“Are you always such an asshole?”
CHAPTER 2
Zoe
Raiden did always have a good poker face, and I used to envy that about him. He was just so freaking calm and cool under pressure. Like a pickled cucumber, which I happen to know he doesn’t like. I mean, who doesn’t like pickles? That should have been my first tip-off that there was something seriously wrong with Raiden Vanstone. That really is his real name. He and his mom never took my family’s last name when his mom and my dad got married, which was good because then, they didn’t have to un-take it when the marriage ended in a divorce.
Rotten Raiden, as I’ve come to think of him, looks anything but rotten. I already knew that, though. Even before I found out his shit tech company was taking over the even shittier one I worked for, I was well aware of what he looked like. It’s not like I could actually forget.
It’s not exactly a secret that our parents used to be married, and everyone from chicks who want to date him to actual coworkers, journalists, and execs from other companies, has hunted me down over the years, thinking I had some kind of clout with him.
It’s hard to find real friends when your ex-stepbrother is a billionaire Greek God tech genius brought back to life to walk amongst mere mortals.
I didn’t actually hate Raiden when our parents divorced. We were just stuck in the middle of some pretty ugly stuff until it ended, and our parents went their separate ways, never to meet again. Thank god. Over the years, it’s become ingrained in me to be a little bitter towards Raiden. Trust me. I have my reasons.
Now he owns the company I work for, but not for long. Not because he’s going to give up on control or building his empire, but because I’m going to walk out the door as soon as I can get my desk packed up. I love my job, and I thought it might be bearable if only he could stay away. This morning, when he showed up here and demanded a meeting with all the higher-ranking supervisors, managers, etc., etc., and gave a pep talk about how he intends to be hands-on (probably quite literally with half the females in this place), I decided I’m not going to stick around.
I’m not going to let him ruin my life again.
I’m not going to watch him conquer my workplace and change everything I liked about it.
It’s going to come out that we have a connection, albeit a far distant one, and then people are going to do what they’ve always done. Use me to get ahead. Or to get in bed. Both are pretty gross options.
Even if Raiden is insanely good looking and looks and smells expensive, he’ll always just be a rat in rat’s clothing. Yeah, so what if I’m not very inventive with my comparisons. He’s the one looking discomfited, not me. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he squirmed when he sat down, and his voice cracked. Yup, he’s so high up there, he had no idea I even worked here, or that I have since I was twenty-two. Eight. Years. For eight years, I worked my butt off, just so he could come and take it all away and wreck everything.
Raiden looks surprised when I ask him if he’s always an asshole. I used to have this major hang-up about swearing. I still kind of do. I think it sounds really unprofessional, so I have my own inventive repertoire, but no, I’m not above using the real words when I think it counts.
Raiden was always athletic. I used to be really jealous of how he could just pick things up. There wasn’t a single sport he couldn’t play well, and he went to college on a track and field scholarship. Who the heck even gets one of those? Anyway, he wasn’t rich back then. Not until he finished and invented some random software crap that made him a frizzle-fracking ton of money. He then bought out another tech company since he had the money to do it. That only made what he was already doing garner more success.
He branched out into apps a year later, then games, and now us. Or at least the company I work for. We do home security. Why he wants that, I have no idea. I think he just finds joy in dropping a smelly load all over everyone else’s day. That’s right. Raiden is definitely one of those people who would purposely leave the house ten minutes early, even if he felt something brewing, and drop it in a public bathroom somewhere just so other people would have the pleasure of basking in the smell of his poop. He probably thinks it would be a real treat for them.
“Am I always an asshole?” Raiden mulls it over. His voice has changed. It’s deeper. Smoother.
He looks different from his pictures. In pictures, he doesn’t seem so threatening, his eyes aren’t the right shade of blue, and his hair is not so raven black. He’s tall and broad in the videos and photos, but not like he is in person. In real life, it looks like he enjoys eating kittens as a snack and toddlers for dinner. He’s nothing short of menacing in the kind of way that women eat right up and fall into bed with twenty minutes later.
I can almost hear them now. I just happened to slip and fall, and Raiden’s dick just landed right inside me while he was trying
