Page 204 of Titus

“Titus.” My mother’s voice broke through the darkness.

I turned to see tears streaming down her face, and then she was gone.

I woke from another nightmare with a sharp intake of breath. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. The darkness looked wrong, and the mattress felt wrong. Then reality settled over me.

Federal detention.

I sat on the narrow edge of the steel-framed bed, staring through the small reinforced window set into the concrete wall. The sun was barely rising, leaving only the glow of security lights beyond the perimeter fence.

The cell wasn’t large. It contained a bed, a stainless-steel sink-and-toilet combination, and a small desk bolted to the floor, with concrete walls painted a color someone probably called beige.

The irony wasn’t lost on me.

For a man who owned homes on three continents, private islands, hotels, and enough aircraft to cross the globe at a moment’s notice, my entire world currently fit inside a room smaller than one of my guest bathrooms.

The mattress was thin, the pillow somehow thinner, and the blanket felt as if it had been made by sadists.

I had slept anyway, not well, but enough for my subconscious to unearth diabolical nightmares about my father.

I rubbed my face, then glanced down at what I wore. I saw the gray detention uniform hanging loosely on my six-foot-four frame. The first morning I’d been handed it, I’d almost laughed. And it wasn’t because it was funny. I’d spent years having custom suits made in Milan and Paris, only to discover that every man looked exactly the same in federal custody.

Honestly, there was something humbling about that.

If the uniform wasn’t enough to humble me, the meals they served here certainly were. Dinner had been forgettable. Lunch had been forgettable. And breakfast had somehow managed to be even worse.

I had reached the point where I no longer bothered to ask what any of the food was supposed to be. If it was technically edible and didn’t kill me first, it counted as food.

But nothing was more humbling than my goddamn nightmares.

I stared up at the ceiling while my pulse slowly settled.

My father had been dead for years, yet somehow the bastard still found ways to intrude on my life.

Fuck me… another day.

Another day without any answers, being punished for the sins of a dead man.

A bitter laugh almost escaped me.

The irony of that wasn’t lost on me. My entire adult life had been spent cleaning up Herbert Hawk’s messes, the public ones, the private ones, and the forgotten ones.

Every acquisition I’d unwound. Every unethical practice I’d abolished. Every corrupt executive I’d removed. Every fucking policy of his I’d changed… I’d spent years turning Hawk Enterprise into the exact kind of company my father would’ve despised.

And somehow, he still managed to reach through the grave and drag me down beside him. My jaw tightened because the worst part wasn’t the detention center. It wasn’t the investigation or even the possibility of prison.

The worst part was Catalina.

For most of my life, relationships had seemed like liabilities, weaknesses. My father had made sure of that. I’d also watched powerful men lose fortunes, destroy companies, and even compromise themselves over women.

The lesson had been drilled into me long before I was old enough to understand it.

Love made men vulnerable, and vulnerable men lost. So, I built walls around that emotion, and no one got through them. Then Catalina Veléz walked into my life and told me she wasn’t interested.

A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. Even in here, the memory affected me in a wonderful way. Almost every woman I’d met had been impressed by me and my lifestyle. Catalina had simply been annoyed by it.

Most people treated me like Titus Hawk, the billionaire and executive, the brilliant and sexy man on magazine covers.

Catalina treated me like I was a moderately irritating human standing in her way. Somehow, that had been the beginning.