1. New Year’s Day

1

New Year’s Day

KINGSTON MOORE

The Museum of the Inquisition in Carcassonne, France holds hundreds of iron implements of torture, including spiked iron bands to pierce a heretic’s eyeballs, racks to dislocate every joint between bones, funnels to force burning oil down the throat to the stomach, and skull vises.

All of these were applied at once to Kingston Moore in his dream, but when his eyelids parted to the laser-edged rain of white light like he was suspended in the heart of a star, the pain didn’t stop.

He managed to lift one arm and touch his head, finding only his own thick hair slipping through his fingers, no metal device, no blood.

His hair hurt.

This was—brutal. What the hell had happened?

He was worth a lot of money those days. Kidnapping for ransom? Had he been down in Central America or Mexico and been abducted by narco cartels? Lately, his business had been real estate and venture capital, not the less legal endeavors of his early career, but the past can ride into your life, brandishing a baseball bat.

Voices.

Men’s voices, talking quietly.

Not screaming at him to wake from being knocked out during the kidnapping.

His arm could move normally, unencumbered. He wasn’t tied down.

As a matter of fact, the couch under his back and against his face was buttery-soft leather, not the usual wooden pallet of drug cartel kidnappers.

He rubbed his eyes, scrubbing the acid sand away. Foul slime coated his teeth and tongue.

Maybe they’d drugged him instead of beating the crap out of him during the kidnapping.

His stomach cramped, clenching in an attempt to vomit. Sweat needled from his pores.

Gasping deep breaths of the cool air around him trickled enough oxygen into his blood that he stopped the expulsion before it started.

He opened his eyes again, and the blinding light subsided, dimming, until he could see empty bottles on a coffee table, glistening and winking in the sunlight.

Tito’s. Macallan. Pappy Van Winkle. Cristal.

Jesus, this was a hangover? He hadn’t been this poisoned since his freshman year of high school when he’d weighed about seventy pounds.

A man’s voice said, “What could we have done that is so horrible?”

Kingston recognized the flat tones. Morrissey Sand, one of his three closest friends and business partners, was speaking.

Had Morrissey been kidnapped, too?

No, kidnappers didn’t toss their victims on soft leather couches like under the side of his face and leave them untied.

He waggled a foot.

Yes, definitely not tied up. His feet were also free.

Gingerly, he drew his palms up beside his shoulders and rested his fingers on the couch cushions for a moment, gathering strength and courage, and he pushed his torso up and did his best to look around.

Morrissey was struggling to lift his head from where he lay curled in an armchair with an ottoman and squinting at the two shadows over on other couches.

Kingston swallowed hard, traces of toxic saliva running in rivulets down his cracked throat. He tried to ask what was happening, but no sound came out of his mouth.

Mitchell “Match” Saltonstall, another of Kingston’s lifelong friends-slash-business partners, gasped, “What did we do?”

Maybe kidnapping would’ve been preferable.

If Kingston laid right back down on this couch, maybe he would wake up in his own bed after a weird remnant of a dream.

Or maybe he would die. Whatever.

Jericho Parr, the last of the foursome, asked, “I say, Match, what have you got there?”

Match said, “We’re in trouble.”

The horror in Match’s voice alarmed Kingston right down to his maybe-bleeding toenails. He writhed on the couch, flipping over to get a better look.

Match was holding trembling leaves of paper, maybe full-size photographs, and staring at them.

Jesus, what could they have done that was so bad?

Snapshots of them with hookers and blow wouldn’t matter. They were venture capitalists. If they’d lived in the eighties, a lack of snapshots with whores and cocaine would have shocked potential investors.

So, dead hookers? Drunk driving arrest warrants? What the hell were the papers Match was holding?

Oh, Jesus is Lord. He hadn’t married one of those debutantes who’d been on the hunt last night, had they? The cream of the New York ton, carefully coiffed and cut into pastiches of the ideal female form, had swarmed the party with their parents the night before, hunting rich bachelors. Had he been set up and roofied? He could probably get an annulment for that.

Morrissey rubbed his face again, grumbling, “We spent New Year’s Eve at an exclusive country club in Rhode Island, not the casino in Monte Carlo. Surely, we haven’t gotten ourselves involved with international arms trafficking or Bitcoin speculating at one of the oldest, stodgiest, most boring parties on the face of the planet.”

Match covered his mouth with his hand and stared at the pages, flipping them back and forth as he studied. “Jesus, it’s notarized. How did he get somebody to notarize this thing in the wee hours of the morning at a country club New Year’s Eve party?”

Notarized? Probably not a marriage certificate, then. Also, that was a lot of paper for a marriage certificate unless the girl or girls had come complete with a no-prenup contract.

Kingston swallowed harder, trying to hold his gorge down and himself together. Nothing fucking rattled him. His element was bedrock stone. He needed to damn well act like it. He croaked out, “Considering the types of business deals that have been closed in this room over the past century, I imagine several of the staff are also notaries public so that contracts can be finalized and deposited before the signatories have a chance to rethink and back out.”

Whatever it was, whatever had happened, Kingston would rectify the situation.

He was sharp, aggressive, and ruthless as fuck when it came to business and especially to safeguarding Last Chance, Inc., the venture capital firm that he and those three hungover corpses around him had built over the past few years.

The four of them had been friends since high school.

Morrissey, Jericho, and Mitchell had been there for Kingston when he’d had no one else.

Kingston would be their sword and shield and destroy this situation, whatever it was, no matter who he had to ruin, murder, or blackmail to do it, and no matter the cost to himself.

He stretched, lengthening his overbuilt arms over his head. Waking shivers ran through his broad shoulders and thick arms, stiff from sleep. He needed to get to the gym to sweat this poison out of his muscles. “What did we sign?”

Match shuffled through the document, hesitating.

Jericho asked him, “What did we sign, Match?”

“It’s a bet,” Mitchell finally said. “Was Gabriel Fish here last night?”

Jericho rubbed his face. “I saw him early in the evening. He had a model fresh from fashion week in Milan on his arm and said he was in town because his grandfather was tottering near the edge of his grave. Was The Shark in on the bet?”

Match nodded.

Kingston winced inside. Gabriel Fish, the mythological shark of their high school, must have been at the party the night before. The Shark crashing a party was like playing a neighborhood pick-up basketball game for a couple of C-notes, and your nemesis’s old buddy LeBron James wanders over and slides onto the other team.

But The Shark never made a bet for mere hundreds of dollars.

Kingston had watched Gabriel Fish financially ruin people in their industry for the hell of it by yanking projects that he could afford to overpay for out from under them when they had contracts already signed. He’d misrepresented who and what he was to responsible organizations and then pulverized them.

In the world of venture capital, where pirate tactics were the norm and mass layoffs were standard, Gabriel Fish gave VCs a bad name.

Jericho asked, “Who was stupid enough to make a bet with The Shark?”

Match whispered, “All of us.”

Jericho leaped to his feet and bobbled, catching himself as he almost fell over, and then wrenched himself around to stare at Match. “What?”

Match sucked in a deep breath and said, “We all signed this, all four of us, plus Gabriel Fish. It’s a five-way bet.”

So Kingston was on the hook.

And so were Mitchell, Jericho, and Morrissey.

He spun his legs off the couch, the sick in his mouth and knitting needles rammed through his temples less important now that his entire life was on the line.

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and Morrissey and Jericho did the same as they watched Match sift through the contract he held.

Morrissey said, “Well, it can’t be that bad. How much could we have bet?” His shoulders were hunched, and he wasn’t smiling as he whistled in the dark.

Match shook the paper he held. “A hundred million dollars each.”

Holy shit. Kingston’s fingernails bit into his knees through his blue suit slacks.

Match continued, “Winner take all. Whoever wins, the other four saps have to pay him a hundred million dollars each.”

Jericho staggered off the couch like an earthquake had shaken him off. “Are you serious?”

Though Kingston was usually solid as hell, he slapped his hands on the old wood of the coffee table. The empty bottles rattled their glass shoulders against each other. “If the four of us lose, we’ll owe Gabriel Fish four hundred million dollars. That would bankrupt Last Chance, Inc.”

And break up the only friends he had in his life.

The only brothers he had in his life.

The only family he had.

Morrissey shook his head, and his breath rasped in his throat. “We were drunk. We were not of sound mind when we signed that contract. It’s not enforceable.”

The rays of sunlight slicing through the windows high above the long lounging room turned to glimmers of hope. Morrissey had graduated tip-top of his class in law school and been admitted to the New York State bar. He could get them out of this stupid sucker bet.

Except that Match shook the paper at them. “It’s got two notarized sections. One is us agreeing to the contract. The other one states that we were of sound mind and body. Ten witnesses co-signed and attested to it, including Justice Marissa Otis.”

Morrissey grabbed another copy of the contract from the stack on the coffee table and started going through it.

Jericho raised his hands as if they were being held up, which they were. “Gabriel got a Supreme Court justice to witness the document stating that we were of sound mind and body when I can’t even remember what happened?”

At least Kingston wasn’t the only one who’d drunk himself stupid the night before, though that was cold comfort in the light of them ruining their lives with one night of sordid inebriation.

Morrissey stared at the document and finger-combed the dark waves of his hair away from his face. “It’ll take years in litigation to break this contract, and I don’t know if we could ever do it with Otis as one of the signatories.” He flipped to the last page. “Who else?”

Match said, “AG Lydia Dickman witnessed it, and so did Senator Harkness.”

Jericho sat back down on the couch like his knees had given out.

Kingston leaned back on the couch and stared at the dark beams of the white plaster ceiling three stories above, daring it to cave in and bury them in rubble and snow.

Jericho asked, “The Shark got a Supreme Court justice, a sitting senator, and the Attorney General of the United States to witness his contract with us?”

He’d tied it up like a fucking Christmas present, ribbons and all.

No wonder The Shark had shown up at the stodgiest New Year’s Eve party on the planet. Gabriel Fish had been trolling for suckers, and where better to find willing victims who would get drunk and sign their lives away than a New England, old-money soiree?

Kingston Moore sure as hell wasn’t old money, though, far from it. His parents hadn’t been posh enough to be serving staff at a place like the Narragansett Country Club. Like always, he was just a hardscrabble guest of his high society friends the night before.

Jericho asked, “What the hell was the bet?”

Kingston cocked his head, listening.

Match flipped the papers in his hands and read from the document. “It says, ‘The five wagerers will each purchase a golf venture and strive to increase its value. The golf venture with the highest net percent increase of value will win the bet, and the four losers will pay the one winner one hundred million dollars each. ’”

Golf? The bet was golf?

Kingston knew the world of fuckin’ golf like his own neighborhood. If the bet was golf, he would damn well decimate The Shark.

The world brightened.

But his eyeballs still hurt.

Yeah, maybe Kingston was a little sunny-side-up when it came to his own abilities, but someone had to be. “This is a cinch. Only one of us has to beat him. We can write a side contract amongst ourselves to work together. I mean, jeez, guys. We own and run a successful venture capital firm. This is what we do. We can outplay The Shark if we work together.”

“Nope,” Match ground out through his clenched teeth as he continued to read. “The contract states that ‘No wagerers may work together, nor give aid, comfort, advice, or information to the other wagerers upon pain of forfeit.’”

Random spikes shot through Kingston’s temples again. They had well and truly fucked themselves, and they had only themselves to blame.

Themselves and the empty liquor bottles littering the coffee table, which had also been a choice.

“So, we can’t work together,” Morrissey said as he scanned the paper sheaf, “and we can’t help each other. We can’t even tell each other how we’re doing.”

Match continued reading to them, “‘The wager will end one year from this date on New Year’s Eve when the four wagerers will meet back here at the Narragansett Club with financial evaluations of the golf ventures.’ And then he specifies financial firms and accounting standards because The Shark wouldn’t leave that to chance.”

Bile soured the back of Kingston’s tongue again.

Dammit, he’d worked his ass off, and he’d had the cash when the three other guys had asked him to invest and work with them.

Idiot. He was a stupid, drunken idiot, getting wasted around Gabriel Fish or, really, any of those Founding Family snakes who thought Kingston was just another poor they could fleece.

Because he was.

“And we’ve only got one year to do this,” Jericho repeated. “Most of our developments don’t start paying out for at least two. We’re not a pump-and-dump firm. Did he put something in the tequila? Is that why we were all so stupid as to sign this?”

Yeah, maybe they’d been roofied. Figured.

If only there were some way to replay last night.

Kingston always had his phone in his hand, taking pictures and notes, documenting.

He tugged his phone from his hip pocket and swiped through his photos, finding way too damn much from the night before.

Even without the sound, the tiny images of all four of them gathered around the coffee table, each bending to scribble on white paper, were damning. “Oh, no. I have a video.”

The others lurched over, obviously just as destroyed as he was, and they crowded around Kingston’s phone to watch.

Each moment of the video was worse than the last, all of them laughing, the people around them laughing and toasting, and each one signing their damned lives away with each stroke of their pen on five separate copies of the contract.

Above them, the windows were white with blowing snow, and a fire blazed in the enormous hearth that could burn old-growth tree trunks as logs.

Jericho said, “At least it looks like we held our liquor pretty well.”

Morrissey nodded. “One of the benefits of going to boarding school for thirteen years is an iron liver and an impressive ability to hide how drunk you are, especially during class.”

Jericho sighed. “I think my liver’s gotten flabby. I’m not doing well this morning.”

Mitchell sat on the couch and held his head between his hands, a picture of how miserable Kingston felt but would not let on.

All right, they had a year.

That year started today.

Thus, they needed to sop up the poison in their systems and get a damn move on.

Kingston hoisted himself off the couch, stretching the stiff muscles that wrapped his arms and thighs, and wandered over to one of the staff members to ask for four glasses of ginger ale and if it was possible to get some dry toast.

The staff person trotted into the kitchen at the back.

Poor guy, working on New Year’s Day. Kingston hoped this overpriced country club was paying him at least double. They could damn well afford it.

As Kingston wandered back, Mitchell’s head wobbled on his neck like it was about to fall off. “You guys know that Gabriel Fish is going to win this, right? He never makes a bet that he doesn’t know he will win. The Shark will tear us to pieces, and Last Chance, Inc. will sleep with the fishes.”

Not unless Kingston was dead at the end of the year.

Jericho said, “There are four of us and only one of him. We have an eighty percent chance of winning this.”

Mitchell shook his head. “I took macroeconomics at Le Rosey with that guy. You guys were in the other semester. He won the Weimar Republic Simulation.”

That made them all shut up.

Le Rosey’s extensive business curriculum included a semester of macroeconomics during their junior year of high school. Every semester, that sadistic econ instructor designed a new unwinnable scenario to test the students’ steely character and the ice-cold nerves required to recover at least some assets in an impossible situation.

No one ever won.

The underlying point was to keep Le Rosey alumni from jumping out of the skyscraper windows when the stock, bond, and real estate markets crashed simultaneously, as they sometimes did.

Mitchell’s semester had been dealt the Weimar Republic Simulation, a scenario that still lived in infamy at the boarding school as a particularly fiendish test, but the professor hadn’t called it that, of course. She’d made up some stupid name for her fictional country, so they hadn’t known it was based on Germany between the world wars.

Morrissey asked, “How the hell did The Shark do that? It’s not on a computer, so you can’t reprogram it and cheat.”

Mitchell said, “Gabriel knew his history better than the rest of us. Dr. Barney devised something devious every year, but the Weimar Republic year was the worst. At the very beginning, the rest of us hadn’t figured out that the fake country of Sardoninnica was actually the Weimar Republic, and our savings and capital were about to die a horrible death in the grip of hyperinflation. We thought she was doing the 1929 US stock market, so we put our money in bonds and lent it at interest, which is what you do in a bear market. The Shark borrowed money at set interest rates from everybody else and bought gold. ”

Ah, gold, the suckers’ bet in every economic situation except the rare, almost singular instance of hyperinflation.

Mitchell continued, “When everybody’s notes came due at the end, he sold ten percent of his gold and paid us back with the worthless, inflated money. Basically, he borrowed a hundred dollars when a hundred dollars was worth something, invested it in stuff that inflated along with the market, and then paid everybody back a hundred and five dollars each but kept millions. He was the Weimar Republic, paying First World War reparations to France and England with hyperinflated dollars that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, and the rest of us were German citizens who got suckered into using our retirement savings to buy a loaf of bread.”

Just as The Shark had destroyed his classmates during the simulation, he would do it again, but this time with real money.

Mitchell said, “If we work together, we lose. If we don’t work together, he’ll beat us. He’s as ruthless and relentless as a tiger shark, and he just suckered us all.”

Morrissey stood up and clenched his fist. “We are going to lose if we just roll over and take it. We may not be able to work together, but we can at least consult on each other’s ventures and make sure we maximize each one of them. Surely, one of us can beat him.”

Mitchell shook his head. “You didn’t see him in that macro class. He made us all think that we were the smart ones, loaning him money at a guaranteed interest rate because we all thought it was the 1930s stock market crash like it had been the year before.”

“So that means he’s a con man,” Jericho said, scratching his beard. “Swindlers make you think you are stealing from them. They can’t hustle you if you play the game with ethics and morals. You can’t trick an honest person. So that’s how we’ll play it. Each of us will go out and buy a ‘golf venture,’ and we’ll run it to the best of our abilities. We’re going to invest and create value, and we’re going to be the best damn businessmen we can be. We’ve got a great track record with Last Chance, Inc. We’ve taken five companies from deep red balance sheets to profitability in the five years we’ve been running it. There’s no reason why one of us can’t win.”

Kingston wasn’t convinced. They’d vetted hundreds of companies and picked five. And they hadn’t been limited by the type of businesses they’d selected.

Mitchell grumbled, “Golf. Why does it always have to be golf?”

Match had never taken to the sport like the rest of them had, like Kingston surely had. Of the four of them, he had the lowest handicap and the most contacts in the golf industry.

As a matter of fact, he knew of several golf-related companies that were ripe for the picking.

Morrissey said, “Jericho’s right. This is what we’re going to do. We’ve been practicing for five years while running Last Chance. If anybody can beat The Shark at this game, it’s one of us. And only one of us has to beat him. We can sign a side contract between the four of us that if one of us wins, the holdings stay within Last Chance, Inc. And, if one of us wins, Last Chance gets an infusion of a hundred million dollars of capital from Gabriel Fish. That way, we can save the company we’ve been pouring our blood and sweat into. We can do this.”

That was an attitude Kingston liked.

He slapped his knees and stood. “Deal. I’ll call Last Chance’s contract attorney and have them draw up a side contract for the four of us. We can keep working on Last Chance as usual, and then we’ll each have our side project to make sure that at least one of us beats The Shark.”

Kingston would beat The Shark.

He had to save Last Chance, Inc. and keep his friends from splitting up.

Their friendship wouldn’t survive the bankruptcy of their company and mountains of personal debt, he knew.

His whole life had been cut away from him before, and he’d be damned if he’d let it happen again.

Everything was shit.