Chapter Seven: Welcome to Hell

Ian’s POV

“Good swing.”

Gabriel’s voice carried across the green as we both watched the ball arc through the Saturday afternoon air and land with satisfying precision exactly where I had intended it to go.

I lowered the club and rolled my shoulders.

There was something clarifying about golf. Not the social version of it — the corporate rounds where half the conversation was positioning and the other half was performed casualness — but this. The family course on a quiet Saturday, just the two of us, no agenda beyond the game itself.

“We should do this more often,” I said, walking back to the golf cart with Gabriel falling into step beside me. “It’s been too long.”

“Agreed.” He dropped into the passenger seat as I took the seat beside him. “Especially considering we somehow managed to play this morning after the reunion last night. That’s either discipline or stupidity and I’m not sure which.”

I said nothing. Both, probably.

Gabriel Kingston had been my best friend since we were seven years old. He was also the COO of Lawson Group — a combination that worked because Gabriel was one of the few people on earth who could separate those two relationships cleanly and completely, being ruthlessly honest with me in both capacities without confusing them.

He was also, I had learned over twenty years, constitutionally incapable of keeping information to himself when he thought it was relevant.

“I forgot to mention,” he said, with the particular casualness he used when he had been waiting to say something for a while, “I did some digging on Layla Thompson.”

I looked at him.

He took this as an invitation to continue.

“She’s twenty-six. One year younger than you. Her parents died in a car accident when she was sixteen — both of them. She went to live with her grandfather Derick after that.” He paused. “She’s the CEO of Thompson Jewelry Group. Built it into what it is now from what Derick had already established. Smart, by all accounts. Driven. Very goal-oriented.” Another pause. “She’s apparently very big on the concept of love — talks about it in interviews, that kind of thing. As for her dating life, I couldn’t find much. She keeps that private.”

I was quiet for a moment.

“Both her parents,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “Both of them. She was sixteen.”

I thought about that for a moment — about being sixteen and losing both parents simultaneously, about the particular shape that kind of loss would carve into a person. About choosing to move in with a grandfather and building a career from that foundation and becoming, by twenty-six, the CEO of a company significant enough to appear in the same conversations as ours.

Then I thought about the Manhattan sidewalk. About the way she had looked at me when I said what I said about her mother.

Something moved in my chest that I did not examine closely.

“At least she’s better than Mandy,” Gabriel said.

I laughed — a short, involuntary sound. “I don’t care if she’s worse than Mandy. This whole arrangement is a sham. We owe each other nothing.”

Gabriel nodded, but I could see in his profile the particular expression he wore when he had decided not to push something further — which meant he had opinions he was temporarily keeping to himself.

Mandy.

I looked out at the course as the cart moved forward and let the name exist in my head for a moment the way I occasionally allowed it to — not dwelling, not reopening, just acknowledging that it was there.

Mandy Park. Fashion influencer. Beautiful in the specific, curated way of someone who understood exactly how to present themselves to maximum effect. I had loved her — genuinely, completely, with the kind of certainty that felt like solid ground until the day it wasn’t.

Gabriel had told me things. More than once. I had not believed him — had not wanted to believe him, which was a different thing and one I was more honest about now than I had been then. I had given her the benefit of the doubt so many times that the doubt had run out before the benefits did.

And then I had walked into her apartment I wasn’t supposed to be there that day and seen something I could not unsee.

Her so-called brother. Who was not her brother.

The month after the breakup had been the worst of my adult life — not because of the loss of her specifically, I understood now, but because of what it had confirmed about the gap between what I had believed and what was real. I had been a fool. A willing, deliberate fool who had chosen belief over evidence because love felt better than the truth.

My family had held me together. Gabriel had held me together. And I had made a very clear decision, somewhere in the wreckage of those weeks, about the kind of man I was going to be afterward.

Not vulnerable. Not committed. Not available for that specific category of hurt ever again.

And then my grandfather had arranged my marriage.

“She asked me to be celibate,” I said, to Gabriel. “For three years. As a condition of this arrangement.”

Gabriel made a sound that might have been a cough and might have been something else.

“She walked out of the restaurant,” I continued, “after telling me not to fall in love with her.”

The silence that followed had a very specific quality.

“She said what?” Gabriel said.

“You heard me.”

Another silence.

“I—” He stopped. Started again. “She told you not to fall in love with her.”

“As her parting line. On her way out the door.”

Gabriel looked at me. I could feel it without turning — the particular look of a man processing information that did not fit neatly into any category he had prepared for.

“She’s something,” he said finally.

“She’s infuriating,” I said. “She came late on purpose — I’m almost certain of it. She laughed at me. She refused my terms and replaced them with her own. She told me I had no choice about being celibate. And then she walked out.” I paused. “She is the first woman who has ever slapped me. The first woman who has ever talked back to me like I was nothing. The first woman who has ever given me orders.” I paused again. “The first woman who has ever told me not to fall in love with her, as though that was a genuine concern she needed to address.”

“And?” Gabriel said.

“And I am going to make her life extremely difficult.”

Gabriel sighed — the long, resigned sigh of someone who had been my best friend for twenty years and had learned exactly where certain conversations ended up. “Ian—”

“She thinks she has the upper hand,” I said. “She thinks she walked out of that restaurant having won something. She thinks she established terms and I’m going to sit with them.” I looked at the course ahead of us. “She doesn’t know me.”

Gabriel was quiet for a moment. Then, with the casual delivery of someone dropping something significant into the conversation without announcement: “Oh — I almost forgot. Layla Thompson is on the verge of closing a deal with Mr. Scott. Regarding Thompson Jewelry’s new design collection.”

I turned to look at him. “Which Mr. Scott?”

“The one whose company you helped revive two years ago.” He glanced at me. “That Mr. Scott.”

The laugh that came out of me was not something I had planned. It arrived fully formed — loud, genuine, leaning my head back against the seat while the golf cart driver very carefully looked at nothing — the laugh of a man who had just been handed something he had not asked for but was going to use.

The universe, apparently, had a sense of humour.

“My gut is doing the thing,” Gabriel said, watching me. “I can see it.”

“Your gut,” I confirmed, “is doing the thing.”

“Ian.” His voice carried the warning tone he had been deploying since we were teenagers. “Whatever you are thinking—”

“I am thinking,” I said, still smiling, “that Mr. Scott owes me a conversation.”

Gabriel looked at me for a long moment with the expression of a man who knew he was not going to change anything and had made peace with that.

I looked back at the course — at the green and the afternoon light and the particular clarity that came from knowing exactly what your next move was going to be.

Welcome to hell, Layla Thompson.

*******

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— Ruthie ❤️