Chapter 24: Ask Me Anything

The roof of the Cabot Capital tower had never held two hundred people before.

Strings of white lights ran from the glass wall to the parapet.

The whole harbor lay below us, black and gold.

Waiters moved through the crowd with trays.

Half the city's money stood in clusters on the gravel, holding glasses and watching the door.

Marin was at my side in a dark green dress, with her father's watch on her wrist.

She had come straight from the closing, with the loan papers in her bag.

"Four and a half," she said, over the rim of her glass. "Signed and filed. I enjoyed it."

"I could tell. You smiled at my lawyer."

"I smiled at your lawyer's face when I read him the covenants."

A young man from the analysts' floor edged toward us across the gravel, pink with nerves.

"Mr. Cabot? Sorry. Everyone says you used to be easy to ask for things."

Marin turned her head.

"I was," I said.

"And now?"

"Now you ask Ms. Ashdown's risk team, and they say no, and then I read it myself."

He laughed, to be safe, and fled.

Then the lift doors opened across the roof, and the noise dropped by half.

Lawrence Thorpe stood in the doorway in a rented tuxedo that did not fit across the shoulders.

He had lost weight, and his face had gone loose.

He walked across the gravel with his back straight, and two hundred people watched him do it.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Return to the Apex: No More Mr. Nice Guy from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.