Page 48 of Mad Rivals (The Bradley Legacy #1)

An Epic Disappointment

“You did what ?” my father asks.

“I backed out of Newman.”

“Why in God’s name would you possibly do that?” he demands.

“Because I took enough away from her, okay?” I hiss. “I need to go. I have workouts this morning.” I’m about to hang up when he stops me with a reminder.

“You’re forgetting about the legacy, Madden. I’m so disappointed in you.”

“Enough about the legacy!” I yell over the phone. “I am so goddamn tired of this legacy. It isn’t worth giving up everything that ever mattered to me.”

“Your family isn’t worth it?” he sneers. “Every damn thing I’ve done for you, and this is how you repay me?”

“You keep saying that. Tell me exactly what you did for me.” My voice is low as I wait for it.

“Don’t you think it fell into place a little too easily? You playing most of your career in Chicago where you always dreamed, your brothers each in the cities of their choosing. It doesn’t work that way, son.”

“So you engineered it?” I spit .

“I used the connections I had to get you what you wanted. And when I needed you in San Diego, I used those connections again.”

I suck in a sharp breath at his confession. I should have known. He orchestrated my trade. He needed me here for whatever reasons he had, and here I am giving away projects that should have been ours.

What an epic disappointment I must be.

Well, truth be told, I’m fairly epically disappointed by my own father, so I guess we’re even.

“But even I couldn’t have predicted you’d be so stupid as to give away a project you had in the bag,” he says.

“Sorry to disappoint you. I have to go.” This time I really do cut the call, and even though he’s disappointed, I feel good about my decision.

I wanted Kennedy to have the vineyard. I put work into changing around my bid to give Newman exactly what she wanted, but in the end, it was my conversation with Spencer during workouts last week that sealed the deal.

I didn’t want Grace to choose Bradley Group because I’m teammates with her husband. I wanted her to choose us because we had the best plan to move forward.

But we didn’t. As it turns out, Spencer confessed that his wife loved Kennedy’s vision for the place.

And knowing that she could easily add in the sustainability features to her plans while also knowing I wouldn’t really be around to handle the project with the attention it deserves… it was a no-brainer .

And honestly, what went down last week was a small part of it, too. I hated the look in her eyes when I broke things off. I didn’t want to go in today and face her, so in some ways, I took the easier way out.

I was in Chicago for three nights before I came back here.

I stayed out of it but stayed close in case my father needed me, and I instructed him to get his shell companies the fuck away from Bradley Group if he expected me to take over the company.

As far as I know, he either liquidated the companies or transferred ownership, and when I checked the financial records this morning, all traces of Vivicorp Commercial Ventures, Peoria Property Group, and Geneva Holdings were gone.

That’s not to say he isn’t doing something else illegal. For all I know, there are more companies. He might’ve transferred funds to offshore accounts or altered the records to delete these companies, but at least the books look clean now for those three accounts.

And that’s why I’m surprised when my phone rings after I hang up with my father and I see it’s my sister Everleigh calling.

She never calls. We aren’t really all that close. She’s closer to Dex and Ford than me, the two she falls in between in age, and on the rare occasion we communicate, she texts.

I pick up right away. “Everleigh?”

“Hey. I know this is weird for me to be calling, but I was just talking to Dex, and he said you were in Chicago last week because Dad’s being investigated. What’s going on?”

I blow out a breath. “It’s a long story.”

“So it’s true? Dad’s being investigated?”

“It’s complicated,” I say, not sure how much to confess to here. Does Dex know about the casinos? Does Everleigh? “He, uh, got himself into some trouble and asked for my help.”

“What trouble?” she presses.

“He tried to bribe a zoning commissioner. I got the guy tickets to a Bears game, and he walked away.” I’m going to leave it at that when she asks me a question that tells me she knows something she probably shouldn’t.

“Does this have anything to do with Vivicorp?”

“What do you know about Vivicorp?” I ask.

“Dad asked if he could name me as the CEO for one of his smaller companies. Vivicorp.”

“What did you tell him?” I demand.

She clears her throat. “I said it was fine. It’s in name only, and he’s giving me a paycheck from it. Why wouldn’t I? ”

Fuck! He’s dragging my sister into this now?

“Tell him no,” I say. “Revoke your permission or whatever you have to do. You don’t want to get involved with this.”

“Why, Madden? What’s going on?”

“It’s a shell company, okay? He’s been laundering money through Bradley Group, and it sounds like he wants to get Mom’s name off it and put yours on it.”

“But why?” she asks. “His wife legally doesn’t have to testify against him, but his kids don’t have the same protections.

If he trusts you with the family wealth, that could be why he’d want your name on it.

” Unless there’s something else going on that we don’t know about.

A divorce on the horizon, perhaps, or maybe he’s trying to layer ownership to confuse authorities.

Or maybe he knows that an investigation would freeze assets in both their names, and he doesn’t want this particular account frozen.

I guess there are any number of reasons.

“Get out of it,” I tell her, and we say our goodbyes.

But one thing she said sticks in my mind. Something I hadn’t considered before.

Something big and important.

His wife legally doesn’t have to testify against him.

If my father is investigated and I’m called into question, my wife wouldn’t legally have to testify against me, either.

Maybe I went the wrong route with ending things with Kennedy to keep her safe. Maybe there’s another way…one I hadn’t thought about and, at the same time, one that I thought about constantly.

Time is short. Too short. The season is creeping up on me, and I barely have time to focus on Bradley Group at all right now, let alone on my personal relationships.

In just two weeks, I have to report for training camp. In the meantime, the trainer for the Storm has gotten in touch, and he’s built a stacked program for me to get season ready. It means long hours at the gym with my teammates, and it means my focus needs to be on the game .

And so rather than give in to the idea that just pulsed through my mind, I turn my focus back to where it has been for the better part of the last two decades, and I get the fuck to work.