CHAPTER 50

MAVERICK

T here’s an elephant kicking my door down.

If this is Bolt waking me up, his ass is fired.

I mean it this time.

I sit up straight in the hotel suite bedroom to complete darkness, the light blocked by the drawn shades.

“Come in,” I shout, pressing my palms into my eyes. “Shit.”

“I would,” Bolt yells back, “but it’s locked.”

I toss the covers aside and drag my tired body out of bed to yank open the door. He’s standing there holding a cup of coffee like I’m not three seconds away from kicking his ass.

“I distinctly remember saying late last night”—I turn back into the bedroom, leaving him to follow—“emphasis on ‘late’ because we’d been in meetings all day and half the night—that I needed to sleep past eight this morning. Local time, please?”

“It’s seven thirty,” Bolt replies dispassionately. “And you need to check your phone.”

I stride… or try to find my stride… back into the bedroom and grab my phone from the nightstand drawer.

“What’s up? What’d I miss?” I ask around a yawn as Bolt presses the button on the wall to retract the shades covering the giant windows.

“Someone leaked the list of businesses backing CFE’s lawsuit against Aspire,” he says.

All lassitude evaporates and my narrowed eyes snap to his. “Who?”

The one word rolls out low and fierce, and even to my own ears it matches the ferocious rage directed at these people targeting Hendrix.

“The list is extensive.” Bolt walks farther into the room and leans against the wall. “But one name in particular stood out. Andrew Carverson.”

The shock is so great the impact is delayed. The two parts of my life that have consumed the last few months—my relationship with Hendrix and my pursuit of the Vipers—clash like Big Bang meteors, exploding into white-hot rage.

The weight of this conundrum drops on me like a double-wide trailer. When I close this deal, the one I’ve been working on for years and dreaming about half my life, I’ll inadvertently fund the very man trying to dismantle not only Hendrix’s fund, but equity efforts at large.

“I can’t just give up on the team,” I say as much to myself as Bolt. “And I can’t let Andy get away with this.”

“What do you want to do?”

I want to tear Andy and the group of cowards who tried to hide behind the CFE smoke screen apart, to devastate them financially. Figure out a way to take every opportunity from them so they can see how it feels. The most urgent matter at hand, though, is stopping them from destroying Aspire’s grant program.

I grab my phone and dial Andy’s cell.

He never answers on the first ring, or even the second. He likes to make me wait. It’s been one of the few ways he’s still able to exert any control over me.

“Maverick,” he says after the third ring, his voice pleasant and unsuspecting. “How are you?”

“I hear you’re one of the people funding Citizens for Equality in their suit against the Aspire Fund. That true, Andy?”

The line goes quiet, and the longer the silence stretches, the higher the tension builds.

“I’m a concerned American who wants to see our nation’s values restored and true fairness upheld by the law,” he finally replies. “People should work for what they get, and if you’re concerned about unfair advantages, so are we.”

“Unfair advantages?” I scoff. “You, of all people, have the audacity to talk to me about unfair advantages. Are you kidding me?”

“We can agree to disagree, but don’t let that ruin a deal that gives us both what we want. Setting sentiment aside, this is business. I didn’t expect it to have any bearing on our arrangement.”

“It has bearing,” I grit out. “Because you and your bigot friends are trying to dismantle the very laws my ancestors sacrificed for. That’s more than ‘sentiment,’ and if you’re so proud of it, why hide behind a firewall of secrecy? Why don’t you ‘concerned Americans’ want people to know you’re supporting the efforts to restore these values you’re always talking about?”

“I still don’t see—”

“It has bearing because I’m in a relationship with Hendrix Barry.”

“Well, seems you have to decide which is more important to you,” he says, the conciliatory tone he was faking dropping altogether, replaced by the kind of arrogance that comes with true privilege. “It’s either your girlfriend’s little fund or the team your daddy never got to coach. Decisions, decisions.”

I let his taunts needle me, let them burrow under my skin and sting like a scorpion bite. I commit the note of smug self-satisfaction in his voice to memory. I want to recall it perfectly when I destroy him.

“By the time you fully grasp the mistake you just made, Andy, it’ll be too late,” I say and I hang up the phone.

“We still gathering intel on CFE?” I ask Bolt, who sits on the couch in the front room, arms spread behind him.

“Of course. We don’t have much useful info yet,” he says. “But we’ll keep digging.”

I glance at my phone and note a missed call from Hendrix. “Get an update for me while I call my girl back?”

“You got it.” He stands, straightening his ever-present bow tie, black and yellow today. “I’m sure she has questions.”

Questions. Concerns. Second thoughts?

I go to the bedroom to listen to her voice mail. Frustration and doubt seem to thread between her words. It took long enough to get her to trust me, to choose me, and now this bullshit happens. I think through what I’ll say while I wait for her to pick up when I call.

“Mav, hey.” The wall isn’t completely back up, but the open honesty, the hard-earned intimacy has been replaced by wariness. I feel it right away.

“Do you trust me?” I ask instead of trying to convince her I didn’t know about this, but will do everything in my power to protect her.

Her pause, the hesitation before she answers, enrages me. Not anger at her , but at Andy Jr. and his bully buddies for putting me in such a position when things were just going right with Hendrix.

“I don’t know what to think, Mav,” she finally says. “Not that you have anything to do with it or that you were hiding it, but you’re in business with one of the men trying to destroy something I care so much about.”

“More than I care about you, is what you mean, right?”

“Well, we haven’t been together long and you’ve been pursuing this team literally for years. I’ve met your father. I know what he was denied his entire career. I know he’s still grieving your mom and the impact you’re hoping acquiring this team will have on him. I’m taking all of that into account.”

“And what I feel for you? Do you take that into account?”

“Look, I wouldn’t blame you for choosing the team. It wouldn’t surprise me. Hell, on some level maybe I’d even understand.”

“It wouldn’t surprise you?” I give my irritation free rein. “Setting aside the fact that you think I would choose a business venture over you—”

“A business venture,” she scoffs. “Don’t reduce it to that. We both know to you it’s more than that.”

“Setting that aside,” I persist. “I’m offended that you think I’d endorse or enable something that could have such egregious consequences for Black people, for equity.”

“Seriously?” She sucks her teeth. “Rich Black folks choose their own interests over the community’s all the time.”

“I’m just some rich dude to you?” I ask softly. “Just like every other man who has looked out for his needs and forgotten his girl’s?”

“You said it. I didn’t.”

“Hendrix, baby.”

She lets out a long frustrated breath. “Look, I know you’re in a difficult position.”

Is she really not going to ask me to choose her? My resolve strengthens, but all the words I had prepared to convince her recede.

“I’ll be in touch,” I tell her instead. “The next time we talk, this will be settled.”

“You’re not going to… well, tell me what you plan to do?” she asks, allowing a rare vulnerability in her voice.

“I’ll show you.”

“Goodbye, Mav.” The joy and eagerness usually in her voice when we speak is noticeably absent, flattened by worry and frustration.

“Goodbye, Gorgeous.”

I hang up, take a deep breath, and process what I’m about to do. It goes against every business instinct I have. The Vipers are an excellent investment. It’s an industry I know inside and out and what I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember. And I truly believe it would invigorate my father in his grief like nothing else could, but this conundrum is not really a conundrum at all because of what I know in my heart. Something I haven’t voiced to Hendrix yet, but will not miss the chance to show her.

“Let me guess,” Bolt says. “We’re heading home.”

“You know me well.” I sigh and scrub rough hands over my face. “But first I gotta make a call.”