“Loren?”

He didn’t bother answering my stupid question. He turned around and shuffled away, leaving the door open, so I followed him inside. The house was mostly quiet since it was mid-morning on a Monday. I was sure Orson was busy running the empire he’d lorded over his son for years. It just showed how little he knew him.

Loren belonged on a stage, not inside a boardroom.

He sure as fuck didn’t care about metal fabrication or whatever made his father rich enough to believe his ambitions mattered more than his son’s.

“Why are you here?” Loren muttered when I followed him into his childhood bedroom. Unlike my grandmother, his parents hadn’t left it alone. They’d converted it into a guest room, completely wiping away everything that helped shape Loren into the man he was today. It was only unusual or unnecessary when you had nine other available bedrooms for guests.

He took a seat on the foot of the queen bed before planting his back on the mattress and closing his eyes.

“You know why,” I said as I watched him from the doorway. “Come home.”

“I am home.”

It took everything I hoped to be one day not to storm across the room and wring his goddamn neck.

He didn’t get to say that shit to me.

When Loren’s father threw him out for finally getting his mother to leave him, he had no one else but us. We were his family, and it had been that way ever since. Loren thought it had all been in vain when his mother crawled back like a thoroughly whipped dog, but it hadn’t. We made sure of it.

I then took that shitty deal with Savant and convinced my friends to do the same.

I couldn’t let Loren back under his father’s thumb. He’d been close to giving in and ready to accept whatever scraps his father threw for a price much too high when that deal came to the table.

But Savant had only wanted me.

Loren and Jericho had been optional, but I insisted, begged, giving Carl Cole the leverage he needed to fuck us. I’d told myself I was helping my best friends. Loren could support himself and Rich would avoid prison. After a while, I couldn’t live with that lie anymore.

Some days I felt guilty, others I didn’t.

Loren knew, and that was why he hated me. It wasn’t because I liked taking charge. Frankly, Loren was too lazy for the role. It was because I succeeded where his father had failed. I forced a life on him rather than let him make his own choices. He trusted me, and I used him to feed my addiction.

“You know as well as I do that isn’t true.”

He didn’t respond, but I knew he was listening.

Swallowing my pride, I finally let free the words I should have spoken a long time ago but hadn’t. I’d never been afraid that I might actually lose him before. “I’m sorry, Lo.” It seemed like I waited an eternity before his eyes slowly opened, and his black gaze met mine. “I’m sorry for breaking your trust in me, I’m sorry for not letting you choose your own path, I’m sorry for making you think we didn’t need you, and I’m sorry for not being sorry sooner.”

He made me wait.

Loren made the silence stretch as long as he possibly could before he simply said, “Thanks.” I was pretty sure my gut couldn’t hold any more dread. Clasping his hands underneath his head, Loren closed his eyes again. “You can go now.”

I narrowed my gaze on him as if he could see the warning in them. “Don’t test me, Lo.”

“Or what?”

I casually crossed the room without saying a word. When I reached him, I gripped his collar in my fists and yanked him from the bed until there was no space left between us. He let me. “Or I do everyone a favor, and I make you a bottom.”

Loren needed some humility, and one of these days, he was going to push me into giving him some. He made me see the difference between a leader and a dictator, and while I was determined to temper those urges, I would always run this shit. If Loren forced me to make that an undisputed fact, so be it.

We stared at one another for a long while before he swallowed and tried to push me away. I tightened my grip.

“You stink,” I informed him. My eyes were starting to water being this close.

He looked away and mumbled, “Back the hell off me then.”

Rather than do so, I pushed him toward the en suite until he stumbled inside. “Shower, shave, and get dressed. We have somewhere to be.”

“Such as?”

“Braxton’s hearing,” I informed him, getting back to business. “It’s today.”

Loren stared at nothing as his mind worked, and he overthought what really should have been crystal clear. “What makes you think she wants us there?”

“Whether she does or not, we will be. We’re not letting her do that alone.”

I sighed my relief when he didn’t argue. While Loren showered, I went downstairs to wait to give him some privacy and figure out my next move. I was so deep in my thoughts as I descended the stairs that I didn’t notice the ambush I was walking into until it was too late.

A spitting image of my best friend, though his hair had long turned gray and thinned, Loren’s father waited at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t flinch as I held the cold and cunning gaze of Orson James. Loren might have thought he hated me, but true hatred was found in his father’s eyes. Loren looked to me, he’d given me the respect Orson desired but never bothered to earn, and sometimes Loren even obeyed. For those reasons, Orson James despised me.

“Orson,” I forced myself to greet.

Laine Morrow wouldn’t care how much contempt I held for the man. My grandmother wouldn’t approve of me not showing anyone the proper respect in their own dwelling.

“Get out of my house, Morrow.”

“Gladly, but I’ll be taking your son with me.” My manners only went so far. Fuck him.

“Loren’s place is here. He knows that now. That’s why he’s come home.”

My skin crawled hearing the way he talked about Loren, but I forced myself to push past it and keep my composure. “Funny. You didn’t seem to think so when you literally threw him out in the rain and the street like a dog.”

“He was a man. It was time he acted like one.”

“Finally, we can agree, but don’t think for one second you had anything to do with Loren standing on his own. He didn’t do it for you.”

“I suppose I have you to thank?” Orson taunted as he straightened the cuff on his blue suit. Someone must have alerted him of my presence if he was here instead of at the office. “Fine. Thank you. Now you and that sad, little black-haired shit can watch me reap the rewards.”

“That will never happen, but if somehow, I died and let you have him, you’d have Loren to thank, not me.” I shoved past him, clipping his shoulder before striding out the door.

An hour had passed when I heard shouting. I was out of my truck and ready to storm back inside when Loren came waltzing out of the door with a sinister smile and looking like himself again. His hair was slicked back, and he wore fitted navy blue pants that hung off his hips and a matching short-sleeve button-up that he’d left undone. The only noticeable difference was the medallion he no longer wore.

My heart was still pounding, however, until I saw the bag with all his shit packed inside and hanging from his shoulder.

Reaching the truck, he climbed inside, and so did I. I could smell the fresh mint from the gum he was chewing and the bergamot in his cologne as he slumped in his seat and got comfortable.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Lo mumbled without looking at me. He was busy staring through the windshield at his father, who was standing on his massive front porch, fuming and holding Loren’s medallion, which hung from his fingers.

Wasting no time, I hit the gas.

I then flipped off Orson James through my lowered window when I sped off with his only son riding shotgun.

I ignored my exhaustion after flying round-trip from Los Angles to Portland in one day as I climbed from the back of the town car Dani had arranged to pick us up. Together, Loren and I walked into the building that held Savant Records, with two of our private security trailing us. Our strides never broke with the knowledge that our girl was thirty floors up fighting Carl’s lawyers alone.

That was until we got through the building’s security and reached the bank of elevators.

Loren, spotting Rich waiting, stopped in his tracks. “I want to make something clear,” he said to me, jaw tight as he glared ahead at Rich, who watched him too but with bleakness in his gaze, “this doesn’t change anything. I’m here for Braxton, and that’s it. I’m done.”

Yeah, we’ll see about that.

“You really want to argue about this right now?”

“I’m not arguing. I’m telling you.”