Page 2 of Price of Victory (The Saints of Westmont U #5)

TWO

AIDEN

The apartment was perfect in the way that expensive things always were. Beautiful, impersonal, and completely lacking in soul. Something like me.

I dropped my towel on the bathroom floor and pulled on a pair of shorts, not bothering with a shirt or underwear.

The place was climate-controlled to exactly seventy-two degrees, but I could still feel the humidity from my shower clinging to my skin.

My hair was still wet, a black lock falling across my left eye and making everything look slightly blurred.

I walked to the massive floor-to-ceiling windows that dominated the living room and stared out at the city spread below me.

Chicago looked different from the fortieth floor—cleaner, more manageable, like a toy city where tiny people scurried around playing at being important.

I could see the Westmont campus in the distance, lit up and buzzing with activity as students moved back in for the semester.

All those bodies, all those possibilities.

I could be down there in an hour, could find some eager sophomore who’d worship my body and make me forget why I was back in this fucking city.

God knew I had a reputation to maintain.

Three years at Michigan had been good to me in that department.

Turns out being openly gay, devastatingly handsome, and completely shameless was a winning combination.

I pressed my palm against the cool glass and let myself imagine it for a moment.

Some random hookup in a dorm room that smelled like pizza and desperation, hands everywhere, someone moaning my name.

I was good at that. I was good at being exactly what people wanted, at making them feel like they were the only person in the world, at least for a few hours.

And that wasn’t an exaggeration. It went on for hours.

Everyone wanted me. It was a simple fact, like gravity or the way water always found the lowest point. I’d learned early how to use my looks, my charm, and my lack of shame about what I wanted. Why pretend to be something I wasn’t?

But the fantasy dissolved as quickly as it had formed, replaced by the bitter taste of reality.

I wasn’t here to fuck college boys. I was here because my father had collapsed in a board meeting six months ago, his heart finally rebelling against decades of eighteen-hour days and stress that could kill a smaller man.

I pushed away from the window and walked to the kitchen, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge.

The apartment was ridiculous. Three bedrooms I’d never use, a kitchen designed for entertaining I’d never do, art that had come with the place and meant absolutely nothing to me.

The only personal touches were my hockey trophies, lined up on a shelf like soldiers waiting for orders.

The trophies looked pathetic here, surrounded by all this expensive emptiness. But they were mine, earned through blood and sweat and countless hours on ice that felt more like home than this place ever would.

My phone sat on the marble countertop, mocking me.

I’d been staring at it for three days, working up the courage to make a call I should have made months ago.

But every time I picked it up, I saw my father’s face—not the way it probably was these days, pale and diminished in a padded bed, but the way it had always been.

Commanding. Disappointed. Completely convinced that hockey was a waste of time for someone who could be running a media empire.

Richard Whitmore didn’t understand failure, which made my passion for a sport that could end with a single bad hit completely incomprehensible to him.

He’d built Whitmore Entertainment from nothing, turning a small radio station into one of the most powerful media companies in the Midwest. He bought and sold stories, shaped narratives, and decided what people cared about this week.

Not having such a sway over his only child was a novelty to him.

And an annoyance, let us not be misunderstood.

Some of those stories weren’t entirely true.

Our online magazines had a flexible relationship with facts, especially when the truth was boring and lies got better click-through rates.

Our entertainment channels pushed gossip disguised as news, and our streaming services promoted content that was more spectacle than substance.

It didn’t bother me. If we weren’t doing it, someone else would be. People wanted to be lied to, wanted their reality served up with extra drama and artificial flavoring. My father was just giving them what they craved.

What bothered me was that he expected me to want it, too.

I’d been avoiding the family business for three years, hiding out at Michigan and pretending I could build a life that had nothing to do with Whitmore Entertainment.

But the heart attack had changed everything.

Suddenly, my mother was calling every week with updates on board meetings and acquisition opportunities, dropping hints about how much the company needed fresh blood, how perfect I’d be at modernizing their digital strategy.

“Your father’s been thinking,” she’d said during our last conversation. “You could finish your degree while working part-time with us. Get your feet wet, learn the business from the ground up.”

What she meant was: stop playing games and join the family empire before your father has another heart attack from stress.

The Michigan team had never warmed up to me, not really.

They’d been professional enough, but I’d caught the comments when they thought I wasn’t listening.

Something about Whitmore Entertainment’s coverage of environmental protests, how we’d spun a story about activists to make them look like extremists.

One of my teammates had muttered something about me “playing hockey like I’m out to end democracy,” which was both creative and deeply unfair.

I hadn’t written those stories. I’d barely paid attention to them. But my last name meant I was guilty by association, just like it always had been.

I picked up my phone before I could change my mind, but instead of calling my father, I scrolled to my mother’s number. She’d be at her book club now, which meant I could get information without having to actually talk to anyone.

She answered on the second ring. “Aiden? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just wanted to check in about Dad.”

“Oh.” There was relief in her voice. “He’s doing much better. The doctors are pleased with his progress, and he’s been asking about you.”

Of course he had been. Richard Whitmore never asked about anything without an agenda.

“That’s great to hear. I’m sorry I haven’t called. The transfer has been crazy, getting settled and everything.”

“I understand, sweetheart. But you know he’d love to see you. Maybe this weekend?”

“I wish I could, but practice starts Monday, and I need to get oriented with the team. Maybe next week?”

It was a bullshit excuse, and we both knew it, but my mother was too polite to call me on it.

“Of course. You know how proud we are of you, don’t you? Coming back to Chicago, being closer to family.”

The guilt hit me square in the chest. She thought I’d transferred to be near them, to finally accept my place in the family business.

She had no idea that the only reason I was here was because I’d been too scared to stay away, too terrified that my father might die while I was pretending we didn’t need each other.

“I love you, Mom,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie but wasn’t the whole truth, either.

“I love you, too, sweetheart. Take care of yourself.”

After I hung up, I sat on the leather couch that had probably cost more than most people’s cars and stared at my reflection in the black screen of the massive TV. The apartment was completely silent except for the hum of the air-conditioning and the distant sound of traffic forty floors below.

This was my life now. Expensive and empty and echoing with all the things I couldn’t say.

I thought about my teammates at Michigan, how they’d looked at me like I was some kind of corporate villain in hockey pads.

I thought about my father, lying in a hospital bed and probably planning my future in the media business.

I thought about the Westmont team I’d be meeting on Monday, who had no idea that Richard Whitmore’s son was about to walk into their locker room.

I wondered if they’d heard of Morrison Media Group.

I wondered if they knew about the rivalry, the corporate warfare that had been going on since before I was born.

I wondered if Rhett Morrison was still the self-righteous prick I remembered from those tedious business events our parents had dragged us to as kids.

Probably. Rich boys like that never changed. They just got better at hiding their superiority complexes behind false modesty and scholarships they didn’t need.

But that was a problem for Monday. Tonight, I was just going to sit here in my perfect, empty apartment and try to forget that I’d moved back to a city that felt like a gorgeous, glittering cage.

I reached for the remote and turned on the TV, flipping through channels until I found a hockey game. It was some matchup I didn’t care about, but the familiar sound of skates on ice and the crack of stick against puck was soothing in a way that nothing else ever was.

This was what I was good at. Not corporate strategy or media manipulation or living up to family expectations. Hockey. The one thing in my life that was clean and honest and mine.

I just had to figure out how to keep it that way.

The game played on, and I let myself sink into the couch and pretend that everything was simple. That I was just another college hockey player looking forward to his senior season, not the heir to a media empire who was slowly suffocating under the weight of expectations he’d never asked for.

On the TV, someone scored a goal, and the crowd erupted in celebration. For a moment, I could almost imagine I was there, on the ice, in the game, part of something bigger than boardrooms and stock prices and family legacies that felt more like prison sentences.

But the moment passed, like they always did, and I was back to being Aiden Whitmore in his empty apartment, counting down the hours until I had to face whatever came next.