My Rival Co-CEOS

Chapter 7

Two hours of sleep is not rest. It is a hostage negotiation between my body and the ceiling, and the ceiling won.

I sit on the edge of the guest bed at six fourteen in the morning, mascara from yesterday smudged beneath my eyes, the cotton nightgown twisted around my thighs like it spent the night fighting me.

My phone screen glows with a cascade of messages from Piper that escalate in tone the way a weather warning escalates from watch to evacuation.

Piper: How's the estate? Rich people weird?

Piper: Wren.

Piper: WREN.

Piper: If you don't respond by morning I'm driving up there in my pajamas and I will make a scene.

Piper: I own a megaphone. You know I own a megaphone.

I type back with clumsy thumbs.

Me: Still alive. Estate is fine. Tell you everything Monday.

It is vague enough to keep her from commandeering a vehicle and specific enough to confirm I haven't been buried in the rose garden.

The shower helps. The cold water strips the night from my skin in layers — the jasmine air, the moonlight, the cedar-and-whiskey proximity of a man I should not be thinking about at six in the morning or any other hour.

I towel off and dress in the casual clothes I asked Piper to send me for Saturday — linen pants, a white blouse, bare feet because the marble floors are cool and my dignity needs at least one small comfort.

I catch my reflection in the hallway mirror and look exactly like a woman who got two hours of sleep after slapping a billionaire's twin brother in a garden at one in the morning.

Stop thinking about his chest. Stop it.

You are a professional adult with a 401(k) and a filing system. His torso is irrelevant to your life goals.

The problem is that my brain has apparently decided Julian Bracken's bare shoulders are a screen saver it can't close, and every time I blink, there they are — moonlit, carved, gleaming with a thin sheen of sweat that I did not ask to catalog and cannot seem to delete.

I go downstairs irritated with myself, with the fan, with the entire concept of identical twins.

The kitchen is vast and sunlit, white marble countertops stretching toward floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the estate grounds in the kind of golden morning light that only exists in places where the landscaping budget has seven figures.

Theo stands at the counter beside a French press, sleeves of his linen shirt rolled to the forearm, hair still damp from the shower.

He looks rested, composed, entirely unbothered by any nocturnal encounters in any gardens.

"Morning." He presses down the plunger and pours a cup. "I made coffee. Black, with sugar."

He holds it out to me with the easy confidence of a man who believes he has performed a kindness.

Black with sugar. I take mine with cream and no sugar.

I have made coffee for both of us hundreds of times over a years — his black, one sugar, served in the grey mug he keeps on the second shelf of his office credenza.

I know the exact sound his spoon makes against the ceramic when he stirs. I know he drinks the first sip before sitting down and saves the last quarter inch until it goes cold.

He has never once asked how I take mine.

I wrap my hands around the cup. "Thank you."

The coffee is bitter and too sweet at the same time, and I drink it because refusing would require an explanation I'm not willing to give this early in a morning that already tastes like defeat.

We stand on opposite sides of the kitchen island, and the distance between us feels wider than marble.

I set my cup down and watch him scroll through his phone with his free hand, calm and efficient, already half-inside a workday that doesn't officially exist on a Saturday.

"You never told me you and Julian were twins," I say.

His thumb pauses mid-scroll. He looks up, and there it is — the careful blankness, the emotional shutters dropping into place like blast doors on a submarine.

"It wasn't relevant to your position."

"My position." I let the word sit between us. "I thought we were friends, Theo. I've worked beside you for years. I know you can't sleep when it rains, I know you eat exactly one almond croissant every Friday from the bakery on Lexington because your mother used to bring them home on weekends when you were small."

I pause, letting the silence fill the space with the meanings.

"And you never mentioned you have a twin brother."

He sets his phone down as his jaw works once, twice, like he's testing the weight of several responses before selecting the safest one.

"Julian and I haven't been close in a long time. It's not a secret I kept from you deliberately. It's a part of my life I don't discuss with anyone."

"Anyone." I nod slowly. "Including the woman you asked to fake date you and possibly get married in front of your entire family. The woman who walked into that estate and met your identical twin across a bar without a single warning."

"Wren…"

"I looked like a fool, Theo."

My voice stays level, controlled, but the edge beneath it is new — a blade I've kept sheathed for three years and am only now realizing I own.

"I mistook him for you. Do you understand how that felt? Standing in front of a stranger wearing your face, saying things I would only say to you?"

Theo's expression shifts. Guilt moves through his features like weather — visible, brief, quickly managed. "I should have prepared you, I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

I open my mouth to push further when footsteps sound against the marble behind me.

Julian enters the kitchen barefoot, wearing a black t-shirt that fits like a second skin, his dark hair still sleep-mussed. His gaze sweeps the room with the unhurried precision of a man cataloging every detail before anyone realizes they're being watched.

He registers the scene — us at the kitchen island, a full counter's width of marble between us, neither leaning toward the other, the air carrying the static charge of a conversation that ended one sentence too soon.

His expression lightens. Not a smile — closer to the satisfied flicker of a man who opened a door and found exactly the confirming evidence he expected.

He doesn't speak. He picks up an apple from the fruit bowl, tosses it once, catches it without looking, and walks through the glass doors onto the terrace.

The silence he leaves behind is louder than anything he could have said.

Theo watches the doors close. Then his hand finds my shoulder — firm, deliberate, his thumb pressing into the muscle beside my collarbone with a pressure that reads less like comfort and more like a flag planted in contested territory.

"Let's take a walk before brunch," he says. "The east grounds are nice this time of morning."

I nod because the alternative is standing in this kitchen drinking coffee that's wrong in every way a cup of coffee can be wrong.

Brunch is served on the south terrace at eleven. White linen, silver, more forks than any meal should require. Victor sits at the head of the table in a pale blue shirt, thinner than last week, his wrists narrow inside cuffs that no longer fit properly.

But his voice, when he speaks, still carries the authority of a man who considers mortality an inconvenience rather than a certainty.

He waits until the second course — a poached egg dish I'm too tense to taste — before making his announcement.

"The Bracken Foundation's annual charity gala is next Saturday," he says, addressing the table with the practiced ease of a man who has never distinguished between family meals and board meetings. "I want both of my grandsons there with partners. It is time this family presented a united front, and I intend to see it before I no longer can."

The implication settles over the table like a change in air pressure. Both couples. Me and Theo. Julian and whatever partner Julian produces.

Julian leans back in his chair, apple-fed and unbothered, and smiles at his grandfather with the dangerous ease of a man who just received the exact invitation he wanted.

"I look forward to it."