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And here's the last true thing I know about myself, the one that never makes the brochure. I have never once wanted something and failed to find a way to take it.

Most nights, that's a brag.

Tonight, I’m not sure.

Like I said, my superpower is knowing what people want. I can smell it on a person from across the room. Eleven years with Elias Thorne and nine with Theo Marsh, and lately I can't cross the lobby to my own office without watching the two of them lose their shit in real time, quietly and expensively, over a woman who answers our phones.

First, there’s Elias, who is, and always has been, the one exception to this. Can I actually, truly read the man the way I read everyone else? When it comes down to it, not really. He gives no hint, no crack, not when we lost the biggest deal of our careers, not even at his father's funeral, where he shook four hundred hands and never changed his face. Reading Elias Thorne is the single thing my superpower has never pulled off.

Which is how I know something's wrong. Because lately, I can read him, and it’s really fucking with my head. He made a mistake in a meeting last week, a real mistake, an amateur mistake, the kind Elias does not make. Then, he came through the lobby the next morning and did a thing with his eyes, a flick, half a second toward the front desk, and caught himself cold, but not before I saw the whole thing. The most controlled man I have ever met is working hard, every single morning, not to look at our receptionist.

Theo's the opposite. He’s the easiest read in the building, because he has never once hidden a feeling in his life. He's brought Agnes coffee for a year, I assume in her preferred combination of milk and sugar and all that crap people who can’t drink it black are prone to like. He’s the only man here who ever bothered to learn how she takes her coffee. It used to be nothing, just Theo being Theo, warm toward everyone. Yesterday though, I watched him set the cup on her desk and hold on a second too long, watched him say something quiet that made her go still, and I wanted to put his handsome head through the nearest window.

Which told me everything I needed to know about myself.

So here's what I know, standing in the middle of my own gleaming office at ten in the morning. Our little arrangement is dead. It just hasn't stopped moving yet.

It ran on one assumption, the assumption everything I've ever built runs on, that this was a deal. Three partners, one asset, split even, everybody wins. We are very good at deals. We have never once let a woman, or anything else, come between the three of us, for the simple reason that nothing ever mattered enough to.

She matters enough to.

You can't split her. That's the flaw in my beautiful machine, the part I didn't see coming. You can share a company. You can share a jet, a box at the game, a good bottle of scotch. You cannot share the person the three of you have each, started to⁠—

I'm not going to finish that sentence.

We had a partners' meeting last night, supposedly about the money, since I'm the one who runs the logistics of the thing I built. Twenty minutes, my office, and that good bottle of scotch. And I ran a little test, because I can't help it.

"She's booked solid through the month," I said, easy, watching them both over the top of my glass. "We could open it back up. Let her take other clients again. Ease off her a little."

I have never seen two men say no faster while saying nothing at all. Elias went still in his specific way. Theo's jaw twitched sideways. Neither of them looked at the other, which is exactly how I knew they were both thinking the identical thing I was. Nobody else gets near her. Not a chance. Not one other man.

Three of us, in a room, each silently swearing to keep every other man on earth away from a woman, and each quietly counting the other two as every other man.

We are so fucked.

We toasted the deal none of us was talking about, and went home to our separate expensive beds and our separate expensive homes. I lay in mine and understood that I am now in direct competition with the only two people on earth I trust.

And the woman at the middle of it, the broke genius whose glowing skin makes me want to lick my computer screen, keeps doing what I can't stop noticing and don’t want to believe. Last night, mid-session, she looked at the three obscene tips stacked at the top of her screen, laughed, and said, "You want to know what I love about men like you guys? Nobody's ever told you no in your lives, so you'll pay anything for the one woman who does." It was light. Throwaway. And all three of us went dead quiet because that is, word for word, the three of us: three men who've never heard no, handing over a fortune to the one woman who keeps saying it. And she said it like she knows us better than she knows herself.

Coincidence. It has to be. She's a sharp woman riffing at a camera. She has no idea the three Knights she's teasing are the three men whose calendars she keeps.

I keep telling myself that. Again, and again, and again.

So here's where I've landed, God help me and God help all three of us.

I am not opening her calendar back up. The thought of other men makes me want to buy the whole stupid CamALot platform for the pleasure of deleting them.

And I am not going to keep standing politely behind Elias and Theo, waiting for my third of a woman I want, holding my breath for the day this thing detonates and takes the firm and my friendships down with it, because that day is coming whether I mind my manners or not.

I built this machine. I get to be the one who breaks it.

I'm going to have her to myself. One night, just me, just once.

And I'm not going to tell the other two.

I do it on a Thursday, the sort of thing I'd fire an analyst for doing, something done with no due diligence, no exit plan, just pure appetite. I open Diablo's booking page, and where our standing three-headed reservation usually sits, I book a private one instead. One seat, for my very own greedy ass. Mine, all mine. HouseMoney, solo, no partners attached. Fuck everybody else.

I don't tell Elias. I don't tell Theo. I turn my phone face-down so I don't have to watch myself not tell them, and I pour a drink I don't touch, and I wait for midnight like a desperate, horny kid.