Page 68 of Broken Brothers

Morgan, though, started to take it worse. He would text much more frequently, and when I heard him on the phone, he sounded like a man in prison who was there for all the wrong reasons. I was always glad to never have had to work for Hunt Industries, but hearing Morgan now made me even more grateful that I had declined all of the offers from Mr. Hunt to join his company. If his only natural son felt like a slave, how would I have felt? How would anyone at the company have felt?

More than once, I let myself look at reviews of working at the company. I have to admit, I felt some degree of schaudenfreude when I saw the negative reviews complaining about Mr. Hunt, but it’s not like it did any good. Edwin Hunt was printing money so fast that he could have taken five decades off and he still would have enough money to retire. Such as was the nature of being a billionaire.

I still remained vigilant in doing my work at home, but aside from a couple of mediocre leads, I didn’t really have much to do. Morgan wasn’t that interested in the small fry, either. In fact, I began to believe that he saw the investment in Virtual Realty as his “Get out of Jail” card from Hunt Industries and had merely given me Claire and Rising Sun to get my feet wet and my confidence boosted. It wouldn’t surprise me if he intended to sell our share of Rising Sun within two years.

Things really came to a head, though, at the end of the second week when Morgan came over to my apartment, a rarity.

I had ordered pizza in anticipation of his arrival and had a hot pie of extra cheese, pepperoni, and mushrooms waiting for him, but Morgan looked stricken with disease when he walked in. He didn’t even acknowledge the pizza. I grabbed a slice as if to remind him by sight what I had, but he did nothing.

Instead, he plopped on the couch, groaned, and placed his head into his hands. Knowing just the trick to cheer him up, I poured him some whiskey and placed it by his hand. Except not even this cheered him up.

I began to feel paranoid by his defeated body language that we’d been found out. My mind began to shift to all of the places we could go—maybe Australia, maybe San Francisco, maybe somewhere in Europe. Just any place but the finance capital of the world. Anyplace Edwin Hunt would not be.

“Dude, what’s going on?” I said.

Morgan didn’t say anything.

“I need to quit. I need to quit right now.”

I had tremendous sympathy for Morgan, but to be honest, I don’t think I could have heard a better line considering his face. I was fully ready for him to say that Edwin would be coming over to announce we were out of the family, or at the very least that Andrew had chosen Edwin’s firm to be the investors for this round of funding.

But quitting? Morgan could survive that, no matter how stressful it was.

It was interesting, though, how quickly he had come to that conclusion. For as much insanity as had happened in the last three months, it had only been three damn months. Most places didn’t have anything of that degree happen in three years, let alone three months.

“I should have listened to you all these years, warning me about joining my father’s firm and saying you wanted to do it on your own,” Morgan said, finally grabbing the whiskey. “I always thought you were crazy. Who wouldn’t want to take over a ten-figure company? Well, you had a point. It sucks being Edwin Hunt’s son.”

He took a big gulp.

“First, I told you so,” I teased, which brought a slight smile to Morgan’s lips. Good, it was what I had hoped for. If he had reacted more negatively, we would’ve been in a world of hurt. “Second, I know you want to quit, but we need to finish that deal with Andrew.”

“I know, I know,” Morgan said.

I don’t know that I’d ever seen him be that tired and that weak. He looked like a man beaten down not just in the course of a single day or a single work assignment but over the duration of several months—which was not even the full picture, given that he’d been less of a son to Edwin Hunt and more of a family intern.

It was a shame, really. If Morgan controlled Hunt Industries, it would almost certainly be run more ethically. God knows it would’ve been under my watch.

Our watch…

“Third…”

My voice trailed off as an idea so insane, so crazy that it almost seemed dangerous, came to mind. What I would soon be proposing was an idea verging on insanity—telling Edwin Hunt to fuck off to his face seemed less dangerous than this.

But on the other hand…

“What if we found a way to take control of Hunt Industries?”

“I’m sorry, come again?”

Morgan’s face looked like I had just told him we needed to swim to the bottom of the ocean and fight sharks with nothing more than our pinkie fingers. The analogy was a little more apt than I had intended for it to be.

“This investment, you and I both know that it’s the kind of game changer that could become an infamous Silicon Valley unicorn someday, right?” I said. “It’s poorly run right now, but if we get Andrew to agree to let us come on in some fashion, it’ll make us billionaires in no time. I don’t think there’s anydisagreement in that regard. When that happens… what if we buy enough stock to get seats on the board? What if we buy enough stock through Morgan & Chance Holdings to make decisions and eventually force Edwin off the company?”

The more I thought about it, the more I not only liked it, I loved it. I admit, some pettiness played a part in this. Edwin Hunt thought in terms of months and a couple of years, but I was looking at the truly long picture. So long as the old man didn’t croak, he wasn’t going to leave his namesake company until he died. Though he was definitely on the older side, in his early 70s, he wasn’t a man who looked to be on the verge of dying anytime soon. He had some chunks on him, sure, but it wasn’t like he was the picture of obesity.

The idea of using this to get back at him for what he did to me with Layla… what he threatened to do to me for refusing a job with him… oh, how delicious that would be.

I also knew right away it would destroy the family dynamic and produce a hell of a lot of lawsuits. Morgan would have his own troubles to face, and if he refused this idea, then my fantasy would remain just that, never extending beyond the maniacal thoughts in my mind. But… I mean, how could I not think about it?