-11-
Allegra
“Ewan?” Alle asked, perplexed.
Rock Giant shifted uneasily behind her, moving his weight from his front to his back leg.
“Shitting yourself?” Ewan prompted. “Why would you be doing that? This,” —he claimed the phone from Alle, and waggled it before Flynn’s nose— “is a phone, not a nuclear bomb. So, unless you’ve got yourself embroiled into some deep, deep, nasty shit that we don’t know about, we arrive at the only reasonable explanation. That the phone contained information you wouldn’t want getting out.”
Ewan continued. “And then, you see, I have to ask myself, what information could that possibly be?”
Flynn squirmed against the wooden chair, now seeming genuinely afraid.
“What are you thinking, Ewan?” Alle asked. She had a sour taste in her mouth, and cramp in her guts. Whatever it was, she knew she wasn’t going to like it.
He swallowed hard, making his Adam’s apple bob. “That the pair of them panicked and got overzealous with the clean-up job. If they’d kept their heads, you’d have been none the wiser.”
Alle cast her gaze back and forth between her eldest brother and the phone. “I…don’t get it….”
Ewan ignored her in favour of crowding Flynn. “Tell me I’m wrong, Flynn. Tell me you didn’t do what I think you did. Tell me you’re not that big an idiot.”
Flynn had apparently lost his tongue.
Some sort of realisation had begun to flower. It hovered on the edge of her understanding, blinking in and out of focus, preventing her from fully interpreting it. Flynn would no longer look at her. His guilt seemed etched into every line of his face, the tight grooves around his mouth, the puffy circles beneath his eyes, but primarily through the petulant tilt of his chin. But, guilt over what?
“Tell me… us… Tell our sister you didn’t call her boyfriend with her phone and pretend to be her. Tell her it wasn’t how you lured him out to those shipping containers. That you didn’t—”
“You fucking monster.” Her mug sailed past Flynn’s ear and smashed against the wall behind him showering the room in china splinters. Rock Giant thundered past her, throwing the table sideways with a loud scrape in order to bowl Flynn from his seat. Flynn’s chair hit the deck with an ear-splitting crash, the two men on top of it. Pizza and cat litter flew. Flynn curled, as Alle tore at Rock Giant’s shoulders, not to stop him, but to get him out of the way so she could pummel her brother herself. It was like trying to move granite—granite with a 3G swing.
Flynn caught a good one in the guts, then an elbow in the nose. It ruptured, splattering the skirting boards with scarlet droplets. He howled. She screamed obscenities back at him. Ewan began shouting at them all to back up and calm down, but none of them were listening. All Alle could truly hear was the thunderous rush of blood through her ears.
She managed to kick Flynn in the arse, but the swing left her unbalanced, so when Ewan propelled himself over the table onto Rock Giant’s back, she skidded into the wall, biting her lip in the process.
By the time she’d about turned, Rock Giant was on his knees inside the pantry. Ewan slammed the door in his face and threw the bolt. He then wedged a chair under the handle for good measure.
Alle swept a bottle off the nearest shelf.
“Put that down,” he ordered her. He stumbled over Flynn to knock it from her hand. Alle dropped it before he reached her. “That’s enough. Get in the lounge.” He gave her a shove in that direction. “Now, Alle. Move. I mean it. Do not try me.”
He bent to check on their brother, who remained curled like a comma, head under the table, an upturned chair bridging his thighs. There was blood smeared across his cheek and pooled in his ear.
“If you don’t fucking get into the lounge…”
She was barely through the door before Ewan followed her in.
“Sit.” His tone brooked no argument as he ordered her into an armchair. “I know you’re heated. I get it, but fratricide isn’t going to make things better.”
“He fucking did it, Ewan,” her voice cracked from the strain of saying it. That knowledge was now lodged in her brain, where it was fizzing and threatening to blow-up her emotions like gelignite.
Her brother was responsible for Spook’s injuries.
She hadn’t seen them, but she’d heard them described. Had seen Xane grow pale at the remembrance. Staples. They’d needed staples to patch him up.
“He put him in hospital.”
“I know, Alle.” Ewan on his knees before her, curled a hand around her knee. “And it’s a lot to take in. It’s not good.”
He was shaking his head back and forth, like he didn’t want the knowledge to settle.
