Page 327 of Double or Nothing

Several people notice me. A few look twice.

One of the floor managers is heading straight past me, but I raise a hand.

“Morning, Terry.”

He stops, and looks surprised at the greeting. I don’t usually address him whatsoever, unless it’s late-night banter.

“Hi, Jack,” he says.

The shock on his face as he looks me over makes me weirdly self-conscious.

“Is Eli in?”

“Is the sky blue?” He laughs, just a touch. “Office.”

“Is he alone?”

“I think so.”

“Great.”

Terry watches me walk away. More people turn around and take notice.

I must’ve been absent long enough for my arrival to become an event. Hardly something to be proud of.

Eli’s office door is open. He sits behind his desk with two monitors in front of him, a coffee to his left and a stack of reports to his right.

He looks exactly as he did at the point I abandoned him with all the real work. Tall, lean and always offensively immaculate, with his precisely styled dark hair, brutal cheekbones and ice-blue eyes fixed on the figures before him. It seems an age since I last saw him, but not one crease has dared appear on his suit.

Everything in this room has a purpose, including Eli himself. He always has a purpose, and he sticks to it. A firing squad could assemble behind him and he would probably finish reviewing the accounts before acknowledging the inconvenience.

We’re two very different sides of a winning coin, with one central theme running through us.

Eli’s family were cold-hearted control freaks hiding behind their roles in their small-town vicarage, rejecting him for being his own person. The term black sheep would be far too light a phrase for the weight they put on his disgrace within their family.

Mine were absent thrill-seekers, who rejected me because they were always too busy looking somewhere else, but we were both rejects, and both learnt our skills from that backdrop.

Both of us were extremely good at reading people. Extremely good at calculating people’s nerve and coming out on top.

Eli more so than me.

He looks up as I appear in the doorway. His eyes travel over my suit.

My tie.

My empty hands.

“No champagne?” he asks. “I’d have thought you’d have picked yourself some up from the bar on your way through.”

“Bit early, don’t you think? Even for me.”

His eyes are so light, they’re piercing. Like spikes of ice reading your very soul.

I step into the office, but Eli doesn’t invite me to sit down.

I take a chair anyway.

His attention returns to one of the reports.