The Trophy Club: Book One

By Magevonna Magevonna

Hanna Hascott, heiress to V-Metal Industries, is left to run her dying husband's business.
As she goes about her daily affairs, she sensed somebody's following her.

While searching for clues of a possible takeover within her company, she becomes dangerously close and dependent on a risk analyst who might be playing both sides.

To get away from all the madness, she takes a short vacation. While in Las Vegas, she ends up befriending four women who want to follow in her footsteps in becoming a CEO. Later, they all agreed to make it an annual event as they cheers and The Trophy Club was born.

Will Hanna succumb to the flirtatious witticism of a handsome stranger or fall victim to a hidden presence in shadows that could be a figment of her imagination or a faction in the making?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Magevonna Magevonna
• Release date: Jul 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780990020233

Magevonna Magevonna

Magevonna lives in Los Angeles, California. He's currently working on his second novel.

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Copyright

Copyright 2015 by Magevonna

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Coffee Ring Novels, P.O. Box 811742, Los Angeles, California 90081

Manufactured by Coffee Ring Novels

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Magevonna

The Trophy Club - Classy & Clever - Magevonna

ISBN: 978-0-9900202-7-1

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book, prior permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher. Thank you.

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P.O. Box 811742

Los Angeles, California 90081

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but building the new.

-     Socrates

CLASSY & CLEVER

BOOK ONE

PROLOGUE

March 11, 2011

Sendai, Japan

The steady clacking of Hanna’s heels against the tiles was nearly lost in the din of men, women, and children walking around AEON –Ishinomaki’s most popular mall. AEON wasn’t her first choice of destination in Sendai, but when Benjamin, her husband, asked her to join him for brunch at Barolo, an Italian restaurant on the seventh floor of their hotel, she had convinced herself that AEON was better than another boring meal in a luxurious or austere environment.

AEON’s stores were less affluent than Hanna’s usual experience with her favorite upscale boutiques and department stores. The mall itself had nothing of note. An updated cinema was the highlight among an array of clothing stores, restaurants, shops, and services. Starbucks was peddled alongside 100 Yen Bowls in the neighboring Daiso; various smells of foodstuff wafted from sophisticated cafés and McDonalds and mingled with the crisp, artificial air of the quaint shopping center. Bay Flow, Global Work, and other homegrown fashion brands caught her eye, while Bliss Point made her reconsider the brands in her wardrobe.

Hanna brushed her ironed hair from her face and smiled at a little boy who had been staring at her since she had come to a stop in front of a shop across him. She’d gotten more than a few curious looks from children and the elderly alike since she had arrived with her husband in Narita, and the staring only intensified when she made the trip to Sendai. Long years spent in the company of socialites and businessmen immunized her from inquisitive glances and longing stares, and Hanna gave them no reason to look away. Even in the suburbs, she merely dressed down to acceptable levels of boho chic. Nude Manolo Blahnik sandals pushed up her shapely calves, accentuated by the rim of her capri harem pants. Her honey vanilla skin glowed healthily even under the drab fluorescent lights of the mall, drawing eyes to her toned arms and flawless face.

The little boy blushed at her smile and ran back to the woman Hanna assumed was his mother. Hanna chuckled and thought of her own children as she continued walking. All five of them were Benjamin’s, by his two previous marriages, and were roughly her own age, the youngest being 19. She had been the same age when she met Benjamin Hascott at a scholar’s dinner at Brown when she was still taking her undergrad studies as an exchange student. Benjamin’s children were naturally suspicious of her intentions at first. Why else would a young university student from an impoverished country marry their father but for his stupendous wealth?

From their first disastrous dinner until their marriage, Hanna worked hard to prove that her pretty face was just an afterthought. She worked her way from a lowly secretary in one of the Hascott plants all the way to supervising manager, and when her talent could no longer be ignored, the board members of the Hascott Corporation offered her a place in the main corporate office in Manhattan. But Hanna knew better than to take the blatant handout, even if it was being given to her out of respect for her accomplishments. She knew she was getting too dependent, too reliant on the ease her unique circumstances gave her. She turned down the offer and continued to work her little plant in Rhode Island, working for the better part of her early twenties until it earned recognition as an outstanding, community-serving venture instead of another branch of the noxious Hascott Empire.

It was at the age of 24 when she finally earned the respect of Benjamin’s kids and her own trust. A tiny part of her knew that they were not completely wrong about her intent for their father. As the fifth child in a household built by a teacher and a carpenter, her belongings as a child were worth less than the junk her recycling plant processed daily. The luxuries Benjamin showered on her were tempting, and she spent many nights reminding herself that she knew better. It was at the age of 26 when she decided that she could trust herself to marry a man more than twice her age and half as sensitive.

Three years and a whole lot of arguments later, she wondered if she could’ve just stayed friends with the Hascott siblings and left their father out of it.

Nee-san! Want some omiyage?

Hanna was startled out of her thoughts by the shout that came from an enthusiastic salesman peddling goods outside a sweets shop. The salesman, barely younger than the giggling old ladies who swarmed his shop, gave her a toothy grin as he held out a box of rice cake. His eagerness made Hanna laugh despite herself. She decided that having a whole box of rice cake to herself wouldn’t ruin her figure, and if she did gain a pound, her Crossfit trainer would suck it up and get her back on track.

She took a few steps towards the shop when she first felt it—the slight tremble and shifting of tiles under her immaculate sandals and the abnormal waving of the banners draped on the shop’s tables. Hanna fought the urge to freeze in her movements. No one else seemed to have noticed the sudden movement and she didn’t want to encourage the spike of fear that bolted through her chest. The salesman cheerfully pointed out her reddened cheeks as he wrapped up some boxes for her, and she played along with his joke. He did not need to know that she blushed not because of his homely good looks, but out of an irrational fear she thought she had buried a long time ago.

Her parents and siblings were now in the States, safe in a disaster-proof building that would not easily crumble. Hanna forbade them from going back to salvage what little they could from their house in Haiti, telling them explicitly that there was nothing there but pain and longing.

Hanna hoped it was just her equilibrium that went off-kilter, but another shock and a baffled look from the salesman confirmed her fears. Before the salesman could talk to her, Hanna thanked him for the rice cakes, paid him, and walked away as quickly as she could without arousing any suspicion. She took her phone out of her pocket, scrolled through her contacts and pressed on her father’s name as she fought the bile rising in her throat.

Flashes of wrecked houses and streets flitted through Hanna's mind as she made her way down the steps to the ground floor, not trusting the escalators. She shook them out of her mind as she sped through the blissfully unaware crowd. But her trance broke as her call went to voicemail and the people around her began to feel the beginnings of the earthquake.

Before she could march towards the exit, the small rumblings suddenly turned violent. Beams overhead began to shake and moan ominously as people walked as calmly as they could to the closest exit they could find. Hanna had to lean against the sides of shops, accidentally knocking down a few displays and tables in her haste for safety. Eventually, a few people began to scream as the tremors grew worse. For a few seconds, Hanna wished she had worn sensible shoes, before a forceful tremor caused her to fall to the ground.

Hanna heard a few people scream in her direction, and for a wild moment she thought they were reprimanding her, until she noticed the display cabinet full of porcelain falling towards her.

Hanna rolled gracelessly to the side, narrowly missing the crush of heavy wood and hardened glass. Tiny shards embedded itself into her exposed flesh, but she ignored the pain and righted herself up, regaining her composure almost immediately as she strode quickly to the entrance.

Around her, people either stuck to steady, unadorned walls or rushed to the exits. Hanna ignored the screams of those who could do neither, though she could not dismiss the phantom echoes ringing in her ears from a place still ravaged by a similar disaster.

Her senses fled her momentarily as she saw the nearest exit. Before she could assess the situation, she ran forward and felt a warm liquid running down her right arm. Hanna stumbled to the floor and gasped as she saw an open wound on the juncture of her shoulder and upper arm, and the chunk of debris that had chipped her shoulder beside her feet.

A shout snapped Hanna out of her shock. She ran to the exit, all pretenses of calm forgotten, whimpering as people painted their sides with her blood in the crush out the door. Once outside, Hanna pulled her keys from her pocket, spared a brief thought for her forgotten clutch, and began to look for her car.

Hanna tried to look away from the people around her who were still upright. She focused on her steps and crouched low to crab walk carefully into her space. The open parking lot was eerily quiet, its relative silence only punctuated by occasional screams and the constant hum of churning water.

By some miracle, she had finally reached her car, blissfully unharmed, when she heard the scream.

Kaasan!

Hanna held her breath as she turned away from her car and looked for the source of the voice. Another desperate cry hooked her gaze to a little boy crying beside a sign for shopping carts, shivering and completely alone. His chubby fingers alternated between curling around the signpost to steady himself and rubbing his watery eyes raw.

Hey! Little boy, Hanna cried out, catching the boy’s attention, can you look at onee-san?

The boy stopped crying, his lips wobbling as he hiccupped with the effort to stem his tears. Hanna tried to make the boy come to her, her hands fanning backwards and forwards, but the boy could do no more but stare at the foreign woman beckoning to him. She could hardly fault the child for his lack of response; she could barely move herself. The boy had a nametag hung around his neck, a pink piece of cardboard shaped like a petal with his name printed in childish Hiragana: Kazuki.

Hanna’s breath caught in her throat. This was the same boy who ran back to his mother when she had smiled at him earlier. Where was his mother?

Kazuki-chan? Hanna tried. Kazuki looked up at her with wide eyes. At least she had his attention now.

Kochira, Hanna spoke again, fanning her hands frantically. She wanted to run to the child and pick him up but she didn’t want to risk scaring him off. There was no time for a chase or any misunderstanding. The ground still rumbled, the people around them either running or locking themselves into their cars. The sound of roiling waves growled ominously from the south.

When she was certain that the boy wouldn’t move, Hanna toed her heels off and began to cautiously walk towards Kazuki, her palms held upwards in a placating manner. She didn’t interact with children much these days, having left all her cousins and neighbors in Haiti when she started her exchange program at Brown, but she knew that Kazuki needed to feel safe. The heels would only slow her down when she eventually needed to run with the child, and Blahniks were worth nothing to her if she couldn't make it to and from the boy and her car safely.

Hanna began humming a senseless tune under her breath as she neared Kazuki, anchoring herself on the slowly-cracking ground with surefooted steps. The boy started loosening his grip on the pole, lowering his fists down to his nametag as he watched the well-dressed woman slowly walk towards him. He bit his lip and slipped his hand off the pole his mom told him to hold on to and reached out to Hanna.

Neither saw the water coming, surging through cars and concrete, unrelenting and violent, until it was all too late. Hanna tried to scream and jump forward to grab Kazuki, but the boy had already disappeared beneath the foaming grey waves as it slammed into her, knocking her underneath the rushing waters. She kicked and tried to keep her head afloat, tried to shout Kazuki’s name over and over, but only succeeding in swallowing the filthy water that gushed from the churning sea.

Hanna’s consciousness was beginning to fade, the light waning above the unrelenting waves breaking over her head. Her limbs were tired and her throat was sore from screaming, Kazuki, Kazuki, Kazuki.

Her lids were beginning to fold over her eyes when she felt a solid mass bump into her shoulder. Instinctively, her body rolled in the heaving water and clung on to the mass—a car—until her head broke up the cresting waves and air poured into her gaping mouth.     

Colors swirled in Hanna’s periphery as she clung on the roof of the car. To her right she was mildly aware of the flood sweeping through the lower floors of AEON, dredging up cars, tables, and people in its wake. She couldn’t muster enough strength to turn her head, but the sounds of crashing metal against the haunting silence pressed into her ears. Seconds stretched into minutes as Hanna counted, whispering a senseless tune as she tried to stay awake and look for a pink flower name tag.

Later, Hanna would realize that if she’d just taken the risk to run and grab Kazuki, she migh have been able to save him.

Two survivors from the mall’s wreckage pulled her off the roof of a Nissan Altima onto the roof of a sturdier Lexus SUV, but Hanna would not remember this until later. She would remember nothing but the child in a jumper with a pink name tag, standing by a signpost, waiting for a person who never came.

1

April 23, 2015

Trophy Club, Texas

It took Hanna three long breaths before she realized that she was awake. On the fourth, shuddering release, she stretched her arms above her head, closed her eyes, and kicked off the thick comforter still swaddling her legs. It had been a long time since she had woken up with unseeing eyes, and it was just her luck that Ben chose to sleep in his own room rather than see her like this. Her psychiatrist told her it was normal, that years and miles away from Sendai was not enough to bury the sound of crashing waves, but a hot flush of guilt and shame still overwhelmed her every now and then for feeling like this.

This won’t do, Hanna whispered as she walked towards the high windows near her bed. The curtains parted under her smooth, honey brown hands, unscarred after sessions with a discreet surgeon who had erased all evidence of the incident four years ago. Along with this surgeon came a fleet of self-help gurus, trained psychologists, quiet clergymen, and yoga instructors who helped rub out the scars inside, like a particularly expensive astringent or luxurious exfoliant.

Nudging curtains into neat, pleated waves on the sides of windows was not part of their recommended regimen for treating her condition, but it was one Hanna made for herself after catching Benjamin’s nurse open their bedroom curtains one morning. The help took some time to accept her newest distraction, her years of idly letting them go about their tasks offering them no cause to accept it quickly, but they eventually relented and even taught her how to properly set the curtains apart. Arranging the curtains helped normalize her sleeping patterns at least, and the sound of the brass rings holding the top of the curtains sliding against the poles framing the windows filled the pounding silence in her ears. So, every day, when she was at home and not some other flat, she would wake up a little before sunrise to open the curtains in every room of the estate. Twenty-eight rooms, with four to five windows on every side, and hundreds of windows in the hallways that led to each and every one of them. Cream, gold, and beige silk rolls of cloth stretched over mahogany, oak, and birch in different combinations in each room. She vaguely remembered picking out the colors in deference to each room’s needs, but that was years ago, before she even thought of shaming herself for previously needing others to do the simple task of opening curtains.

By the time she finished her task, Hanna had watched the sun rise from the tops of the estate’s trees and pin itself on the shifting gradients of the sky above. The colors of the sky and the domesticity of the act had helped her manage her trembling hands by then, and Hanna finally saw herself decent enough for her husband to see her.

Ben was being fed by his nurse when Hanna walked into his study, his stubborn mouth a thin line above his quavering jowls as he tried to take the spoonful of drying oatmeal from the beleaguered young woman. The nurse, a fresh graduate, grinned at her little wave and offered her the bowl as she neared them, quietly alerting his charge of her presence.

There you are, Gabby, Ben grumbled as he accepted a bite of oatmeal from his wife, Young Erica here needs to meet with our Matthew and refused to leave me alone until you got here.

Thank you, Erica, Hanna smiled warmly at the young nurse, who looked like she’d just solved world hunger with her offer of time off to meet with Ben’s 19-year-old.

’Ta, Mrs. Hascott. See you later, Ben, Erica waved goodbye as she hurried to the door, grabbing a small backpack from the foot of Ben’s wheelchair as she did.

Hanna was surprised that Ben let the young Briton call him by his first name. The few dozen nurses they had had since the stately Hascott patriarch relegated himself to a wheelchair were never allowed to call him more than his last name with a perfunctory Mr. before or Sir afterwards. Erica was, Hanna recalled, only a few weeks into her employment at that point, and the significance behind the endearment was not lost on her. Then again, the young woman was dating Ben’s youngest.

That’s new, she muttered quietly, her excellent vocabulary leaving her momentarily as she absently wiped her husband’s chin with a napkin.  

Come off it, Ben answered gruffly, tugging the bowl and spoon away from Hanna and feeding himself with almost childlike petulance.

If Hanna didn’t know better, she would describe her husband as a grumpy old softie whose fortune and disease whittled down his formerly fit body and mind. But she knew, from hours spent at his side or at some satellite office, politely smiling at investors and board members until she can cut them down with well-placed words, that Ben did not grow an ordinary million-dollar company into a billion-dollar industry by being a docile lamb.

V-Metals Industries, named after Benjamin Vossen Hascott and Vincent DiMaggio, was a recycling giant worth $542 billion, and was the only name worth knowing in scrap and junkyard. Nearly fifty years ago, no one thought a single company could ever become synonymous with an entire industry without contention; now, it was unthinkable to mention recycling without mentioning V-Metals or Benjamin Hascott. Long before hitting the billion-dollar mark in the Nineties, V-Metals had stretched its long limbs into other industries by way of high-profile partnerships and conglomerates. Half the world’s tech plants used metals recycled by V-Metals plants, construction sites and neighborhoods were supplied with material smelted directly from Hascott-owned smelts, and numerous charities proudly called the now 72-year-old patriarch a dear donor who only wished for his funds to help the truly needy.

Hanna almost snorted out loud at the thought and smothered her amusement by arranging the Mackintosh draped on her husband’s legs. Ben was not a man who offered anything without any strings attached. He’d sooner make an orphan write him an I.O.U. than let them get away with an unwrapped gift. It was not cruel—it was just the way you had to be when your own employees and friends clawed at you with words and injunctions underneath veils of simpering idiocy. Ben told her once, two years ago at her thirtieth birthday, that the very bottle of Champagne she’d been sipping on since their guests had left came from the same ex-wife who once tried to use her position as the head of his legal counsel to usurp