Page 77 of Broken Brothers

“I said do not fuck with us, Chance!”

“It was like, really ewwy and gooey, am I right?”

“Fucking prick! Listen to me, you—”

“Oh, wait, my girlfriend is calling me. Try not to be jealous, little boy trying to sound like Darth Vader. See ya!”

“You fucking—”

I hung up before I heard the rest of his words. The point had been made and I’d gotten a good laugh, but it was undeniable that Edwin Hunt was now resorting to fucking goons to try and intimidate me. On one level, I could laugh that Edwin Hunt was now having to use bush league tactics to try and scare me, and not only had it failed miserably, I had effectively trolled said goons so much that it had pushed them to losing their mind.

But the flip side was I knew this wouldn’t end anytime soon.

Which begged the question… what did Edwin Hunt want to get out of this?

Did he want to know what I was doing? Did he want to pressure me into coming back to him and asking for a job? Did he want me to just feel fear all the time?

As vicious as a man as Edwin Hunt could be, I never saw him as an evil or cruel one. He had his reasons for doing things, and they almost always came back to making money.And by almost always, I basically mean always.He wasn’t doing what he was unless he either suspected I was stealing business from him in the form of investments, or he was convinced I needed to join him for the sake of profitability in the firm.

If Morgan had cracked, the former was likely. If he hadn’t, then it was probably the latter.

I felt tempted to text Morgan right then and there, but leaving nothing to chance, I left the question for in-person contact. Better to ask him alone and without hackable technology than to text him and have it blow up in my face.

Instead, I got ready to see Layla, throwing on casual but not ridiculously dismissive clothing. Jeans, a V-neck t-shirt, and alight sweater for the fall season seemed appropriate—enough to make it clear I put effort into getting ready but not so much that it would have signaled the wrong thing. It wasn’t hard to think about what the wrong thing was.

When I saw her at Joe’s Coffee, she looked like she went for the exact same appearance—enough to make it clear that she cared about this meeting, but not wanting to give the wrong impression.

“Hey,” I said as I took a seat. “How are you?”

“Hey Chance,” she said.

The way she looked reminded me of Morgan—beaten down, looking physically relatively the same as before, but her eyes carrying a heavy weight that she had only recently consumed.

“You look like hell, what happened?”

She just gave the soft, somewhat pitiful laugh that I used to give myself after breakups.

“What happened is my uncle stopped pretending to be who he is,” she said. “After everything happened, I thought that helping him getting this deal would increase my standing in the family company. Instead, it’s just given me more work without any type of promotion, any type of benefit.”

I had so many questions for her, and unlike last time, when I tried to push her away, I sought to understand her better. Was this treading on dangerous waters? Possibly. I could certainly see how the ripples might play out over time, churning the seas in a way that was not wise.

But I trusted myself.

Probably a stupid move. But too late now.

“You sound like your family has a little bit of Hunt in you,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” she said, groaning. “Anyways, I’m sorry—”

“No, let’s not start with that whole spiel again, don’t be redundant,” I said with a polite hand wave. “What’s going on with your uncle? Why is he such a massive asshole?”

She sat there in silence for a long time, alternating between looking at me and looking up to the sky. I had struck some sort of nerve that, I now realized, was about to unearth some probable dark, harsh secrets I wouldn’t have wanted to know.

“At first, we told you he was my father for the sake of making it look like a family business in which I was trying to learn,” she said. “Which, I guess, in the strictest sense of the sentence, is true. I am considered family, and I was trying to learn.”

The fact that she used the words “am considered” made me begin to suspect something about Layla.

“But the fact of the matter was, that was never Craig’s intent, not even close. He saw how his interns and junior associates looked at me, and instead of feeling disgust, he decided to use me.”