Page 46 of Broken Brothers

I had fucked up so bad “fucked up” didn’t seem like a strong enough verb.

I knew I risked getting hurt when I decided to say I loved Layla Taylor.

I didn’t know I risked getting destroyed.

I didn’t know I risked my career and my family life dying before my very angry eyes.

19

When I came to, the first thing I noticed was how much my goddamn head hurt.

I tried to move, but immediately, the feeling of nausea overwhelmed me. I leaned over to the side of my bed—which, in the half second before I puked, I realized was not mine—and hurled my guts out. All of the pain of last night, all of the agony of the last ten years, all of the terrible decisions, heartbreak, and self-loathing—it all poured out onto the carpeted floor for what seemed like a hellish eternity.

When I finally finished, I looked around. I had no idea where I was, probably in some sort of hotel, but it was easy to see what I was in—a shitload of trouble.

The room was destroyed. I had turned up one bed and ripped it into a million little pieces. The window had cracks on it—a miracle, considering that I was almost certainly more than a couple of stories up. Alcohol littered the ground, and some white powder that I didn’t want to guess at was on the counter.

“Fuck me,” I groaned to myself.

I never blacked out… but I had now. I couldn’t remember a goddamn thing after I stumbled into a bar and ordered threeshots of tequila, which I killed in about ten seconds. Everything after that…

Who the fuck knew? I guess I should’ve been grateful that I had not woken up in jail cell and I hadn’t woken up to the sound of police banging on my door, but other than that, it looked like I had done a good job really fucking myself over.

Oh, and I realized, it was a Friday, not a weekend. I still had to go to work.

I looked at the time. 8:30 a.m. I would be late, but that somehow seemed the absolute least of my concerns.

For one, I had no idea what the fuck I had done last night. The possibilities ranged from utterly self-destructive physically but isolated otherwise to sending out a fury of angry phone calls and texts, ruining every single relationship I had. I pulled out my phone, the pounding headache unending and the suffocating self-loathing still omnipresent, and checked my message history.

By some miraculous outcome, I had only texted a few casual hookups from my past asking for a good time and a quickie. One never responded, two were curious, but as far as I could tell, none had come to the room. I didn’t see any stray purses or clothing. In fact, I was still in my tux.

My tux… which I had rented… and ruined… which I now owed thousands of dollars on.

And that said nothing about the extent of the damage I’d done to the hotel room. I didn’t like to rely on my family’s resources, but given the extreme amount of damage I had caused, I was looking at some hefty payments. And that was just from the visible damage—who knew what kind of shit I’d caused at bars and places before this, and who knew how many bills I had racked up on my card from the night before?

I didn’t want to go into work. Not only did I feel like shit, I had made Mr. Burnson look like a jackass. I had made myself, no, I had made everyone associated with that firm look likea fool, getting to witness Mr. Hunt receive the prize investing opportunity while we all had to watch because of my inability to keep my fucking mouth shut in front of a hot woman. To say that I would get reamed today or whenever I next showed up was an understatement; I just had to hope that my punishment ended at being fired, because it wasn’t out of the question for more punishment to come my way.

I dragged myself slowly to the mirror and looked at myself. I honestly didn’t look that bad, other than some cuts on my hands, considering how I felt. My face looked a little pale, but I hadn’t gotten in any stupid fights judging by the lack of scars or bruises on my face. And if I had, well, I’d won them all.

Hey, I needed some victory, no matter how made up it was.

And, fortunately, the tux did not look as torn as I had thought based on the one sleeve.

Still, I had to go. And I was not in a position to clean up or take care of myself. So I turned to the only person from last night who didn’t seem interested in fucking me over or taking advantage of me.

“Hey, had a rough night, need to pay the bill for a hotel room… can you cover me?”

I sent the text to Morgan and tried to make it as innocuous as possible, the better so that it wouldn’t incriminate me if it came back around somehow. Mr. Hunt had also drilled that into us—cover our asses whenever we wrote something, because it would always be traced back.

“Of course,” Morgan wrote back immediately. I saw a text bubble forming and kept my eye on my phone as I left the room, every step a fucking struggle with the headache. “I had no idea Dad was going to do what he did. I really didn’t. I’m sorry, Chance.”

I bit my lip. I believed him.

I had to believe someone in this world.

“I know. Thanks bro.”

I put my phone down as the elevator came up, leaning against the wall, and sighed. I should have known that I could only trust Morgan. He was there for me when Sarah first broke my heart, and he was here now when Layla did the same to a much stronger degree. He may have been a little clueless about the way things worked outside of the world of billionaires, but he was a good man all the same.