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Chapter Two: Rowan

The sound of my phone buzzing pulls me out of my restless sleep. I groan, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand, and fumble with the vibrating device on the nightstand.

“Fuck,” I mutter as the light of the screen flashes.Hayden.

I sit up, blinking at the faint glow of the city lights coming through the glass wall.

“No, come back to sleep,” a voice murmurs.

Chelsea. Right.

I look at her for a second. She’s objectively hot and we’ve been hooking up for months now, but even she and her glorious mouth couldn’t stop me from picturinghimthrough the whole thing. Honestly, it’s a good thing I came before my mind could trick me into thinking she was Alex, and I strangled her to death.

That should concern me.

I haven’t pictured Alex in months.

She reaches for me, her arm brushing my naked thigh, but I shake her off gently, standing. “I’ll be right back.”

The phone buzzes again, insistent. Hayden doesn’t call twice unless it’s urgent.

I pad down the hallway to the kitchen, annoyance bristling at me.

“It’s four in the morning, Hayden.”

“I’m fully aware,” he replies, voice clipped.

Hayden tends to speak like he’s stuck in a classic novel written by an uptight Victorian old man who would faint at theidea of an exposed ankle. He has always been the more reserved of the three of us, eager to keep his hands clean or at least not parade how dirty they are.

I know taking charge of the vast corporate and entertainment portfolio that The Snake owns is not his dream. He would rather spend his days drawing the stuff of nightmares with his charcoal pencils, but that’s not our destiny. Our destiny is and forever will be The Snake.

And whilst Hayden tolerates it, Xander relishes it. As The Snake’s Enforcer, he handles the clan’s underbelly and commands the men. There is no skull my brother doesn’t mind putting a hole in.

And then there is me. It’s like from the moment I was born; I was expected to one day become The Head of The Snake. Hayden hates mess, Xander is too unpredictable, but ever since I was a child, I sat perfectly in the middle like a balanced pendulum. Like after two tries, our parents finally made the perfect heir.

I made peace with it at a young age.

Iwantit.

But everything changed after Alex and my arrest. I slipped up, embarrassing both The Snake and my family by getting wrapped up in him. It’s been two years, but the memory is still fresh and becoming The Head of The Snake might just be a pipe dream now.

“What can I do for you at four in the morning?” I ask, pouring myself a glass of water.

“I need your help.”

I can hear the loud thumping of house music and the faint clamour of voices in the background letting me know he’s at Summit tonight. It’s a high-end techno club on the northwest side, nestled in the wealthiest part of the city, Queen’s Peak, a few blocks away from my apartment.

“At four in the morning?”

A tired sigh escapes him. “Are we going to stop saying four in the morning? How quickly can you get here?”

“Where is here?”

“Don’t be cute, Rowan. It doesn’t suit you.”

“You and I both know that’s not true. Why am I leaving my very warm apartment in the middle of the night?”

“Something happened,” Hayden says patiently. “Can you get here or not?”