like her ex-boyfriend, Tyler, and his new fiancée. Because if she thought about it, she would have to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t hers anymore. If she thought about it, she would be forced to admit to herself that she was heartbroken, and that was a feeling she couldn’t afford to feel. Not on the brink of her success. Still, a year ago, when she told Tyler she needed a break, she didn’t think six months later he would be engaged. She didn’t think he would move on so fast. She thought he would wait for her because he loved her. But she was wrong. He had fallen in love with someone else.
As Ray’s right-hand man, Tyler was still part of The Last Kings, so she had no choice but to occasionally be around him on a business note. In truth, he had tried a few times to talk to her about where they stood, but she just couldn’t. He had made the conscious decision to give another woman his heart, and she had nothing to say to him. Sadie found that if she kept herself busy, she wouldn’t think about Tyler. But right then, when she walked into her room and sat on her bed, the only person she wanted to talk to was him.
He knew all about Rhonnie and Ahli and the events that had led her to them. However, she hadn’t told anyone but Ray and their team of scientists about the drug. Maybe if Tyler knew the reason she had been so aloof back then, things would have been different. She had been so wrapped up in doing something that hadn’t been done in years that the last thing on her mind was a relationship. If she could go back and do things differently, she might have. But she was fashioning a new drug, not a time machine.
Before she knew it, Sadie was on her feet again and inside of her closet. It was vast and mimicked a dressing room in a luxury clothing store. In the very back, there was a jewelry cabinet that held some of her most prized possessions. The entire cabinet was a mirror, and the front of it was outlined with diamonds. As she walked toward it, she stripped herself of her clothing. She looked her curvy body up and down, taking in her reflection as a whole. Gone was the girl who had begged her cousin for a piece of his pie. She had been replaced with a woman who had the spirit of a boss. A boss who would do whatever it took to never fall from grace again.
She opened the door of the cabinet and was standing face-to-face with $2 million worth of jewelry. She reached past all the diamonds and gold and pulled something from the back of the cabinet: a picture. Her face was emotionless as she stared down at the man and woman in the photo. The man was Tyler, and the woman was her. She was holding the camera and had caught the perfect photo of them smiling big under the shining moon. They were sitting on a gondola gliding along the canals of Venice, Italy. Sadie felt her heart tug slightly when she thought back to how Tyler had surprised her with a trip out of the country for a few days. She was so happy, and she would have been content anywhere in the world as long as she was with him.
“I’m going to keep this photo forever.”
That was what she had said, and she meant it at the time. But it seemed that their forever had come and gone. A single tear rolled down her cheek and fell on her happy face in the photo. Her chest felt like it had caved in, like someone had knocked all the wind out of her, and she realized she had been holding her breath. When she finally tried to breathe, she was comparable to a fish out of water, gasping at the air. It seemed as if the walls inside the closet were closing in on her, and before more tears could fall, she clenched her eyes shut. She didn’t open them until she had regained her wits, and when she did, Sadie forcefully ripped the photo in half before letting the two pieces fall to the floor. She closed the cabinet and left the closet, grabbing the suit and shoes she was going to be wearing on her way out.
She couldn’t hear the guns going off in the basement, but Sadie knew Ahli and Rhonnie were down there having a field day. She hadn’t expected Rhonnie to have many questions about the meeting, Ahli was the one she had been worried about. Although Ahli was the one who had given the location to the drug’s recipe, Sadie figured she hadn’t given much thought to the fact that one day it would really be on the market. If Ahli did feel any kind of way, she would have to get over it quick. Money was the motive, and there were millions, potentially billions, at their fingertips.
Sadie set the clothes on her California king and went to the bathroom connected to her bedroom. It was one of her favorite parts of the entire house, and she had it designed to fit all her needs. She felt the familiarity of the floor-to-ceiling pebbles underneath her feet as she made her way past the walk-in soaking tub. It was big enough to fit five people, and even though she would have loved to sit and relax, she didn’t have the time. So instead, she opted for a steaming hot shower. She turned the knob so that the water inside the glass walls of the shower spouted out and instantly hit her from all sides. She thought that the sting of water would bring her back to the present instead of in and out of her memories of Tyler, but she was wrong.
“I love you, Sadie,” she heard and saw his lips say in her mind.
“Stop it,” she whispered with her head down and water sliding down her face.
“There’s nobody else out there for me.”
“Please stop . . .”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Get out of my head!”
The truth was that she was inside her own head. Sadie fell to the floor of the shower and curled up in a ball as she finally let out the grief she’d been holding in. All of the strength she was used to carrying around all the time left her body. She cried loudly, not caring, because no one could hear her anyway. Her sobs were so powerful that her entire body shook, and she shook her head left and right.
“You don’t love me,” she said out loud to the Tyler in her head. “You moved on. I asked for space to focus on business, our business, and you left me! I hate you!”
In that moment, she was reminded that she was still human, and it humbled her deeply. She wasn’t just some ruthless hustler. At the end of the day, she was a woman—a woman who had loved and lost her soulmate. She cried and lashed out, banging the glass walls. When there were no more tears in her eyes, she let the shower water replace them.
When Sadie finally got back up, she felt better—not much, but a little bit would do. She cleaned herself and got out of the shower, not realizing exactly how much time had really passed during her episode. When she was dried off, Sadie went back into her bedroom, and she saw that the clock read three o’clock. Although the meeting was at five, she felt rushed because she still needed to get dressed, and the ride there would eat up forty-five minutes of those two hours.
The first thing she did after moisturizing was put her hair into two neat Cherokee braids. Next, she got dressed in her high-waisted maroon skinny pantsuit. She paired that with a black cotton camisole that she tucked into her pants and a black and gold Gucci belt to go around her waist. After sliding into her blazer jacket and pumps, she grabbed a small black Gucci clutch and a white binder off one of the dressers in her room.
Before leaving her suite, she glanced in the mirror at her reflection to make sure there was no trace of the fact that she’d been bawling. Her eyes were a little red, but that was nothing some eye drops couldn’t fix. Other than that, her secret was safe with her. Sadie dug in her clutch until her fingers wrapped around the small eye drop bottle, and she applied two drops to each eye.
By the time she got downstairs to the foyer of the mansion, Rhonnie and Ahli were already there waiting in their normal black attire. To the untrained eye, they just looked like two put-together businesswomen, but Sadie could see the small bulge of the guns on their hips.
“Our driver just pulled up,” Rhonnie announced, glancing through the glass windows beside the front door. “Are you ready?”
“Beyond,” Sadie replied, and the smile that found her lips was genuine.
“Then we should be heading out. After you, boss,” Ahli said, opening the door for Sadie to walk through.
Sadie avoided eye contact with her when she did. She didn’t understand it, but somehow Ahli always seemed to be able to guess when something was amiss with her. The only people able to do that without trying were Sadie’s former best friend, Mocha, and Ray. In truth, Sadie had tried to keep the relationship with both sisters strictly