a desperate foe

by leoandsnake

Summary:

Kendall wished he could envision any reality besides this Sisyphean one, any course of action besides leaping to his feet and running back up the hill that his father had just pushed him down. He was quiet for a moment, then added, “It’s hard to believe that Dad is so good at jerking our chains that it took us forty years to realize he was never planning on giving it to any of us."

Shiv held up a hand. “Thirty-four.”

“Thirty-six,” Roman muttered.

“I figured that one out in tenth grade,” Stewy said. They all looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. “The benefit of an outside perspective.”

Notes:

After their disastrous attempt at a palace coup, the Roy children were cordially invited to get the fuck out of Italy.

They were first ushered away by Colin and a few other heavies, out of the mid-century modern lounge where their father had calmly slaughtered them. Roman doubled back and started pounding against the closed door, shouting — not to Logan, but to Gerri. “Please, Gerri,” he wailed, “please, come on.” This went on until Colin walked over, picked him up, and heaved him bodily away from the door like he was a sack of potatoes.

Logan still had Kendall’s number blocked, and was no longer accepting calls from Shiv or Roman, either. The two of them tried to reach him for the entire drive to Kendall’s rental property. While Kendall was putting his kids to bed, they tried Caroline, who wasn’t picking up either.

“I’m sure she’s enjoying her wedding night with the Onion,” Shiv said to Kendall when he returned, her voice tight.

The three of them slept in the living room together, wordless, dozing in fits and spurts. To Kendall, the night had a feeling of unreality to it, like he was sick with a fever.

Karolina came to them at 7:30 the next morning and issued the suggestion for them to go home. She brought them coffee and donuts, and stood there in the center of the living room, dusted in golden Italian light.

“We need you,” she said, her voice firm but kind. “Shiv, Roman — your dad needs you with him on this. You’ll be invaluable to making sure this sale goes smoothly, and we need eyes and ears back in the city.”

Roman had been prone on the couch, but when she said that, he bounced to his feet. He put his hands on his hips and said, “I don’t want to be invaluable. I don’t want to be valuable at all.”

“I understand it’s raw right now,” Karolina began.

Shiv ran a hand through her Venetian-blonde hair. “Karolina,” she said, “can you just, uh, go away?”

Karolina shot Kendall a look, like he was the cause of this mutiny. He looked back at her with a blank, relaxed face. He was too tired to emote.

Roman picked up one of the takeout coffees that Karolina had set on the coffee table and whipped it into the fireplace, where it exploded. Everyone jumped. Foam cascaded from where the cup had struck, and milky coffee trickled out over the flagstone hearth.

“Jesus, Roman,” Shiv spluttered, but she looked unmoved.

It occurred to Kendall for the first time that Shiv hadn’t gone home with Tom last night, and that she hadn’t called him to say she was staying over at Kendall’s, either. The elephant in the room — Tom’s rather obvious betrayal of her and them — had yet to be pointed out. Kendall wasn’t even sure if Roman had put two and two together on that one, yet.

“Get the fuck out, please,” Roman said to Karolina, who was already backing up, her heels clicking on the floor. “We’re not playing. We’re not going to participate. Tell him it’s over.”

“Am I to take that to mean you’re both resigning?” Karolina said, looking between him and Shiv.

“Don’t take that to mean anything,” Shiv said in a flat tone. “Nothing means anything.”

“Yeah, nothing means anything,” Roman repeated, “so get the fuck out.”

Karolina moved to leave, then hesitated and turned back. “It would be easier for both of you if you —“

“Go,” Kendall boomed at her, surprising himself and everyone else.

Karolina left. Silence filled the vacuum of her absence.

“No one is taking my calls,” Shiv said, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “Except Laird, and at this point he doesn’t know anything we don’t know, so he’s just bitching and gossiping.”

Roman turned to Kendall. “Frank?” he said, with a mix of desperation and disgust.

Kendall shook his head. “No, I don’t have Frank, but, uh, I’ve been texting Stewy.”

“Okay?” Roman said. “And what is Stewy going to do for us, exactly?”

Shiv looked curious to hear the answer.

“He’s willing to meet with us as soon as we get back,” Kendall said. “He could — we could try again for a vote of no confidence.”

Shiv nodded. “That’s what I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I think that’s our only move.”

“I’ve been doing board math, and it checks out,” Kendall said. “We can talk about this on the plane, but we have to go. We should sit down with Stewy and Sandi as soon as possible.”

“I agree,” Shiv said, and Roman looked pained, but nodded.

It was strange to be bringing Shiv and Roman into the fold with him and Stewy. When they were all kids, Stewy was one of the friends who had always egged Kendall on in excluding them. ‘No, you can’t come up in the treehouse.’ ‘No, you can’t come hang out in the poolhouse, we’re hotboxing it, fuck off.’

 

/

 

Shiv and Roman slept for most of the jet ride back to the States. Kendall, unable to sleep, split his time between watching over them and watching over his kids. He was restless, desperate for something to do. When he was alone with his thoughts, he felt himself teetering on the edge of the big hole that had been blown through him, the frayed edges of him whipping in the breeze.

The kids could only sustain him for so long — Sophie fell asleep halfway into the flight, and Iverson was deeply absorbed in a game on his Switch and wouldn’t make conversation about anything else. Kendall, growing ansty, got up and went back down the hall of the private jet to his siblings. Shiv had woken up and was staring into space, hugging her arms to herself.

He sat down across from her and nodded to her.

“Hey,” Shiv said.

“Hey,” Kendall said. “Um, one thing I wanted to say…” He shot a glance over at Roman, who was still asleep. “I don’t think we’ve got Ewan.”

Shiv nodded. “Why count on history to not repeat itself, right? He doesn’t like us.”

“Yeah. I think he’d vote with Dad again. At the end of the day, does he really care if he gets cashed out and loses his board seat?”

Shiv stretched her legs and turned her face to the sunlight coming in through the plane window. “Maybe the loss of the seat would have some sway for him, yeah, because he’d be losing influence, which I don’t think he wants. But then again, it’s not like he usually even calls in for votes. And it’s not like GoJo is demonstrably more evil than Dad. If they were, maybe we would have a case.”

“Yeah, so, that’s my worry. Without Sandy and Stewy’s seats, we don’t have it.”

Shiv nodded. “Let’s say we get those four — big if — so that’s seven with you, me and Rome. We’re up against Dad, Uncle Ewan, Paul, Datu, and Dewi. It’s clinched, right?”

Kendall laced his hands in his lap and squeezed them together to ground himself, sinking back into the buttery leather of his seat. “Yep.”

Securing Sandy’s four seats sounded like a titanic effort that would require Kendall to be rock-hard, when all he was right now was limp and noodly. His nerve and tenacity had deserted him. He was spent, and only wanted to protect Roman and Shiv. He felt like a soldier clinging pointlessly to the body of a fallen comrade.

“We could let it go,” he heard himself whisper.

“No,” Shiv said. When Kendall looked up from his hands, he saw tears gathering in her eyes.

“Um,” Kendall said. “Tom —”

“Don’t go there,” Shiv said, her voice raspy but quavery. She swiped angrily at her tears with her sleeve.

“I’m not, but does he even know where you are?”

“I called him this morning and said goodbye to him, I said I’d see him at home.”

“So where is he?”

“Wherever they all are,” Shiv said. “Wherever Dad is, and Gerri, and Kerry — everyone. I could hear typing and talking in the background.”

“Is he going to come back with Dad?”

She cleared her throat. “That was what he said, yeah.”

“Did he say when?”

Shiv shook her head.

“Either way, we’re beating them back to the States, so that’s good. And you can find out via Tom when Dad is heading back, but in a, like, covert, indirect way.”

Roman surprised them both by lolling his head over, lowering his sunglasses and saying, “I think Dad is probably aware of what we’ll do when we get back, guys. I don’t think we’re pulling off the fucking heist of the century.”

“I think he thinks he has us beat,” Shiv said.

Kendall shook his head. “He never thinks he has anyone beat,” he said. “That’s why he’s him.”

 

/

 

It was night by the time they landed in New York, though just barely. It must have rained earlier, because the tarmac was shiny, and the sky had a luminous violet glow to it.

Kendall was the first one down the stairs, eager to get eyes on Stewy. Stewy had said he would meet their plane, but Kendall didn’t see him waiting on the tarmac like he had expected. The plane’s staff and the airline employees were no help as far as directing them; they were too busy hauling luggage off the plane and shouting to each other.

There were four identical Range Rovers parked and idling, and Kendall zeroed in on the rightmost one with a stab of intuition. At the same moment that he did so, the heavily tinted rear window rolled down, and Stewy stuck his hand out to beckon them with his fingers.

Kendall turned around and saw his kids descending the stairs out ahead of Shiv and Roman, laden with carry-ons. He went over to meet them, and clapped them both on the shoulders. They looked up at him with trepidation.

“I’m going to send you guys home to your mom’s,” Kendall said, “but I’ll see you soon, okay? And, uh, I wanted to talk to you about that stuff she was saying about the nanny before we left —“

“Mom already fired her,” Iverson interrupted him.

Sophie nodded.

“Okay, well,” Kendall said, “good. Just uh, in future, I hope you know — you’re old enough now to defend yourselves, okay? If a nanny ever should, you know, try to, uh, hurt one of you… your mom and I wouldn’t get mad if you fought back.”

They stared at him, now aghast.

“It’s a fucked-up world out there,” Kendall said, feeling defensive. “There are fucked-up nannies. A worst case scenario isn’t necessarily the stuff we’ve trained you guys for, like kidnappings. Sometimes people just snap.”

He tousled their heads and ushered them off to the leftmost Range Rover, waving goodbye. Shiv and Roman closed ranks with him, laughing as they did.

“Remember, eleven-year-olds,” Roman said in a goofy voice, “sometimes you absolutely have to kill your nanny in self-defense.”

Kendall’s heart dropped. “Nobody said anything about killing anyone.”

Roman opened his mouth to say something else and got slapped lightly in the head by Shiv. “Alright,” he said, gesturing at Stewy’s idling vehicle. “Let’s go beg for gruel like orphans. From the guy who once tried to run me over with a golf cart.”

“That was an accident,” said Kendall, who had been in the passenger seat.

He led them over to Stewy’s car, pulled the door open and slid over the bench seat. Stewy was sitting across from him, his phone laying in the palm of his hand — both muted and on speaker. A second later, Kendall’s heart dropped as he recognized the self-important, drawling brogue of his father as the voice coming out of it.

Once they were all inside and Roman had shut the door behind them, Stewy snapped his fingers at them and said, “You three have the worst timing. I’ve been waiting for your plane to land for forty minutes, and the second it did, your fucking dad called. Please be dead quiet, I’m about to go off mute.”

Kendall and Shiv nodded. Roman didn’t react; he was staring at the phone with big, wet eyes, like it was a bomb.

“… know what it’s about, at the end of the day,” Logan was saying. “I know this about you. And I know my son, he’ll come running to hide behind your skirt as a last resort, but you’ll let him dangle, I know that too. In fact, I think you’d throw his dead body to a pack of wolves if somebody would pay you a little money to do it.”

Logan laughed, then. In every vein in his body and every chamber of his heart, Kendall’s blood turned to ice. He was used to Logan saying much worse, but something about eavesdropping on these words made them feel additionally ghoulish. People were supposed to say nice things about their kids behind their backs, weren’t they? A thought came to Kendall, eked out as if it had traveled a great distance: all the times he had defended his own children to Logan. There were many.

Stewy laughed, too, but he had a look of disgust on his face as he did, and he mimed jerking off. Out the window, Kendall could see that the remaining two Range Rovers were being loaded up with their luggage.

“Oh, come on, Stewart,” Logan said. “Don’t give me that fake laugh.”

Kendall held his breath so he didn’t make a noise. Next to him, Shiv was digging her nails into the car seat.

“I’m sorry,” Stewy said, “you want me to be more enthusiastic about the idea of me desecrating your son’s corpse?”

“Oh, enough,” Logan said. “You know, you’re awfully mouthy and opinionated for a two-bit PE investor. This isn’t your world — the open market, the unwashed masses, the average Joe and his whims. You grew up spoiled and coddled just like my son, remember that. I do.”

Stewy sucked his teeth. “Look, we’re steady, Logan. Sandy still has the reins, and he’s shrewd.”

“Is he? Has he got any of his brain left, at this point?”

“Enough of it,” Stewy said.

“Well, I’m sure he’d like to see the back of me however he can get it,” Logan said, laughing more. “It’s all dandy. It’s all progressing fine, over here. Once we have the shape of it smoothed out, Matsson and I will both be on our way back to the States, and we’ll sit down with you and Sandi at some point.”

“Sounds great,” Stewy said, and flicked his gaze up at Shiv, who was gesturing toward her watch. “When do you think that’s going to be?”

There was a pause, and then Logan said, “Give me a few days.”

“Great. See you then.”

“Yep.”

Logan hung up, and Stewy tossed his phone onto the seat next to him before hitting a call button on the ceiling. A moment later, the car lurched into motion, and Stewy leaned back against the seat with his arm stretched across the tops of the seats beside him. He was dressed casually, and Kendall’s eyes kept accidentally seeking out the bare parts of his body — his throat, his ankles, his wrists.

“What the fuck did the three of you do?” Stewy said, either not noticing or pretending not to notice Kendall staring at his neck. “That was the third time in a five-minute conversation that he made a joke about one of you being dead.”

“What were the other two?” Roman said immediately.

“There was one about Ken being a walking corpse, and then one about you,” Stewy said. “Something about how the cold hard world is going to fuck you to death?”

“Cool,” Shiv said impassively, cracking her knuckles.

“Pissed you didn’t get one?” Roman said to her.

“Yeah, that’s my last straw,” she deadpanned.

They both looked to Kendall, and Kendall inhaled. “What do you know so far?” he said to Stewy.

“I know what I’ve been hearing,” Stewy said. “I know I’ve spent all day today being tailed by half of the Wall Street press corps, looking for confirmation of this deal —“

“Is that why you’re riding around with fifty percent tint on your windows?” Roman said. “You know, that’s illegal.”

Stewy waved him off. “And I know whatever smoke your dad just blew up my ass. But I’m not keen on releasing to you all of the details of what I know until you guys give me the entire scope of what’s gone down and what you want.”

He looked directly into Kendall’s eyes as he said this. For once, Kendall was too tired to avoid being seen. He looked back at Stewy and into his large, dark eyes. Stewy’s expression changed — he looked worried, almost rattled, by whatever he saw in Kendall’s gaze.

Kendall glanced over at his siblings. “Are we telling him everything?”

Roman sighed. “Yeah, whatever, who gives a shit.”

“I don’t really see what we have to lose, at this point,” Shiv said.

“Okay,” Kendall said, and turned back to Stewy to recap the events of the last twenty-four hours.

 

/

 

For almost the entire time that Kendall talked, Stewy remained quiet with his arms folded across his chest. Sometimes he nodded or sucked his teeth, but that was it. Shiv and Roman often jumped in to add detail, clarify points, or respond “Fuck you” to something Kendall had said — the only details they all wordlessly worked together to omit were Kendall’s suicide attempt and his confession of manslaughter.

When Kendall got to the part where Caroline had screwed them, Stewy said, “Hold on, for what reason? What does she stand to gain from that?”

“She said she thought it would be best for us to let all of this go,” Shiv said, through a tight jaw.

“And the Onion she married loves Dad,” Roman added. “Dad probably offered to show the Onion his wiener if Mom agreed to fuck us, or something.”

Stewy glanced at Kendall, who offered his take: “If he sells, she gets cashed out at the optimal time. It’s all money, at the end of the day.”

Stewy nodded.

The car trundled slowly through New York as Kendall wrapped up the story. Once he had caught Stewy up to the events of that morning, he looked out the window and realized they were too deep in midtown to be going to Stewy’s apartment. He started to ask Stewy where they were going, but Stewy read his mind before he could speak and said, “I have a suite at the St. Regis, we’re going there. I can’t go home — like I said, I’m being followed everywhere, and they have my building staked out.”

“I thought you were exaggerating for attention,” Roman said.

Stewy gave him the finger. Roman gave him the finger back.

When they arrived at the hotel, the driver took them in through the underground garage, and then a porter met them and escorted them to a clandestine elevator so they wouldn’t have to go through the lobby. This was full-bore celebrity treatment, the likes of which Kendall had really only begun to experience after he killed his dad on live TV.

He and Stewy drifted toward the back of the elevator, leaning their shoulders against the mirrored walls and facing each other, while Shiv and Roman talked in undertones that Kendall was too tired to listen to. He made eye contact with Stewy, and mouthed, Weed? while doing the universal smoking-a-joint gesture.

Stewy, who looked tired himself, nodded and mouthed, I have weed.

Kendall nodded back in relief.

Stewy kept looking at him with those big, searching eyes, then mouthed, You good?

Kendall froze for a second, unsure of how to react, then shook his head.

Stewy reached out and clapped his hand to the inside of Kendall’s arm, squeezing him. It was an odd gesture, like he didn’t know how to touch him anymore, but it lit Kendall up like an electric shock anyway.

Stewy had always been more comfortable with touch than Kendall: a more ready hugger, a shoulder grabber, a cuddler. That was just how he was raised. At their Harvard graduation, Stewy’s dad had come up to Kendall to congratulate him, and pulled him in for a hug — Kendall, stunned, had gone limp in his arms as a defense mechanism.

The porter led them to Stewy’s room and let them in. The Roys wandered inside like three lost lambs while the porter waited in the doorway, telling Stewy, “Please let us know if there’s anything else you need, Mr. Hosseini.”

“Could you have someone bring up a six-pack of Dr. Pepper?” Stewy said, peeling a hundred out of his money clip and handing it to the porter. “Thanks.”

The porter thanked him and left, pulling the door shut behind them. Kendall looked around. It was an aggressively colorful suite, and one he had never stayed in before himself. The wallpaper was a fine, elaborate pattern, gilted around its edges where it met with the wainscoting. The drapes were a deep olive, and the couches around the center ottoman were blood red, flanked by velvet stools.

Stewy led them over to that ottoman and sat on one of the couches, beckoning them to come join him. Roman went over to one of the stools and sat incorrectly on it; Shiv remained standing, pacing back and forth barefoot. She had taken off her heels as soon as they walked in. Kendall sat diagonal to Stewy on the sectional, then leaned back into the plush pillows. Once he did that, exhaustion descended on him, tugging his eyelids down. Kendall fought this, hugging his arms to himself.

“So,” Stewy said, kicking his feet up onto the ottoman. “What do you guys want from me, exactly?”

“You know what we want from you, asshole,” Roman said. “Four votes of no confidence.”

Stewy laughed. “Ro-Ro, your math skills leave a lot to be desired. I have one board seat.”

“You could sway the Sandies,” Kendall said, looking over at him.

“Yeah, and you owe us,” Roman said. “You promised to vote with us, and then you fucked us, and now you owe us interest on that. The one vote has become four votes. Pay up or we’ll break your kneecaps.”

Stewy held a finger up. “I never promised you anything,” he said, his voice calm. “I told Kendall not to rely on me. I told him I would follow the money. And I abstained, Roman, while you voted with your dad.”

“This isn’t about me,” Roman said, pink-cheeked. “I’m not the interloper here.”

“Remember that I saved you from falling off a debt cliff,” Stewy snapped.

Shiv cleared her throat. “Stewy, I think we have a case to make to the Sandies,” she said. “I think Sandi Jr. likes me, and I think, considering the animosity between our dad and Sandy Sr., we could convince him to vote with us just to fuck our dad.”

“Shiv, this is not the same situation it was back in March,” Stewy said. “Sandy is gurgling away in a rented hospital bed uptown. He doesn’t differentiate between you and your dad anymore. You are all your dad, as far as he’s concerned. He will love this deal, quite frankly, because it takes the company out of Logan’s hands forever.”

Kendall’s heart sank. He had known going in that Stewy would say that, but it stung all the same.

“But Dad wins!” Shiv exclaimed. “He wins, this way! Can’t Sandy see that? He’s going to go out on top, secure his legacy, and make a shitload of money! If Sandy blows up this deal and helps us get control of our company, we’d be putting our dad out on an ice floe!”

“And then the Three Stooges take control of the firm that we’re into for a billion dollars, and drive it into the ground?” Stewy said. “I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. I get what you’re going through, right now, but objectively, selling to GoJo is the optimal business decision.”

There was a knock at the door, and Stewy got up to go answer it. He patted Kendall on the knee as he passed him. Kendall shrank away from his touch, frightened of how needy it made him feel.

“Ken,” Roman said in disbelief, “tell him.”

“Tell him what?” Kendall said in a low voice, as Stewy thanked the room service guy and tipped him. “He’s right.”

“No, he’s not!” Shiv said. “We’d be good at this, you know we would. The three of us, we could do it. If we stuck together, and held a united front — played to each other’s strengths, covered for each other’s weaknesses — we could do it. We could turn Waystar completely around.”

The hotel room door shut again, and Stewy went over to the kitchenette, putting the Dr. Pepper in the fridge.

“Fuck your Dr. Pepper,” Roman said wildly.

Stewy snorted as he came over and sat back down. “Are you guys forgetting Sandy literally wanted to block every single one of you from ever taking control? He’s a deranged, punitive vegetable, and he’s out for Roy blood. That is the guy you want to go to with your hats in your hands — remember that.”

Roman leaned forward and took a deep breath, then swept his hair back off of his forehead. “Stewy,” he said, “I’m literally about to throw up from even thinking about saying this, but… what if we installed you as CEO?”

“I am not an executive,” Stewy said immediately. “I couldn’t do that job. You’re lucky you said that to me, and not someone else, because even just floating the idea has horrifying implications for the state of your acumen.”

“We’re just fucking talking here! Jesus! This is all hypothetical!”

“Well, stop it,” Stewy said, crossing his legs and bouncing his foot. “Stop playing fantasy football and wake up to reality.”

“Don’t cross your legs at me,” Roman said pettishly.

“It’s not that he can’t do it, it’s that he won’t,” Kendall said to Roman. “He has the understanding of the street, he has the killer instinct…  it’s just not what he does. He gets in, turns a buck, gets out. He’s the pullout king.”

Stewy snorted, but looked flattered.

“So what, though?” Shiv said. “We’re in no-man’s-land right now, anyway. Our general counsel is our CEO. The C-suite is a mess.”

“She’s CEO in a temporary-as-fuck sense,” Stewy said. “I’ve heard your dad pulled a name out of a hat to put down on paperwork, and somehow that became real. I’m not falling on the same sword for you guys that she did for Logan, sorry.”

Roman looked further nauseated by this mention of Gerri.

Kendall looked over at Stewy and said, “We should have let you and Sandy buy us out.”

Stewy reacted as if slapped. His eyes got wide, and he turned to Kendall, spluttering, “Oh, do you think? God, I’m going to have a fucking aneurysm!”

“Look, we can live in what-ifs and should-haves, or we can act,” Shiv said, starting to pace again. Roman was now lying down across the velvet stools. “Stewy, is there anything here, or are you just jerking our chain? Because if it’s the latter, I’m leaving now so I can go call my journalist friends and start leaking every single piece of dirt I have on Dad.”

Stewy inhaled and laced his hands in his lap. “There is one thing,” he said. “Sandi and I — Sandi Jr. — are extremely tired of your dad. We’re tired of being outside of deals, outside of information. We’re not being treated like half of his board, we’re being treated like two bumpkins who wandered in off the street.”

“I warned you he was going to sideline you,” Kendall muttered.

“You being right about that was never what was in question, Ken,” Stewy said without looking at him. “And you’re right, Shiv, that Sandi likes you.” He paused and thought better of this. “Respects you.”

Shiv looked like this was cold comfort to her, but comfort all the same. “So?”

“So, I think if you could offer a compelling alternate vision for the company, and show her a viable path to successfully taking this to a vote, she’d give it fair consideration and pass that along to her dad.”

Kendall nodded. “I think that’s the best we could hope for.”

“You would have to move fast,” Stewy said. “Like, tomorrow.”

The mere thought of this was exhausting. Kendall’s warm, heavy eyelids tried to fall again. His head ached from lack of sleep, and all of the crying he had done yesterday, and the lingering effects of hypoxia from the pool incident. He wanted to smoke a joint and go to sleep.

“We don’t like Matsson,” Stewy added. “That’s another thing, we didn’t like the GoJo deal to start with. I think Sandi would be, ah… unappreciative of the idea of him waltzing in and cashing her out. Look, everyone likes the idea of a board seat, right? Everyone likes the idea of control, and a voice. People can, and do, sometimes sacrifice large amounts of money in the interest of maintaining that control. That’s really your only angle to go to the board with.”

Shiv nodded. “I didn’t know you two had met with Matsson.”

“We haven’t met with him,” Stewy said. “We follow him on Twitter, and I talked to him for like, five seconds at Ken’s fortieth.”

“You were there?” Roman said, looking up.

“Briefly,” Stewy said. “I left early, the vibes were absolutely rancid. Sorry, Ken.”

“No, you’re right,” Kendall muttered. “The vibes — the vibes were pretty rancid.”

He got up, and everyone looked at him.

“Bathroom?” he said to Stewy, who jerked his thumb at a door along the far wall.

Kendall went in and shut the door behind him, leaning over the sink and turning the cold tap on. He let cool water run over his shaved head for a while, then lifted his head and splashed it against his cheeks and eyes. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he looked crazy — his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, his face wet, his collar damp.

When he walked back out, the hushed conversation between the three of them cut off like a movie being paused.

“Talking about me?” Kendall said.

“No,” Roman lied badly.

“Whatever,” Kendall said, and went into the kitchen to get a Dr. Pepper. “Stewy, do you mind if I crash with you tonight?”

“Nah, that’s fine,” Stewy said, sounding surprised.

Kendall turned to his siblings, taking a long sip of soda. It tasted like corn syrup and battery acid, but the carbonation stung his nose and grounded him in reality. “Shiv, Rome,” he said, “I think maybe we should pick this back up tomorrow. I’ll call you first thing, and we can start going down the list of board members and major shareholders. We shouldn’t consider anyone with influence off-limits, even Marcia. Maybe we can cut her a better deal than Dad did.”

“A better deal than a billion dollars in cash?” Shiv said. “I mean, sure, if you want to try to seduce our step-mommy, go for it.”

“If Dad has a baby with his assistant, that’s pretty bad news for Marcia’s interests,” Roman said.

Stewy whipped his head around to Kendall like an owl. “If he does what?”

Kendall shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it, we don’t have official confirmation on that one,” Roman said.

Stewy said something under his breath that sounded like ‘this fucking family’. Kendall came over and sat back down on the couch, and as he did, Stewy got up.

“I’ll walk you guys out,” he said. Shiv and Roman nodded.

Kendall wasn’t stupid — this was clearly a ploy to finish their conversation from earlier, but he was too tired to mount any kind of protest. He lay there like a salted slug as they gathered themselves to leave. Roman came over and patted him on the head to say goodbye. Shiv made eye contact with Kendall, and he saw that she was on the verge of tears again.

“Get some sleep, guys,” Kendall said.

“Yeah,” Shiv breathed. “Yeah, we will.”

“You too, buddy,” Roman said.

They left with Stewy, and Kendall dozed on the couch. About ten minutes later, he heard the door open again, and lifted his head. Stewy walked in, shrugging his blazer off and tossing it over one of the barstools that rimmed the kitchenette’s breakfast bar.

“I need an explanation,” Stewy said, his voice flat and hard in a way it hadn’t been when Shiv and Roman were present.

“For what?” Kendall said. His mouth was dry. He licked his lips.

“For what? How about you start with absolutely everything, and we’ll go from there?”

“I told you everything.”

“Bullshit, you didn’t even tell me the truth about what went down in Italy. They just told me you tried to drown yourself.”

Kendall got a fortifying jolt of shock, and sat up. He gestured for Stewy to sit down, but Stewy remained standing, his arms folded and his face stone.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t. I just kind of, um… let go.”

“Of being alive?”

“No, of the floatie.” A lump formed in Kendall’s throat. “I was — I was tipsy, I had, uh, sun poisoning. Sleep deprivation. I’m fine, I don’t know why they even told you about that.”

Stewy took a step closer and clapped twice in his face, like he was a catatonic boxer slumped in the corner of a ring. “Hello! Earth to Ken! They’re worried about you! So am I!”

“I thought you didn’t care anymore,” Kendall said. The lump got bigger and harder.

He looked up at Stewy, who looked grief-stricken. Kendall found it hard to reconcile Stewy’s facial expression with himself. That face was about him? That face was because of him? It didn’t make sense. Kendall felt he had died in that car alongside Andrew Dodds, and all that remained was a corporeal ghost.

“Maybe I should just go home,” Kendall muttered.

“No. If you want my help, again, you need to tell me what happened after the bear hug.”

“I — I relapsed,” Kendall lied. “At Shiv’s wedding.”

“No, you didn’t, Ken, you relapsed before the wedding, are you fucking kidding me? You and I were snorting blow up and down the financial district for months before the wedding.”

“Yeah, but it got bad,” Kendall said, and then more of the lie came to him: “I overdosed. I got some shit that was laced, I think. Um… my dad’s guys found me. They put me in rehab. I thought it would be better to… to no longer be involved. I didn’t think I could do it anymore.”

Stewy stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said, his voice soft.

“No?”

“No, you’re lying to me. Because if that’s what happened, you would have told me. You would have called.”

“They took my phone,” Kendall said numbly.

“Yeah? Did they put a pillowcase over your head and duct tape your wrists behind your back for the entire flight to rehab? Bullshit.”

Kendall let out a shaky breath. “Can I have… um. Can I have weed?”

Stewy stood there for a moment, then heaved a sigh and crossed the living room, going into the bedroom. He left the door open, and Kendall could hear him moving around in there, unzipping luggage.

He came back out with a fat joint and a lighter. Kendall accepted these gratefully, and lit up. Stewy went to open a window.

“Don’t worry about that,” Kendall said.

“Dude, you can’t skunk up the St. Regis.”

Stewy went about his evening ablutions while Kendall killed the joint in short order. After Kendall had tossed the roach into an ashtray on the ottoman, Stewy came out of the bathroom with moisturizer drying on his face. Kendall pointed at him with a smile.

“Fuck you,” Stewy said. “I have to be camera-ready, thanks to this shit.”

“No, you look beautiful, man. Radiant.”

“Again, fuck you. Oh, I have something for you, actually.” He clapped his hands to his thighs and went back into the bedroom. Kendall could hear him rummaging through his luggage again.

Stewy came back out with a slim object in his hand: a vape. He tossed it to Kendall, who caught it and took an appreciative hit.

“You really look like you want a cigarette,” Stewy said, “but that’s not as much my thing, as you know.”

“No, thanks, this is good.” Kendall laughed at a memory. “Remember when we moved in together in college, and you stole that No Smoking sign from a bar and put it up in your room?”

Stewy laughed too. “Yeah, well, the smell gets into fabric.”

Kendall took another hit. The flavor of the nicotine was cloyingly sweet; it lingered in his mouth like grease. “What flavor is this?”

Stewy sat back down, beside him this time. Their knees were almost touching. “Froot Loops.”

Kendall laughed again. “You are the only person over the age of fifteen who’s vaping Froot Loops.”

“I got that for you,” Stewy retorted. “You’re the only person over the age of fifteen who’s vaping.”

Kendall was quiet for a moment, then said, “You got this for me?”

“Yeah, after we agreed to meet up.”

Kendall glanced at him. “You know, I was really happy our sophomore year,” he blurted out. “How that house was just you, me, Dan and Scott… it felt like I was, um… it felt like the first time I felt, you know…”

“Freedom?” Stewy said, searching his face.

“It — yeah. That’s what it felt like.”

Stewy touched his knee again, like he had earlier. “Do you want to get out?” he said.

“Get out of what?” Kendall said, feeling completely smooth-brained. “Your hotel room?”

“No, Ken, the company.”

Kendall swallowed. The lump had returned, and his eyes grew hot with tears. “I don’t, but I do,” he said. “I do, but I can’t. Look, not like this, okay? It can’t be like this. This is so humiliating for us.”

“I know.” Stewy’s voice was silk-soft, almost inaudible. “It might have to be like this, though.”

A tear ran down his left cheek. “It can’t.”

“You’ll be a billionaire, you’ll be free, you can do anything you want. We’ll start something new, okay? Anything you want. I’ll deal with the money, and you be the face of it.”

“I’ll have nothing. I have nothing.”

Stewy’s hand went to his shoulder. He gave him a bracing, hard squeeze. “Kendall...”

Kendall shook his head, feeling hysterical and childlike. He was bowled over by another wave of exhaustion. “I need to sleep,” he said. “I need — I just need sleep.”

“Alright, then let’s get you some sleep. There’s a second bedroom.”

Kendall would have liked to sleep in bed with Stewy, the way he had done when they were younger, but he couldn’t ask for that. It felt impossible to articulate. So he just nodded and let Stewy help him to his feet.

Once he took off his clothes and got into bed, he fell asleep instantly.

 

/

 

Kendall woke up in the middle of the night. It took him a relative eon to remember where he was; the room was perfectly quiet and perfectly dark in the way of lavish hotel suites.

When he did remember, he sat up and fumbled to turn the bedside lamp on, then got out of bed. He had stripped down to his boxers to sleep, and he didn’t bother putting anything back on before he crept out of his bedroom and walked on light feet to Stewy’s door.

Kendall leaned against it, listening for sounds of breathing or snoring. He didn’t hear anything. He thought about calling Stewy’s name, but his mouth was too dry, and his heart was beating too fast. He simply twisted the crystal knob and went in.

Stewy’s room wasn’t as dark. It had an en suite bathroom, and he had left the light in there on, plus an open laptop was sitting on a chair by the door. Kendall crept toward the bed, where he could see Stewy lying. It was hard to tell if he was asleep or not.

Kendall knelt onto the bed behind him and laid a hand on his hip. Stewy stirred.

“You awake?” Kendall said.

“No,” Stewy murmured, raising his wrist to his eyes.

“Can I sleep in here with you?”

“Yes.”

Kendall, relieved, lifted the sheets that were over Stewy and got underneath them. He lay on his back beside Stewy at first, but that felt like needless pretense, so after a minute or so he cuddled up against him. To his great relief, Stewy didn’t push him away, but instead grabbed him by the forearm and held onto him like Kendall was dangling over the edge of a cliff.

He pressed harder up against Stewy, nuzzling into him. His dick twitched hard in his boxers, but he ignored it. His body wanted sex, but he didn’t. All Kendall wanted was peace.

“Ken,” Stewy said.

“What,” Ken mumbled between his shoulder blades.

“I can feel your boner, dude.” His voice was low from sleep.

“Just ignore it, don’t worry about it. It’s just a reaction.”

“Did you come in here for sex?”

“No,” Kendall said. Something inside of him broke, then, and he started crying.

Once he had started, it was very hard to stop. Stewy sat up and leaned against the headboard, pulling Kendall into his arms. Kendall felt stupid and grotesque and unlovable, but he let Stewy hold him anyway. He wept and wept against Stewy’s bare chest, his eyes burning, his own chest heaving. He could taste the salt of his tears in his mouth. Stewy’s chest hair was soft, damp and curly against his face. Stewy stroked his head and his back, holding him, not saying anything.

Kendall finally hiccuped himself into silence and lay there in Stewy’s arms, feeling exhausted once again, but better.

“Are you ready to talk, now?” Stewy said. “For real?”

All of the fight went out of Kendall. He lolled into the crook of Stewy’s elbow, burying his face against his armpit, and Stewy jostled him like he was trying to wake him up.

“Ken,” he said.

“I killed someone,” Kendall said into his armpit.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

Kendall lifted his head and wiped tears and snot from his cheek. He looked into Stewy’s eyes, which were pitch black in the low light.

“I killed someone,” Kendall said, enunciating each syllable.

Stewy looked exactly as nonplussed as Roman and Shiv had, as if this were an admission that couldn’t be reconciled with the person saying it. “What are you talking about? What does that mean?”

“The waiter,” Kendall said. “The waiter at Shiv’s wedding. The one who drowned. Do you remember him?”

To his surprise, Stewy nodded. “Sandy’s guys tried to look into that,” he said, “but they didn’t find anything.”

This made perfect sense, but still, Kendall dry heaved from the unpleasant shock of hearing it.

“Ken, what do you mean you… that guy died in a car accident, what are you talking about?”

“I was driving,” Kendall said, and gagged again. “I was driving. Stewy, I was driving.”

Stewy’s expressive face began to show dawning horror. “You were driving?”

“I was high… I was fucked up… we were on our way to get drugs, and he saw something in the road, and he grabbed the wheel out of my hand.” This retelling was easier than the initial confession had been. He was able to comfort himself with the memory of the warm Italian sun on his back, and Roman’s easy assurance. “We crashed into the water. I got out, I don’t remember how — I got my window down somehow. I kind of… I came back into my body once I was safe on the bank. Then I dived a few times, I tried to get him.”

Kendall broke off and wept for a moment. Stewy kept his hand wrapped around Kendall’s forearm. He hadn’t let go of it this entire time.

“It was so dark,” Kendall sobbed. “It was so dark, man, it was cold, it was fucking March. I couldn’t see anything when I went under, I couldn’t find the window I came out of. I think his car — I think it settled onto its side, or something…”

“What did you do then?” Stewy said.

“I went back. I started to run for help… but I was so far from everything, and I thought, you know, I thought maybe he got out on his own. I just, uh… I went to my room, and I changed. I went back to the wedding. I don’t remember what I said to people when I got back.”

Stewy swallowed. “Okay.”

“I didn’t want to tell you this. I didn’t ever want to tell you this.”

Stewy put a hand up. “Slow down. Who else have you told?”

“Shiv and Roman. I just told them yesterday.”

“And this is why you bailed on the takeover?”

“Yes. But my — my dad —”

Stewy’s eyebrows staved down and his mouth hardened. “Your dad what?”

“He knows, he covered it up,” Kendall said. “The next morning, I found out the kid was dead, and then my dad sent for me, and he told me they had covered it up. They found my keycard on the scene, and they hid it, and it looked like he was the only one in the accident. And then my dad told me to give it all up and come back into the fold.”

“Oh,” Stewy said, all of his breath leaving him in a single exhale. “Holy shit. You’re fucking serious?”

“Do I not look serious?” said Kendall, who was shaking violently and covered in his own snot and tears.

“Oh, Ken. Oh, my God. What the fuck?”

“I’m a terrible fucking person, I know, okay? I didn’t mean to bail on you, is all I’m trying to say.”

Stewy ran his hands through his hair, looking agonized. “So the overdose thing, that was a lie.”

“Yeah. I did go to rehab, my dad sent me to rehab, but it was because of what happened, it wasn’t because I was using. I didn’t overdose.” Kendall drew in a shaky breath. “This is what happened.”

“Your dad is a fucking felon,” Stewy said. “Do you realize that? He tampered with a crime scene, he stole evidence.”

“I’m the felon.”

“Ken, he went — while you were asleep, he went and covered up your crime, he prevented you from turning yourself in. If you had turned yourself in the next morning, you’d probably get DUI, reckless endangerment — nothing that serious. Now —” Stewy gestured wildly. “Now it’s a trap he’s put you in. He stuck a pin in you and put you in a shadow box.”

“You think my own father should have turned me in to the police?”

“Don’t be stupid, that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Look, I get it,” Kendall said. He wiped his eyes again. “I get what he did to me. I do. Maybe I should turn myself in anyway. That way, I’d bring my dad down, and Roman and Shiv would get the company, and I’d — I wouldn’t have to walk around feeling like this.”

“I can’t let you do that,” Stewy said. He sounded as serious as he looked; his eyes were blazing. “You’d go to prison for, like, five years. It’s not happening.”

“I don’t think it’s up to you,” Kendall said.

“Yes, it is. I’ll say you’ve lost your mind. I’ll say I was with you when it happened, that it couldn’t have been you, I’m your alibi. I’ll say you’re trying to commit some kind of existential suicide by cop. And Shiv and Roman would back me up. We’ll all have you committed.”

Kendall began to weep with a mix of dread and relief, and collapsed back into Stewy’s arms. “I wanted to fuck him,” he said, his voice raw.

“What?”

The words tumbled out of Kendall like vomit: “My dad accused me of wanting to fuck him, a few days ago. He asked me if I was queer.” His voice caught, and he heaved out, “I was attracted to him, the kid. The waiter. But how did he know? How did he fucking know?”

“Kendall, Kendall,” Stewy said in a soothing voice. “Calm down. You’re spiraling, you’re not making sense.”

“I’m not a real person,” Kendall moaned. “I’m made of lies.”

Stewy slid out from under him and got up, going into the bathroom. Kendall buried his face in the bedspread, crying quietly, creating a wet spot under his face as he lay there alone.

When Stewy came back, he was holding a glass of water and he had a pill in his hand. He extended both to Kendall, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Take this.”

Kendall squinted at the pill, struggling to identify its color and shape in the low light. “What is it?”

“A Xanax.”

That was a good sign; Stewy’s love language was drugs. Kendall sat up and took the pill without further questions. He sipped the water, then inhaled shakily. “I didn’t want to tell you,” he said again.

Stewy handed him a tissue box that was sitting on the bedside table, then watched him, waiting. Kendall blew his nose and mopped his face before going on.

“I could barely tell Shiv and Roman,” he said. “But I knew they’d have to forgive me, because we’re blood. No matter what we do, we’re blood. But you and I don’t have that.”

Stewy was quiet for a long time. Kendall looked up at him, worried, and Stewy drew in a large breath.

“You’re right, we don’t,” he said. “And no, I don’t have to forgive you. But I forgive you anyway.”

Kendall blinked away tears that had gathered and grown cold on his eyelashes. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Stewy said, and that was all there was to it.

He got in bed and wrapped Kendall in his arms, holding him. Kendall’s trembling and sniffling slowly subsided as they lay there together, and he started to feel almost calm. He knew it was fleeting, that he would wake up tomorrow mired in dread and grief and regret, but for now he was okay.

Kissing each other seemed like a natural progression from holding each other. Kendall was loopy and hot all over from crying, and the moment had the inexorable logic of a dream. Stewy’s mouth was soft and open, wet and inviting. Kendall kept his eyes shut tight as they made out, writhing and rutting against each other, holding each other hard and tight.

He had forgotten how being held by Stewy felt. Kendall had had sex with other men since the last time he had last had sex with Stewy, but it made him uncomfortable every time. He didn’t like the lack of safety he felt when a strange man grabbed him hard, the way Stewy was now. Those men didn’t love him or care for him. They could hurt him if they wanted to. The only way Kendall could enjoy sex with other men was when they were on their knees blowing him. When Stewy wasn’t an option, he invariably preferred women. He liked the butterfly touch of someone like Naomi, who was barely tethered to life or reality. Naomi wouldn’t physically hurt him. The worst she would do was leave him.

It seemed, at this point, that she had done so, although Kendall had let his phone die on the flight back from Italy, so he had no idea if she had tried to get in touch with him since he had landed.

Kendall pressed his face to Stewy’s chest and throat as Stewy pulled his boxers down and rubbed off against his bare thighs. Kendall’s hard-on hadn’t progressed as quickly as Stewy’s had, probably due to the Xanax and weed working to depress his central nervous system. Stewy and Kendall had seemingly both gotten a little hard from all of Kendall’s crying, which was fucked up, but in a comfortingly mundane way. Not fucked up like murder, or Shakespearean betrayals and turns of fortune.

Stewy gripped Kendall’s bicep hard as he came all over his thighs, groaning and sighing. Kendall kissed his neck and stroked his hair, nuzzling him. Stewy always smelled good, especially at his neck, where he generously daubed cologne every morning.

“You have no idea how powerful smells are,” he had said to Kendall once. “I’ve closed deals because of how I smelled, I swear to God, dude. It overwhelms people’s defenses.”

Kendall believed it. His defenses were regularly overwhelmed by Stewy, though that had more to do with a lifetime of history and decades of on-and-off sex than it did cologne.

(The sex had begun in college, but the makeouts started earlier, in the treehouse and the poolhouse. Kendall had initiated them. Stewy just looked so good when he was high, his pupils big and his mouth soft, like a powdered donut in a box or a beautifully wrapped gift. Kendall wanted to claim ownership of him before someone else did. The first time he kissed Stewy, he did it on his neck and kept his eyes resolutely closed, thinking that would somehow give him plausible deniability. Stewy had been quiet for a long moment after, then said with a laugh in his voice, “Try again, on the lips this time.”)

“I want to fuck you,” Kendall said, rubbing Stewy’s spent dick, milking the remaining pleasure from him — diminishing returns on the reverberating orgasm, fourths and then eighths.

Stewy inhaled, licked his lips and said, “Do it,” his eyes lubricious.

Kendall got out of the bed and almost fainted from the ensuing head rush. His vision blacked out like film burning in a projector, and he dropped into a squat, blinking furiously as it returned.

“You okay?” Stewy said.

“Yeah,” Kendall said, popping back up. He went into the bathroom and started pawing through the complimentary beauty products like a madman.

When he found Vaseline, he grabbed it and tore back into the bedroom, where he knelt onto the bed, grinning.

“God, don’t look at me like that,” Stewy said.

Kendall handed him the Vaseline, and he nodded in approval, then asked, “Condom?”

“I don’t have one. You?”

“No.”

They shrugged at each other.

“Where have you been lately?” Stewy said.

“Nowhere diseased,” Kendall said.

“Good enough for me.”

Kendall fell back into bed with Stewy so he could kiss and finger him, wanting to vanish inside his mouth and inside his body. He wished he could be subsumed into Stewy — swallowed by him, taken inside of him, so he could live in Stewy’s brain and watch life through his eyes. The pain and struggle and confusion would all be over, and he could just watch Stewy live, like he was watching a movie. Easygoing, confident, unbothered Stewy.

Their whole lives, Stewy had failed to express jealousy of Kendall, even though it was clear at times that he felt it. That was one of the reasons Kendall kept him so close. Plenty of his friends wanted to use him or be him, which made Stewy so appealing, because he seemed to want the opposite: to have Kendall all to himself, to remove him from his context and his upbringing. Stewy wanted to run away with him.

Kendall sort of let him do that, in college. Once he was out of the freshman dorms at Harvard, Logan wanted him living with roommates he could network with: tech geniuses and fellow princelings. Instead, Kendall opted to go live with Stewy, along with two of their nobody business school friends.

Logan had hated this. “You’re going to drink away a golden opportunity,” he said at Thanksgiving that year. “Kids on that campus are creating the next generation of news, and you’re making yourself a miniature frat house. I didn’t get to go to college, do you know that?”

Kendall had argued that Scott worked with him on the Crimson, so their house did not necessarily lack for the next generation of news, and Logan put his face in his hands. On this point, though, Kendall held fast. He lived with Stewy for the rest of undergrad, with a rotating cast of other roommates.

Though Stewy should have been jealous of Kendall, at some point things flipped in the wrong direction. Kendall watched Stewy talk to people at Harvard mixers and developed an aching, raw envy for his ease. Stewy didn’t care. The stakes were so low for him. Every conversation Kendall had felt insanely fraught: he stuttered, he made over-the-top pronouncements, he forced slang he wasn’t comfortable with. This was how he had been taught to communicate: in elevator pitches and argumentative essays.

Stewy didn’t even care that a lot of people found him slimy and didn’t like him. He didn’t care! He didn’t care about being disliked! Kendall couldn’t imagine this. Dislike made his insides turn to ash. Stewy shrugged it off and laughed at it. He found everything funny, all the time. The closer they got to graduating and leaving for the workforce, the more Kendall had wanted to shrink himself down to doll size and live in Stewy’s breast pocket.

Stewy decided for himself when he was bored of Kendall fingering him. He reached down and grabbed his wrist, pulling Kendall’s hand out of him, then rolled them over into missionary and spread his legs, seizing Kendall around the base of his dick and moving him into position. Kendall obeyed, then felt his gut seize and clench with pleasure as he drove up into the tight warmth of Stewy’s asshole.

Stewy moaned, and they kissed each other in a hard and clumsy way, their teeth bruising each other’s lips, Stewy’s facial hair scraping Kendall’s cheeks. Kendall slid his arm under Stewy and clutched at his left shoulder as he thrusted into him, dropping his head to kiss his temple and his sweaty neck. Stewy wrapped his legs around Kendall’s waist and held him in place, one hand caressing the back of Kendall’s bald head, the other held gently to his ribs.

“I want to be inside you for the rest of my life,” Kendall said into his ear, breathing hard.

Stewy’s eyelashes fluttered against Kendall’s cheek. “Ken,” he said, his voice impossibly soft, like the word could break in his mouth if he wasn’t careful with it.

Kendall started to fuck him harder, then, because he knew Stewy could take it, and he had a lot of toxic energy inside him with nowhere to divert it to. He pulled Stewy’s hair and pounded him relentlessly; Stewy squeezed him tighter and tighter with his legs, caging Kendall like he was a rabid dog, and bit down on his shoulder.

When Kendall came, it was a surprise to him. He knew he was close, but he didn’t realize he was there yet. He collapsed atop Stewy, trembling again. Stewy stroked his head and kissed it.

“You just let a murderer fuck you,” Kendall mumbled into his neck.

“You’re not a murderer,” Stewy snapped with an uncharacteristic amount of anger.

“Roman said that too.”

“He’s right.”

Kendall was suddenly even more exhausted than he had been earlier, totally physically spent. He was too tired to pull out of Stewy, and lay there lodged in him like a sword in a stone until Stewy slid off of him with a small pained sound. Then he wrapped Kendall in his arms and pulled the sheets up around them.

Kendall bent his head into Stewy’s chest again, and fell fast asleep.

 

/

 

When Kendall woke up the next morning, he was alone, and itchy from all the dried semen. He could hear Stewy moving around out in the hotel suite, and news on the television. Brightness was creeping in around the edges of the curtains. The day had begun.

Kendall staggered into the bathroom and took a quick shower, scrubbing the come off of his thighs, then freshened up and put on the boxers he had discarded earlier. He walked out into the suite and saw Stewy freshly showered and fully dressed, lounging on the couch with a takeout bag next to him, eating what looked like an affogato out of a styrofoam container.

“Affogato?” Kendall said. “For breakfast?”

“Correct,” Stewy said.

Kendall took a better look at him. Stewy had dark circles under his eyes, and looked a little gray-faced and distant. “You okay?”

“I’m fantastic.”

“Did you sleep at all last night?”

“For about ten minutes.”

“Is that my fault?”

“It’s one night of sleep, Ken, it’s not irreparable.” Stewy spooned more ice cream into his mouth. “I need you to get dressed so we can go get your siblings, I set up a meeting for us with Sandi at ten-thirty.”

“What time is it now?”

“Eight.”

Kendall nodded. “Okay,” he said, and went to get dressed.

Before he did, he plugged his phone into the wall with the complimentary charger that was already in the outlet. When it dinged back to life, he had unread texts from two dozen people, including Greg and Comfrey (and not including Naomi). He ignored all of these and opened the new group chat that Stewy had started with him, Shiv and Roman.

Sandi meeting @ 10:30, Stewy had said, and sent the location for an apartment building along the rim of Central Park. I’d like us to meet and strategize first

fine, come over to my place, Shiv had texted back. I’m with Roman, he slept over last night.

as soon as Kendall gets up, we’ll head over, Stewy had responded.

Kendall put on yesterday’s clothes after sniffing the armpits and judging them to be clean enough, then returned to Stewy, who was now sitting on one of the barstools and swiveling back and forth on it like a little kid.

“Ready,” Kendall said.

“Great,” Stewy said, still swiveling. “I already called a car, it should be here in five.”

“I think my girlfriend is ghosting me because I was suicidal on my birthday,” Kendall said.

Stewy brought his hand to his forehead. “Hey, bro, can we get in a good headspace ahead of this meeting?”

“I’m in a good headspace,” Kendall lied. “I’m fine. I’m just saying words.”

“Okay. Great.” Stewy rubbed his temples.

“You look like you’re about to throw up.”

“Yeah, I do look like that, but I’m not going to do that.”

“Is it because of what I told you?”

Stewy shook his head. “I’m fine. I’m good.”

It was unlike Stewy to dissemble, so Kendall chose to let it go. “Cool, glad we’re both fine.”

“Yep.”

Kendall noticed for the first time that Stewy was in a turtleneck. “Hickey?” he said.

Stewy nodded and pulled the collar away from his neck to reveal a love bite on his inner throat.

“Sorry,” Kendall said.

Stewy snorted. “If you’re not going to ever actually apologize for the knife you stuck in my back,” he said, “then don’t apologize for a tiny hickey.”

Kendall felt an electric jolt of shame. “I thought my apology went without saying, man. I thought it was covered by what I told you last night.”

“An apology is not the kind of thing that can go without saying, but I get it.”

“Alright, well, I’m sorry. I never meant to fuck you over, that didn’t even occur to me. Everything was out of control, out of my hands.”

“Apology accepted,” Stewy said, and Kendall knew he meant it. He stood up. “Let’s go.”

 

/

 

Kendall had only been to Shiv and Tom’s new apartment a few times. He had forgotten how unwelcoming the flat white length of the entryway hall was, with its many identical storage closet doors that made you feel like you were in a hall of mirrors.

“We’re in the kitchen,” Shiv called from down the hall to the left, so Kendall started heading that way, with Stewy following.

In the bright, high-ceilinged kitchen, Roman was sitting on the edge of the island eating peanut butter off a spoon while Shiv leaned against a counter, drinking coffee. Mondale was lying down in a pen in the dining room, asleep.

“Morning, goobers,” Roman said. He looked a little better than he had yesterday, though he was still pale and red-eyed, and hadn’t shaved yet.

“Morning,” Stewy said, fidgeting antsily.

“Coffee?” Shiv said to him and Kendall.

Kendall shook his head, but Stewy said, “Yes please,” and she poured him a cup, then added cream and sugar and handed it over.

Roman eyed Stewy. “So what did you two get up to last night?”

“Sleeping,” Kendall said.

“Really? ‘Cause this one looks like he was up all night fighting ghosts, or something.”

“I’m fine,” Stewy said, moving around the kitchen, sipping the coffee. “Okay, we need to talk. We have an hour and a half to lay out our…” He squinted and shook his head, snapping his fingers. “Our pitch. You guys are going to have to go this alone, I can’t be seen trying to sway Sandi one way or another. As far as she knows, I’m just facilitating a meeting. And you cannot make this about the animosity between her dad and your dad, because that’s not going to fly.”

His gaze flicked all around as he spoke, not landing, and he sounded distracted and jittery. Roman watched him for a moment longer, then turned to Kendall with a look of horror.

“No,” he said. “You fucking idiot, did you tell him? You didn’t tell him, did you?”

Shiv, who had been staring into space, snapped her head toward Kendall. “Did you?”

Kendall saw no point in lying. “Yeah, I told him.”

“Oh, my God!” Shiv groaned, setting the coffee pot down hard. “Kendall! Why?”

“For the purpose of reestablishing trust,” Kendall said, spreading his hands.

“You can’t do that,” Roman said. “You can’t tell people who aren’t us. He can’t handle it, he’s not trained in the, like, mental dark arts of not caring about this stuff. He doesn’t have our upbringing. Look at him, he looks like he’s about to cry.”

“I’m not about to cry,” Stewy interrupted. “And it is fucking hysterical to have the Roy children worrying about my ability to handle my emotions like a normal person.”

“That’s the problem, idiot, you are a normal person,” Roman snapped. “Yeah, we’re not! Fuck you! Congratulations! But that means we can deal with something like this and compartmentalize it, and meanwhile your head is going to explode, or something!”

“You think I can’t compartmentalize?” Stewy demanded. “Fuck you back. This is handled. This is… it’s done. It already happened, there’s nothing any of us can do about it, and we just have to keep the secret forever to protect Kendall. I’ve already accepted all of this.”

Shiv and Roman exchanged a look.

“Well, alright,” Shiv said.

“I’m solid,” Stewy said. “Fuck you for thinking I’m not, but whatever.”

Roman cleared his throat and said, “I just don’t like, uh… I don’t like you looking like that.”

Stewy sipped his coffee and set it down. “Like what?”

“Like… how you look right now. I don’t like it.”

Roman was scared, Kendall realized. His entire world had imploded, and as much general animosity as there was between him and Stewy, Stewy had been a relatively constant presence in his life since he was five years old. Seeing Stewy upset and rattled and scattered was like seeing Frank that way.

Stewy seemed to get this. He stepped closer to Roman and gave him a half-hearted punch on the shoulder, then said to Shiv, “Bathroom?”

“Down the hall on the left,” Shiv said, pointing.

Stewy left them, and Kendall’s siblings rounded on him. Roman kicked his heels against the island and said, “Kendall, what the fuck?”

“What?” Kendall said.

“You know what,” Roman said. “Are you fucking drunk right now? You on drugs? Did you guys spend all night doing drugs, or something?”

“No.”

“Do we have to muzzle you and stick you in the dog pen ‘til further notice?”

Shiv snorted. “Maybe we can put Mondale in a suit and teach him to walk on his hind legs, see if anyone can tell the difference.”

“The resemblance is absolutely there,” Roman said.

“Very funny, guys,” Kendall said. “No, I don’t need to be muzzled. This is it, okay? The circle of trust is closed. It’s just the four of us.”

“And Dad,” Roman said.

Kendall’s gut lurched as he remembered something. “Also, uh… Marcia and Amir, probably.”

Shiv threw her hands up in the air, looking horrified, and Roman’s eyes got large. “Marcia and Amir know?” she demanded.

“They were in the room with Dad right before he told me,” Kendall said. “I don’t actually know what they know, but they know something.” A chill went through him, and he shook it off. “I really don’t want to talk about this.”

“Ken,” Shiv said, and hesitated. “As far as maybe talking to a lawyer…”

“I can’t do that.” He paused and added, “Colin also knows. He was the one who orchestrated the cover-up. I don’t know if anyone else associated with Dad knows, like, the full details.”

“Oh, Christ,” Roman said. He inhaled hard, pressing his fingertips to his chest and looking up at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ.”

“You okay?” Shiv said to him.

“Yep,” he said, still looking up. “I’m feeling, I think, whatever Stewy’s feeling. I’m queasy in my entire body. My brain wants to throw up. I want to throw up this information.”

“Sorry,” Kendall said.

“So, six people confirmed to be in the loop,” Shiv said, running her hand through her hair. “Probably eight, and possibly even more than eight.”

“Yep.”

They heard Stewy coming down the hall, and went quiet. He walked in and came over to get his coffee, appearing to ignore the fresh nervous energy in the room.

“Something we have to keep in mind,” Stewy said, “is that this deal is well underway.”

“Yes,” Kendall said, relieved to snap back into business mode. “We spent months planning to buy GoJo, so large chunks of the groundwork have been laid for that deal to play out in reverse.”

“I think we’d have to move for a vote by next week if we’re going to have any hope of stopping this,” Stewy said. “It’s like your dad got the company pregnant. You can’t be half-pregnant. The wheels are in motion.” He sipped his coffee.

“Time to get an abortion,” Roman said.

Stewy lifted his mug. “To our collective abortion.”

“What’s the market saying?” Roman added.

Shiv checked her watch and said, “It’s not open yet.”

“One problem is, if we call for a board meeting, Dad’s going to immediately know what we’re trying to do,” Kendall said.

“Yeah, thanks to the fact that you already shot your wad with this tactic,” Roman said.

“We shot our wad with this tactic,” Kendall reminded him.

“You fucked off to Long Island.”

“Okay. Whatever.”

Roman turned to Stewy, who glanced up from his coffee. “I still don’t get why you’re even involved in this, by the way. What’s in this for you?”

“I’m not involved,” Stewy said. “I set up a meeting. What happens at the meeting is up to you three.”

“Yeah, but he has a point,” Shiv said, leaning against the island and spreading her hands. “You’re advising us, you’re helping us. Why?”

Stewy had no answer for them. He just drank his coffee in silence.

“Stewy usually sniffs out the biggest dick and fattest wallet in the room,” Roman said, sizing Stewy up as he remained perched on the island, looking down at all of them. “Is it us, Stewy? Do the three of us have the biggest dick in the room? Did our combined dick size catch your eye? Somehow, I doubt that.”

“Enough,” said Kendall, who didn’t like this particular line of questioning.

“I’m not involved,” Stewy repeated. “I set up a meeting. You’re on your own.”

“Uh-huh,” Shiv said dubiously.

“Is there still room for a merger of equals?” Kendall said to Stewy. “Like, would it be easier to get the Sandies on board if we were just taking over for Dad and then pursuing a merger with GoJo, versus blowing the whole thing up?”

“Harder, Ken,” Stewy said, glancing over at Kendall for the first time in a while. In the bright light of the kitchen, Kendall could see that his eyes were bloodshot. “In a merger, your board would be consolidated down. The Sandies and I would likely be winnowed down from four seats to one, if we kept a seat at all. Pick a strategy and stick with it — you’re going to scare her off if you start equivocating. Remember, she doesn’t have control. She’s a proxy for her dad, which makes her even more skittish than him, because she doesn’t have faith in herself to think and act exactly the way he would.”

“Does she love him?” Shiv said, her hooded eyes hard.

“Yeah, I think so,” Stewy said. “She doesn’t want to fail him. She’s resistant to being swayed by Roys, at least while he’s alive.” He drummed his fingers on the island. “Like I told your brother, this is a complicated coalition of interests.”

“But what are your interests?” Shiv said.

“Money,” Stewy said in a flat tone. “Look, it’s easier to turn board seats into money than it is to turn money into board seats. That’s all, guys. We have temporarily overlapping interests. Let’s leave it at that.”

They fell silent. Over in his pen, Mondale let out a loud yawn that tailed off into a squeak. Shiv glanced over at him, then back at Stewy, then shot a surreptitious look at Kendall.

“Want to have some breakfast, talk this out some more, then go get this party started?” Kendall said to no one in particular.

Shiv nodded, and then Roman did too.

/

 

At 10, they called a car and gathered in the entryway to wait. Kendall, nervous about being papped or ambushed, asked Shiv if he could borrow a hat and sunglasses of Tom’s. She went into one of the many closets and pulled out a baseball cap and a pair of Armani aviators, which she handed over wordlessly.

“Thanks,” Kendall said, putting them on.

“Mhm,” Shiv said, her lips pursed.

“Probably have to adjust the band, ‘cause of Tom’s giant fucking head,” Roman said. “Those are nice sunglasses, is he going to be okay with Ken crying into them?”

“I’m not going to cry,” Kendall said stolidly, at the same time as Shiv muttered, “Oh, fuck Tom, I’m going to shove him out of a fucking airlock.”

Stewy, who was waiting by the door, looked alarmed by this and started to turn to them before seeming to think better of it.

Shiv’s front door opened into a private elevator, which they took down to the parking garage level, and once again they snuck into a waiting, idling SUV. This time, Kendall sat next to Stewy instead of across from him. This was less out of a desire for closeness with Stewy and more out of a desire to not look at the pained, drawn facial expression that he had caused Stewy to have.

Shiv and Roman didn’t look much happier than Stewy, though. As the car made its way toward Sandi’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, Roman stared out the window with his hand pressed to his mouth, and Shiv busied herself with her phone.

“Hey,” Kendall said. They both looked up. “We can pull the plug on this anytime. Just say the word.”

Next to him, Stewy let out a soft sigh, and Shiv looked up. “What the fuck?” she said. “No, we’re doing this. Do you not want to do this? Because that would be pretty hypocritical. You’ve taken shot after shot at Dad.”

“And missed every time,” Roman added helpfully.

The car lurched to a stop at a red light.

“I’m giving you guys the benefit of my wisdom and experience,” Kendall said, taking a deep breath to steady himself. (Roman repeated ‘wisdom’ in a goofy, mocking voice.) “You had never taken a real shot at him before. I know how you feel right now — you’re furious and humiliated, and you want revenge, you want to kill him and you want to win. I’m saying I don’t know if it’s possible.”

“We have to try,” Roman said, sounding helpless.

“I know,” Kendall said. He wished he didn’t know. He wished he could envision any reality besides this Sisyphean one, any course of action besides leaping to his feet and running back up the hill that his father had just pushed him down. He was quiet for a moment, then added, “It’s hard to believe that Dad is so good at jerking our chains that it took us forty years to realize he was never planning on giving it to any of us.”

Shiv held up a hand. “Thirty-four.”

“Thirty-six,” Roman muttered.

“I figured that one out in tenth grade,” Stewy said. They all looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. “The benefit of an outside perspective.”

 

/

 

Since it was a pretty day at the beginning of September, Sandi wanted to meet with them outside on her balcony, which had a flawless green lawn and was rimmed on all sides by a terrace garden. Kendall estimated the value of this penthouse as similar to the value of his Hudson Yards place — around $55 million. It overlooked Central Park, a top-drawer amenity which Logan had nonetheless always found gauche.

“Greenery in New York City is fucking Tartarus,” he had said once. “They give you a little taste of it, and they let you look at it out your window, and that’s supposed to satisfy you. No, no, New York real estate is for water and skylines. If you want greenery, buy an estate with actual land, somewhere. Get the real thing.”

Sandi led them through a rooftop allee, under a canopy of vines and hanging flowers, and over to a finely wrought white iron table surrounded by chairs. On the table sat a tray with a decanter of orange juice, and five glasses.

“Please, sit,” she said. Over by the French doors that led to the kitchen, a bodyman shifted his stance.

Everyone sat. Stewy sat across from them, next to Sandi, which made sense, but still somehow felt like a betrayal to Kendall.

“So,” Sandi said. “From what I’m hearing… from what Stewy has told me…” She gestured to him. “The acquisition of Waystar by GoJo is underway?”

“Yes,” Shiv said.

Sandi nodded and steepled her fingers on the table. “Do you know how far advanced it is?”

“It’s… bad,” Roman said, pouring himself some orange juice. “Stage four.”

“And you’re not happy about this,” Sandi continued.

“We’re deeply unhappy,” Shiv said, crossing her arms over her chest. “We were cut completely out of the decision-making. And we know you were too.”

Sandi nodded slowly, flicking her gaze briefly to Kendall and then bringing it back to Shiv. “Right. Well, I can tell you, we were uncomfortable with this deal when it was just a merger. A full acquisition… that’s a different animal.”

“You’ll be off the board,” Kendall said to her. “It’s going to be Matsson’s board, one hundred percent.”

“That’s what I was afraid of before,” Sandi said, with a soft laugh. The morning sun haloed her blonde head; not a hair was out of place. “Even in a merger, board restructuring is significant, and I get the feeling that your dad has not been all happy to be sharing power with us.”

“No, he’s really not,” Roman said. “I think he might be taking this deal just to kind of, uh, kick your dad down the stairs, as it were.” He shot a look at Shiv as he said this, but she either didn’t notice or pretended not to.

Sandi nodded and said, “Mmm. Okay. And what are you proposing to us?”

Next to her, Stewy leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.

“A vote of no confidence, backed by all seven of our combined board seats, and then the three of us taking over for our dad,” Shiv said, thumping her fingertips on the table. “With Ken replacing him as chairman, and Roman and I will split everything else. We’d be a three-headed monster with equal control over the company — ipso facto checks and balances.”

Sandi studied her for a long moment. “Right. But in terms of justifying that vote of no confidence?”

“Oh,” Shiv said, and then fell silent, glancing at Kendall.

Kendall cleared his throat. “Our dad isn’t well,” he said to her. “He hasn’t been well for a long time, and I’ve been trying to take control since we became aware of this, but he’s extremely canny and well-protected. The current C-suite is completely aware of his medical condition, and they’ve worked with me to oust him on multiple occasions, but… circumstances change. And they’re afraid of him.”

“Not well in what sense?” Sandi said.

“Um… he’s losing his grip, he’s sick. He got very ill when we went to visit Josh Aaronson.”

Stewy nodded. “Josh corroborated that to me,” he said to Sandi. “He didn’t get into details, but…”

Kendall nodded back at him and continued: “Before the shareholder meeting, he, uh… he got very sick from a UTI. He became delusional and started hallucinating, and several times he almost blew up our attempts to make a deal with your camp.”

“Oh,” Sandi said, her eyebrows lifting. “Okay. Wow.”

“Ken,” Roman interrupted, looking over at him.

“What?” Kendall said.

“Is this really — do we fucking need to jump into this stuff, like, immediately?”

Kendall started to respond, but Shiv cut him off. “This is what it is, Rome,” she snapped. “If you’re too squeamish for it, you can go wait out in the car.”

Roman scoffed and glanced down at the table. He looked unhappy, but didn’t add anything else.

“He’s having sex with his personal assistant,” Kendall said to Sandi. “That’s been going on for a while now. And in addition to how sick he got at Aaronson’s, he made some troubling comments to me… really racist, vitriolic stuff, and it wasn’t like we could be totally sure that Josh was out of earshot.”

“He tried to tell the DOJ and the FBI to go pound sand on multiple occasions,” Shiv said.

“Right,” Kendall said. “Things like that. We’re very worried about his judgment.”

“I can imagine,” Sandi said. She hesitated, then added, “But the three of you don’t exactly have an objective role here.”

“No, but Stewy does,” Shiv blurted out.

Stewy looked at her like she was crazy. “I have no input,” he said. “I didn’t witness anything you’re talking about, with regard to Logan.”

“Right, but you know he’s unstable,” Shiv said.

“I’m not here,” Stewy said, putting his hands up. “For this portion of the conversation, I’m not here.”

Sandi seemed to take a moment to weigh her words. Kendall got distracted by a flock of birds in the distance that were flying as one — a strange, shimmering dark shape against the blue sky.

“Our dad would hate us taking the company from him,” Shiv said. “If that helps your angle with your own dad at all — if our dad sells and cashes out, he wins. If we take the company from him, he loses.”

“This is about business, Shiv, not personal vendettas,” Sandi said, her mouth stern.

Shiv sat back. “Of course.”

“Listen, I’m not unsympathetic to the premise,” Sandi said. “I don’t see myself working well with Matsson, and we haven’t been working well with your father, that much is clear. But I’m not sure what I’d be getting, with the three of you. What’s your vision for the company?”

This was a question that, somehow, all three of them had forgotten was coming. They turned to each other gawping like goldfish, then turned back to Sandi.

“I have a lot of visions,” Kendall said. “I have, like, whole pitch decks full of — you know, I just think we have to —”

“We have to streamline everything and drop the dead weight,” Roman interrupted, at the same time as Shiv said, “We need to pivot away from the misinformation bullshit and toward real, indispensable news, like, uh — congressional coverage, the weather.”

“The weather?” Roman exclaimed.

“You know what I mean!”

Kendall turned back to Sandi. “Listen, it’s been a crazy twenty-four hours for us,” he said. “We didn’t see ourselves working together like this until very recently. So we have some work to do as far as reconciling our ideas, but I give you my word that they can be reconciled.”

“I understand,” Sandi said. “And I know certain options would open up if your father were no longer at the helm. Maybe the deal with Pierce that you were considering before?”

Everyone looked at Shiv, then. She looked shocked and struggled for words. Kendall thought again about Naomi, and he felt the lurch of an unwitting loss — the feeling of realizing you had accidentally swallowed your own loose tooth.

“Sure,” Shiv finally managed. “I could absolutely go back to Pierce.”

“Okay,” Sandi said. “Listen, I get the impression I’ve caught you early in the planning stages. I’m glad we sat down and talked, but do you want to take some time to put your heads together and figure out the shape of this? In the meantime, I can talk to my dad, and Stewy and I can discuss it some more.”

Kendall looked to Stewy, who nodded.

“Great,” Sandi said, smiling. “We’ll be in touch, then.”

It was clear they had been dismissed. Stewy led them back inside the penthouse while Sandi opened a laptop and began to type into it with a furrowed brow.

Halfway through the living room, they were ambushed by a blue merle Great Dane that bounded straight for Stewy and started sniffing him and licking his pants. Stewy put his hands in the air, looking displeased.

“That horse likes you,” Roman said to him.

“She has three of these,” Stewy said, “and they all love me. The feeling is not mutual.”

Roman laughed at Stewy as he tried to sidestep the dog and escape its orbit. The dog shook this off and followed him, panting and drooling everywhere. Kendall gave it a pat on the head as he walked by.

“So,” Roman said, “Sandi Junior is a filthy liberal, who knew?”

“Yeah, how about that,” Kendall said. “No wonder she likes you, Shiv.”

“Girls count for double in all kinds of ways, now,” Shiv said, shooting him a look. “Even literally, with board seats.”

“Alright, alright.”

“By the way, I think we can ease off Dad,” Roman said to Kendall. “We can keep it to bare-bones details, we don’t need to humiliate him to his enemies.”

“Rome, we have to justify this, or it’s pointless to even try it,” Shiv said.

“I’m just saying I don’t like standing around libeling my own father.”

“It’s slander,” Stewy said. “Slander is spoken, libel is written. You should know the difference if you want to run a massive news organization. It’s also only slander if it’s false, and none of this is false, is it?”

Roman opened his mouth, then closed it and sighed. “I’m just saying,” he finally said.

Stewy went to the door and called the elevator for them, then slid his hands into his pockets. “I’ll call you guys at some point,” he said. “Keep your phones on.”

“Wait, you’re staying?” Roman said. “You’re talking to her about this now?”

“Yes,” Stewy said, in disbelief, like this should have been entirely obvious.

“Well, what are you going to fucking say?”

“I don’t know,” Stewy said. “The truth? What I think? I’m going to let her lead the conversation.”

“So what do we do while you’re doing that?” Shiv said.

“Go get some sandwiches? Some therapy? Come up with an actual vision for the company, like I already suggested you do last night?”

Kendall took a deep breath and said to Stewy, “Do you think we might have this? Do you think there’s a chance?”

Stewy’s dark eyes met Kendall’s. His face was impassive, but he nodded, then chewed at his lip a little. “There’s a chance,” he said softly.

The elevator let out a musical chime as it arrived. The Roys piled into it; the mood between the three of them felt befuddled but hopeful.

“You better call us,” Roman said to Stewy. “Like, ASAP. If I don’t have a call from you in an hour, I’m going to tell Forbes you cried at a haunted house once.”

Stewy rolled his eyes at this. “I’ll call you when we’re done talking!”

Kendall snagged Stewy’s gaze again, and didn’t say or do anything; he just held it, staring into Stewy’s eyes as the doors began to close. Stewy stared back at him with a very complicated look on his face, and then, for some reason, he moved forward half a step.

The doors closed right as he did that, and Kendall was left staring at the art-deco design emblazoned in them. The elevator dropped fast, making no sound besides a faint whistle as it cut through the air.

Behind him, Shiv and Roman were arguing over a potential Pierce acquisition. Kendall found his mind drifting away as they did; their voices began to sound like radio static. It felt good to let go and tune out. He smiled to himself.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of the scandinavian defense