression. Traurig’s thin, cunning sneer revealed little.

“Sheila’s been nagging me about getting more exercise. I think I’ll walk my way home. Gentlemen.” Cromwell nodded curtly. “Christian, congratulations on bringing Emerson. I will see you at our weekly meeting next Friday.” And then he was off, disappearing in the throng of bundled-up people and white steam curling from manholes.

I passed Traurig a cigar. He gave it a few puffs, patting his pockets, like he was looking for something. Maybe his long-lost dignity.

“Deacon thinks you’re not ready yet.”

“That’s bull crap.” My teeth pressed into my cigar. “My track record is impeccable. I work eighty-hour weeks. I oversee every big case in litigation, even though it is technically your job, and I’m teamed with a junior associate for all my cases, just like a partner. If I walk away right now, I am taking with me a portfolio you cannot afford to lose, and we both know that.”

Becoming name partner and having my name on the front door would be the pinnacle of my existence. I knew it was a large leap, but I’d earned it. Deserved it. Other associates didn’t clock in the same hours, bring in the same clientele, or deliver the same results. Plus, as a newly minted millionaire, I was chasing my next thrill. There was something terribly numbing about seeing the hefty paycheck rolling in each month and knowing that anything I wanted was within reach. Partnership wasn’t only a challenge; it was a middle finger to the city that had purged itself of me when I was fourteen.

“Now, now, no need to get lippy.” Traurig chuckled. “Look, kiddo, Cromwell is open to the idea.”

Kiddo. Traurig liked to pretend I was still on the cusp of adolescence, waiting for my balls to drop.

“Open?” I said, snorting. “He should be begging me to stay and offering me half his kingdom.”

“And here’s the crux of it.” Traurig gestured with his hand, making a show like I was an exhibit he was referring to. “Cromwell thinks you’ve gotten too comfortable, too quickly. You’re only thirty-two, Christian, and you haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom in a couple years now. You serve your clients well, your name precedes you, but you don’t sweat it anymore. Ninety-six percent of your cases settle out of court because no one wants to face you. Cromwell wants to see you hungry. He wants to see your fight. He misses that same fire in your eyes that made him pluck you from the DA’s when you got in hot water with the governor.”

My second year at the DA’s office, a huge case had landed on my desk. It was the same year Theodore Montgomery, the then Manhattan district attorney, got slammed for letting the statute of limitations run out on a few cases due to overwhelming workload. Montgomery tossed the case on my desk and told me to give it my best shot. He didn’t want another outrage on his hands but also didn’t have any staff to work on it.

That case turned out to be the one all Manhattan talked about that year. While my superiors were chasing white-collar tax crooks and banking fraudsters, I went after a drug lord who’d run over a three-year-old boy, killing him instantly, to make it to his daughter’s glitzy sweet-sixteen birthday. A classic hit-and-run. The drug lord in question, Denny Romano, was armed with a line of top-notch lawyers, while I arrived in court in my Salvation Army suit with a leather bag that was falling apart. Everyone rooted for the kid from the DA’s office to nail the big, bad, macho man. In the end, I managed to get Romano convicted of vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison. It was a small win for the poor boy’s family and a huge win for me.

Deacon Cromwell had cornered me at a barbershop when I’d been fresh out of Harvard Law School. I’d had a plan, and it had included making a name for myself at the DA’s office, but he’d told me to look him up if I ever wanted to see how the other half lived. After the Romano case, I hadn’t had to do anything—he’d come back to me.

“He wants to see me back in court?” I practically spit out the words. My appetite for winning cases was healthy, but I had a reputation for coming in real hard at the negotiation table and walking away with more than I promised my clients. When I did show up in court, I made a spectacle of the other side. No one wanted to deal with me. Not the top litigators who charged a cool two grand an hour only to lose a case to me, and not my ex-colleagues from the DA’s office, who didn’t have the resources to compete.

“He wants to see you sweat it.” Traurig rolled the lit cigar between his fingers thoughtfully. “Win me a high-profile case, one that you cannot tie together in a sweetheart deal in a fully air-conditioned office. Show yourself in court, and the old man will put your name on the door, no questions asked.”

“I’m doing a two-person job,” I reminded him. This was true. I worked unholy hours.

Traurig shrugged. “Take it or leave it, kiddo. We got you where we want you.”

Leaving the firm at this stage, when I was a breath away from becoming a partner, could set my career years back, and the bastard knew it. I was going to either suck it up or get a partnership at a much smaller, less prestigious firm.

It wasn’t the way I’d wanted tonight to go, but it was better than nothing. Besides, I knew my capabilities. Depending on court schedules and the case I’d pick, I could be made partner in a few short weeks.

“Consider it done.”

Traurig let out a laugh. “I pity the unlucky counsel you are going to go against to prove your point.”

I turned around and made my way to the bar across the street, to meet Arsène (pronounced aar-sn, like the Lupin character) and Riggs.

I didn’t have principles.

And when it came down to what I wanted from life, I didn’t have any limits either.

The Brewtherhood was our go-to place in SoHo. The bar was a stone’s throw from Arsène’s penthouse, where Riggs could be found whenever he was in town and wasn’t crashing at my place. We liked the Brewtherhood for its variety of foreign lagers, lack of fancy cocktails, and ability to repulse tourists with its straight-shooting charm. Mostly, though, the Brewtherhood had an underdog appeal—small, stuffy, tucked in a basement. It reminded us of our Flowers in the Attic adolescence.

I spotted Arsène straightaway. He stood out like a dark shadow in a carnival. He was perched over a barstool, nursing a bottle of Asahi. Arsène liked his beer to match his personality—extra dry, with a foreign air—and was always dressed in Savile Row’s finest silks, even though he did not technically have an office job. Come to think of it, he did not technically have a job, period. He was an entrepreneur who liked to stick his fingers in many lucrative pies. Currently he was in bed with a few hedge fund companies that waived their two-and-twenty performance fees just for the pleasure of working with Arsène Corbin. Merger arbitrage and convertible arbitrage were his playgrounds.

I shouldered past a drunk group of women dancing and singing “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” getting all the words wrong, and leaned against the bar.

“You’re late,” Arsène drawled, reading a soft paperback on the sticky bar counter and not even bothering to take a look at me.

“You’re a pain in the ass.”

“Thanks for the psychological assessment. But you’re still late, on top of being rude.” He dragged a pint of Peroni my way. I clicked it against his beer bottle and took a sip.

“Where’s Riggs?” I shouted into his ear over the music. Arsène jerked his chin to his left. My eyes followed the direction. Riggs was there, one hand leaning against the wooden, taxidermy-decorated wall, probably knuckle deep between the blonde’s thighs through her skirt, his lips dragging across her neck.

Yup. Arsène definitely meant her ass implants. She looked like she could float on those things all the way to Ireland.

Unlike Arsène and me, who prided ourselves on looking the part of the 1 percent club, Riggs loved sporting the billionaire-bum look. He was a con artist, a crook, and a delinquent. A man with so little sincerity I was surprised he didn’t practice law. He had the clichéd appeal of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks bad boy. The floppy flax-gold hair, deep tan, unshaven goatee, and dirt under the fingernails. His smile was lopsided, his eyes depthless and bottomless at the same time, and he had the annoying ability to talk in his bedroom voice about everything, including his bowel movements.

Riggs was the richest of us three. On the outside, however, he looked like he was cruising through life, unable to commit to anything, including a cellular network.

“Had a good meeting?” Arsène popped his paperback shut next to me. I glanced at the cover.

The Ghost in the Atom: A Discussion of the Mysteries of Quantum Physics.

Can someone say party animal?

Arsène’s problem was that he was a genius. And geniuses, as we all know, have an extra hard time dealing with idiots. And idiots, as we also know, make up 99 percent of civilized society.

Like Riggs, I’d met Arsène at the Andrew Dexter Academy for Boys. We’d connected instantly. But whereas Riggs and I had reinvented ourselves to survive, Arsène seemed to be consistently himself. Jaded, cruel, and dispassionate.

“It was fine,” I lied.

“Am I looking at Cromwell and Traurig’s newest partner?” Arsène eyed me skeptically.

“Soon.” I dropped onto a stool beside him, flagging down Elise, the bartender. When she moved over toward us, I slid her a crisp hundred-dollar bill across the wooden bar.

She quirked an eyebrow. “That’s one hell of a tip, Miller.”

Elise had a soft French accent, and a soft everything to go with it.

“Well, you’re about to have one hell of a task. I want you to walk over to Riggs and splash a drink on his face à la every corny eighties movie you’ve seen, acting like you’re his date and he just ditched you for Blondie there. There’s another Benjamin waiting for you if you can produce some serious tears. Think you can do that?”

Elise rolled up the note and tucked it into the back pocket of her snug jeans. “Being a bartender in New York is synonymous with being an actress. I have three off-off-Broadway shows and two tampon commercials under my belt. Of course I can do that.”

A minute later, Riggs’s face smelled of vodka and watermelon, and Elise was two hundred bucks richer. Riggs dutifully got called out for leaving his date waiting. Blondie stalked off with an angry huff back to her friends, and Riggs made his way to the bar, half-amused, half-pissed.

“Jerk.” Riggs grabbed the hem of my blazer and used it to wipe off his face.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Penicillin was first called mold juice. I bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t, either, until last month, when I sat on a flight to Zimbabwe next to a very nice bacteriologist named Mary.” Riggs grabbed my beer, downing the whole thing and then clucking his tongue. “Spoiler alert: Mary was no virgin between the sheets.”

“You mean in the lavatory.” Arsène made a disgusted face.

Riggs let out a roar of a laugh. “Need some pearls to clutch, Corbin?”

That was the other thing about Riggs. He was a nomad, drinking other people’s drinks, crashing on their couches, flying economy like a heathen. He had no roots, no home, no responsibilities outside of his job. At twenty-two, it had been tolerable. At thirty-two, it was skirting the edge of pitiful.

“Which reminds me: Where are you off to tomorrow?” I snatched the empty beer before he could start licking the damn thing.

“Karakoram, Pakistan.”

“Ran out of places to visit in America?”

“About seven years ago.” He grinned good-naturedly.

Riggs was a contributing photographer for the National Geographic and a few other political and nature magazines. He’d won a bunch of awards and visited most countries in the world. Anything to run away from what was—or wasn’t—waiting for him at home.

“How long will you be gracing us with your lack of presence?” Arsène asked.

Riggs kicked back his stool, balancing it on two legs. “A month? Maybe two? I’m hoping to get another assignment and fly straight from there. Nepal. Maybe Iceland. Who knows?”

Not you, that’s for damn sure, you industrial-refrigerator-size baby.

“Christian asked Daddy and Daddy for a promotion today and got denied.” Arsène filled Riggs in, his voice monotone. I picked up his Japanese beer and downed it.

“Yeah?” Riggs clapped my shoulder. “Maybe it’s a sign.”

“That I suck at my job?” I asked pleasantly.

“That it’s time to slow down and realize there’s more to life than just work. You’ve made it. You’re in no real danger of becoming poor again. Let it go.”

Easier said than done. Poor Nicky was always going to live inside of me, eating two-day-old kasha, reminding me Hunts Point was just a handful of bus stops and mistakes away.

I elbowed Riggs’s ribs. His stool snapped back into place. He laughed. “And it’s not that I didn’t get it,” I said, setting the record straight. “They want me to give them a show-off case. A big win.”

Arsène tossed me a cruel smirk. “And here I thought things like that only happened in movies with Jennifer Lopez.”

“Cromwell just pulled it out of his rectum to buy time. Jumping through one more hoop won’t make a difference. The partnership is mine.”

Cromwell & Traurig wasn’t more than a pile of bricks and legal-size papers on Madison Avenue without me. But it still had that shine as Manhattan’s best white-shoe firm, and leaving it for a partnership, even one in the second-biggest firm in the city, would raise questions, as well as eyebrows.

“I’m so happy the wrong-side-of-the-tracks syndrome isn’t contagious.” Riggs flagged down Elise again, ordering another round. “It must be exhausting to be you. You’re determined to conquer the world, even if you have to burn it down in the process.”

“No one’ll get burned if I get what I want,” I said.

They both shook their heads in unison. Riggs looked at me with visible pity.

“This is what you’re designed to do, Christian. Let your demons run free and wild and see where they take you. This is why we’re friends.” Riggs patted my back. “Just remember, to become king, you must dethrone someone first.”

I sat back in my stool.

Heads would roll, all right. But none of them were going to be mine.