Adrian was driving a SUV I assumed was a rental. He was even dressed far more casually than I’d ever seen. He had on a teal polo that hugged his biceps and let me see hints of the tattoos on his arms. He wore a simple pair of jeans and sneakers with the outfit. He looked good enough to eat. “I put in some extra time last night. You’ve got me all to yourself today.”
I’d noticed the bags under his eyes. He was home late, even by his insane workaholic standards. The apartment he got us had two bedrooms, but I’d casually decided we were sharing a bad. We were sleeping together, after all. Even if my draconic childhood made me feel like I was going to get in trouble for sharing a bed with a guy I wasn’t married to, I was an adult, damn it. I could do what I wanted.
“How has Coleton Central been so far, anyway?” I asked.
He waved his long finger, grinning. The morning sun was in his face, making him look unfairly good. Each of his long, thick eyelashes was bathed in golden light. “No work talk today.”
“Ooh,” I said. “This is new.”
“It’s good,” he said. “I can’t remember the last time I took a true day off.”
“So you’ve really been doing this ten years?” I asked. “I mean, I know you said Noah made his own business and then the rest of you all worked on Terranova Holdings. But how did it transition from that to this whole demolition thing? How does that even work?”
“I feel like that qualifies as work talk,” Adrian said.
“Nope. This is prior workplaces. Doesn’t count. Work talk is talk that makes you think about stuff you need to do later.”
He chuckled. “Okay. Well, I had to make enough money to afford it first. By the time we decided to go after Coleton, we all had enough that we could afford to disappear from jobs at the drop of a hat. Some of our demo jobs have cost us tens of millions.”
“What did you do to earn it all?”
“I started a company. We actually learned to fix companies from the inside. We started small with family owned barbecue places or laundromats. We’d take a two-hundred thousand dollar business and turn it into a million-dollar business in a few months. We eventually worked our way up the chain to bigger places. Then we started flat-out buying the struggling businesses with potential and flipping them ourselves to sell for a profit. Learning to fix a business, it turns out, is a great way to learn how to destroy one.”
“Wow,” I said. “So you fixed companies until you had enough money to afford to destroy them. You do realize how backwards that sounds, right?”
“We fixed good companies so we could destroy bad ones. But yes, destroying them sometimes was very expensive work. Once I had to actually take over as the CEO before we could bring this place down. They were bribing port officials and dumping toxic waste and plastics in international waters, among other things. But I had to buy out the majority of their stock shares. When we crashed the company later, I tanked the value of all that stock I acquired.”
“How do you destroy a company from the inside out if you’re not doing it that way?”
“It depends. That’s kind of Noah’s specialty. To be completely honest, I don’t always pretend to fully grasp what he’s doing. Sometimes he can just move numbers around and everything falls apart. Other times it takes a little more brute force.”
“I think it’s admirable,” I said. “What you’re doing, I mean. I feel like every man I’ve ever met has only cared about money or power. You actually want to do something good. And, honestly, when I first met you, I would’ve never guessed that.”
“Bad first impression?”
“Uh, yeah? You were destroying Walker in the middle of your employees. How does that work, anyway? You actually want to help people, but you do it by being the most terrifying bosshole imaginable?”
“This is work talk,” Adrian said.
“Oh, come on,” I laughed.
He smiled, but the amusement in his face didn’t last long. He stared out at the road a few moments, then responded. “I learned early that it’s easier to put up walls, doing what I do. I may be helping people on the outside, but I do it by bringing down companies. All those people who work for me tend to lose their jobs. I put them through hardships and have to hope it’s a net gain for the greater good, or something like that.”
“I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Yeah,” Adrian said. “At some point, I think it stopped being an act and felt more natural. I wasn’t always like this. The bosshole thing, I mean.”
“No? What were you like?”