All Chapters of Twin Billionaires, One Obsession : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The Boy Who Wears FacesThe gala smelled like money and secrets, two scents Nolan Vale had learned to tell apart before he learned to read.He stood beneath a chandelier the size of a small car, a glass of champagne he had no intention of drinking balanced between two fingers, and let his gaze drift across the ballroom the way a man admiring art might, slow, appreciative, harmless. Nobody in that room knew his real name. Nobody in that room knew there was a real name to know. Tonight he was Etienne Marchetti, a soft spoken authenticator of Renaissance paintings with a tragic story about a mother who died in Florence and a habit of touching his own collarbone when he lied, a tell he had built into himself on purpose because targets always trusted a man who seemed to have something to hide that had nothing to do with them.Three hundred of New York’s wealthiest were gathered under that chandelier tonight, and every single one of them was, to Nolan, a door. Some doors led nowhere. Some l

A Name That Isn’t MineCassius Laurent’s office existed nowhere on paper, in a building with no name, accessible only through a private elevator that required a retina scan Nolan had undergone so many times he sometimes dreamed about the faint blue light. Nolan sat across from him now, spine straight, hands folded, the posture of a soldier delivering a report rather than a man who had spent the previous night lying awake replaying the exact pressure of two very different hands against his skin.“Walk me through it again,” Cassius said. He was a man of indeterminate age, silver threading through dark hair in a way that seemed less like aging and more like a deliberate aesthetic choice, his eyes pale and unblinking behind thin wire frames. He had trained Nolan since Nolan was seven years old, had shaped every skill Nolan possessed, and Nolan had never once, in seventeen years, seen him express an emotion that had not been calculated first.“Priya’s cover was compromised by a guest who r

House of Two KingsNobody moved for a long, brittle moment.Nolan stood frozen between them, close enough to feel Lucein’s warmth against his back and close enough to see the muscle jumping in Alistair’s clenched jaw, and understood, with the sudden, sickening clarity of a man realizing he had walked directly into the center of a minefield disguised as a hallway, that he had made a catastrophic miscalculation somewhere in the last four days. He had assumed, foolishly, that managing two separate points of interest inside the same household would be a matter of careful scheduling and careful lies. He had not accounted for the fact that the two men in question were brothers who apparently already existed in a permanent, simmering rivalry that his presence had just detonated into something considerably more volatile.“Lucein.” Alistair’s voice had dropped into a register Nolan had not yet heard from him, quiet in a way that carried more threat than shouting ever could. “You are embarrassi