Page 122 of Broken Brothers

“The conversation, you mean?”

“Yes,” Morgan continued. “You have it all?”

“On a USB stick, yep.”

“I see,” Morgan said. “There’s something you need to be aware of, Chance. I don’t want to lose my father. You say youknow that, and I know I’ve said that before. But I don’t think you understand to what extent this is true.”

As much as I hated to say, I could believe it. Just as Morgan had never understood my life, I had never really understood his, so it wasn’t delusional to say that I couldn’t appreciate what he and the elder Hunt had.

“If you listened closely during the conversation, you heard him say some nice things to me.”

“I also heard him say some terrible things about me.”

Morgan nodded, validating my perspective.

“Won’t argue that. Won’t also argue that this needs to stop.”

“You know he was playing bullshit with you, right?” I said, feeling my anger start to grow. “You know that when he said he knew nothing about the constant phone calls and stalking that he was, at best, just distancing himself. Surely he knows some of it.”

“Yeah, I don’t doubt it. But listen, Chance, seriously. Listen. We need to take this slow. My father is an old man. He won’t be around forever and he won’t be in business for any longer period of time. My best guess is that he’ll be around as CEO for another three, four years while he searches for a successor that isn’t me and then he steps down. And then that’s it. Hunt Industries is now just a name, not a legacy. He won’t have—”

“I’m gonna stop you right there,” I said.

I was getting frustrated with Morgan’s waffling. I was tired of him wanting to please both of us. I understood it, but it wasn’t helping us in any way. He needed to pick a side, and if he chose Edwin’s side, I had to keep my investments and I had to keep MCH afloat. I’d let Morgan keep his percentage of the investment, but I would have to be able to operate the thing without his presence.

Which… yeah, easier said than done.

“There’s blood in the water, Morgan,” I said. “What he said about John Burnson said it all.”

“You mean—”

“Oh, yes, that was the golden nugget I was hoping to receive. We can use that as leverage.”

“How? You crazy? You think my father would be afraid of something like that?”

“That’s…”

It was here that I began to realize I could no longer tell Morgan all of my plans in full detail. That hurt and it made me wish I could, but I just couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut with everything going on. He was in on the plan to take over Edwin Hunt, but he wasn’t in on all the details.

He was just too close to the enemy. And while I loved Morgan, I loved my own position and standing in life a little more. I didn’t care to sacrifice one for the other, and I would never risk losing Morgan’s brotherhood even if I kept pursuing MCH. The reverse, though, wasn’t true.

“I just think we need to hang on to it. You never know when it will come in handy.”

“You sound like you want it to come in handy sooner rather than later,” Morgan said.

Now his voice was starting to rise. Tensions were beginning to flair between us. It wasn’t ugly yet, far from it, but I could see that one of us had to pull back and make peace, and it wasn’t going to be Morgan.

“I am just saying that we don’t want to discard any options prematurely,” I said, raising my hands to try and calm him down. “I don’t want us to get into a spot where we wish we had something and we didn’t because we decided to get rid of it out of fear it would be ineffective or something like that.”

Morgan snorted through his nostrils but said nothing. He took a seat on the couch about three feet over from me, puttinghis feet up on the coffee table. He appeared to be watching the TV, but I knew better that he was just thinking about everything.

“I’m worried we’ve lost our whole reason for doing this in the first place,” Morgan said. “Why did we start MCH? Morgan & Chance Holdings? Why did it start?”

“So we could be our own bosses, obviously,” I said.

“No disagreement there, that’s what I thought,” Morgan said. “So what are we spending most of our time on right now?”

“I spent some time mentoring Andrew—”