I’d made my fair share of mistakes, and now, nothing else mattered.

Nothing else would ever matter.

There had been a brief time in my life when the idea of walking into a room filled with happy, exuberant women was a welcome task. The old carefree Roman would have put on a charming, wolfish grin, immediately zeroed in to pick his target, and gone in for the kill.

But, unfortunately for me and the women I used to take home with me, those days were long gone.

My father had once called it my rebellious period. It was a period in my life when I’d thrown caution to the wind and abandoned every responsibility I had in a vain attempt to be someone else for a time.

See, the thing with growing up and knowing your inevitable outcome in life was that there was no guessing and no spontaneity. Everything, every tiny detail, was already hashed out into a nice, neat, orderly package for you, and you’d find yourself powerless to stop it.

As I’d watched my life slowly unfold while my brother and I were groomed from a young age to take over a life we’d had no choice in having, I’d decided to take another path, becoming the stereotypical rebel of the family. My parents believed Jude was the saving grace of our generation. With his gifted ability and talent for numbers, he was a shoo-in for the coveted top spot after my father retired. Why should I have sat around and waited for inevitable? It had been my chance to step out and discover who I really was — or at least have fun trying.

My father, of course, being the man he was, had spun my shenanigans into something more wholesome for the media, making me more of a modern-day spokesperson for the family and the company we were known for… but we’d all known what I was doing.

I had been turning away from my family.

Or, at least, I had attempted to.

My brother though? Like always, he succeeded where I failed.

When he’d all but dropped off the face of the earth after the death of his fiancée, I had known my carefree existence was over. When our father’s health had begun to decline, there was no one but me to take over the family business.

Me—the cute but dumb one.

I would have laughed in the old man’s face at the irony of it all—his dim-witted son taking over while his favorite wasted away his talent in a hospital, doing janitorial duties. But instead, I proved him wrong.

I’d been walking the line ever since.

Every day felt like a slow crawl into hell.

The outside world had faded away as family and what few friends I’d had ceased to exist. Nothing mattered, except for what happened within these walls.