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At any rate, seven years later, my mother had accidentally gotten pregnant, and she’d gotten pregnant with twins, me and my twin brother, Cotter. My older brother, Phin, had been sent off to boarding school while we’d been raised by the help, and though there was a significant age gap between us and Phin, we’d still been close. After slipping free from our father’s grasp soon after graduating high school, Phin had come home a lot to spend time with us, and when we’d been fourteen, he’d gotten custody of me and Cotter. Phin and Sheridan had done their best to undo some of the damage that had already been inflicted on us by Phineas and our mother, Candy, and I like to think that they’d had, to some extent anyway.
Luckily for our father, Cotter and I hadn’t had any objections to going to college, then taking over Moore Industries when the time had come. With our intelligence levels being what they were, we’d started our internships at Moore Industries during our junior years in college, and by the time that we’d graduated with our degrees, walking into Moore Industries to take over had been a piece of cake. Granted, Phineas hadn’t been ready to step down at that time, but as Sheridan had begun to give him more grandchildren, Cotter and I had gotten more responsibility.
Now, all these years later, I was the official CEO of Moore Industries, Cotter was the official CFO, and Phin and Sheridan had four kids total. Phin had retired from snowboarding at thirty-five, and between all the money that he’d made during his career as one of the best Olympic snowboarders ever, his endorsement deals, and what he made from his shares of Moore Industries, Phin was a great stay-at-home-dad while Sheridan still taught science at Seeland Prep.
There was also no mistaking that we were all Moores. We’d all taken after our father, though Cotter and I had gotten our mother’s hazel eyes, whereas Phin had gotten our father’s green ones. Still, we were all tall, Cotter and I at six-foot-two, and Phin at six-foot-three, and had dark auburn hair, a dimple in our right cheek whenever we smiled or cursed, and even without the snowboarding career under all our belts, we were still all athletically built. Cotter and I were also identical, except for a small scar on the apple of Cotter’s left cheek that told us apart.
Now, while Phin was a good guy, and Sheridan still tried to do her best by us, Cotter and I were what most people would consider assholes, but we’d come by our personalities honestly. When you were wealthy and neglected, nothing good ever came of that toxic combination. There was also our intelligence to factor in, and it was hard not to act superior when you were surrounded by idiots.
Cotter and I also had that ‘twin connection’ that people weren’t sure was real or not. Granted, I had no idea if it was real or not myself, but Cotter and I were more than just twins. Our father and mother had neglected us enough that we’d been everything to each other growing up, so like most abandoned siblings, our bond was deeper and a lot stronger than the one of siblings that’d been raised in a normal, healthy, loving household.
I was also the nicer of us two. Sheridan had once described me as diabolical and Cotter as calculating, and she hadn’t been far off the mark. The best way to explain how my brother and I worked together was that my brain analyzed all the data, and Cotter’s mind made all that data add up to its final result. That was why I’d chosen the CEO role of Moore Industries and why Cotter had chosen to be its CFO. Cotter was aware of every penny that came and went, and I was aware of how each of those pennies had been earned. That was also the reason that we’d been able to take Moore Industries from a multi-million-dollar conglomerate dealing in renewable resources to the multi-billion-dollar powerhouse that it was now, our fingers in damn near everything on the market. We were also a privately held company, so we answered to not a motherfucking person outside the family.
Granted, that kind of success didn’t come without a lot of sacrifices. Neither of us had slept much during those early years when we’d been hellbent on proving ourselves to our father, and there hadn’t been much time to form any meaningful relationships outside the company. For years, I’d chosen to get my dick wet with escorts that new the deal, and up until a couple of years ago, Cotter had been of the same mind. Luckily for him, he’d found a woman that had agreed to sex-only, and for the past couple of years, he’d been able to live the dream. He didn’t have to go looking for pussy, but he also didn’t get yelled at if he forgot an anniversary.
Now, as for me, my situation was a little different. Though I still chose escorts to relieve the tension, I had a thing for my personal assistant, and it was a torture that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. When my faithful assistant, Lucy Averal, had quit to be a stay-at-home-mom, I’d left it up to her to hire the person that she believed could do the job, and she’d chosen Merritt Dale, the first and only woman that had ever grabbed my attention upon meeting her. Granted, Cotter and I had been a little hormonal upon first meeting Sheridan, but we’d been fourteen, and our opinion of her had quickly changed when she had become our sister-in-law.
At any rate, I’d been wrong when I’d first met Merritt, soon discovering that she’d been engaged back then, not married. Still, after watching my parents cheat on each other throughout their entire marriage, infidelity had always left a bad taste in my mouth, so every day, I made a conscious decision to treat Merritt with professional curtesy and that was it. Anything more, and I’d be in court, fighting a sexual harassment case. Of course, there’d be nothing to fight since she’d probably have a solid case, but still.
When my desk phone rang, I answered it as soon as I saw the extension on the screen. “Yeah?”
“I heard that heads are rolling,” Cotter snorted.
“R&D left the Copper Trunk prototype out all weekend, instead of securing it in the temperature-controlled vacuum,” I informed him. “The original prototype.”
“Are you fucking serious?” he rushed out. “What the fuck, Cutter?”
“Still feeling sorry for those rolling heads?” I drawled out.
“How in the fuck does something like that happen?”
“Well, let’s see…there’s the ‘I don’t know’ reason, the ‘I’ll have to look into it’ reason, the ‘I have no idea how this could happen’ reason…should I go on?”
“Have you looked at the surveillance yet?” he asked, and I automatically knew why he was asking.
“Not yet,” I answered. “The meeting just ended five minutes ago.”
“How stupid do you have to be to lie about something like that?” he asked incredulously. “Everyone knows that we have cameras all over the R&D departments.”
“I have a better question,” I countered. “How stupid do you have to be to make that huge of a mistake when you know that we have cameras all over the damn place? Whoever fucked up has to know that it’s going to cost them their job.”
“Well, I’m on my way,” he said, not surprising me in the least. “I want to see the surveillance with you.”
“Why? It’s just going to piss you off more.”
“My meeting with Sundial got cancelled,” he answered easily. “So, I have an hour to kill.”
“Do you really?’ There was no such thing as downtime in our jobs.
“My next meeting is with Garrett Connelly about the erased files that he can’t seem to find,” he said. “Seeing the surveillance will help keep my anger fed in between meetings.”
I laughed at that. “Like you need help keeping your anger alive.”
“Whatever I can do to keep you the nicer boss,” he retorted.
Yeah, we both knew that there wasn’t anything nice about either of us.
Chapter 2
