And if I really listen to it…
“Thanks, Dad,” I said with a warm smile.
I grabbed my glass of wine and toasted to his advice and health. It was a shame I didn’t spend more time with him, and it was a shame that it took his advice to get me to accept what I already rationally knew to be true.
Only one real question remained.
How could Cassius truly, once and for all, prove that he prioritized me over his empire and over his grievances and flirtations with the Morrils and Black Reapers?
25
CASSIUS
The normal single glass of bourbon to close out the night had turned into my fifth of the evening. I stood at the glass windows of my penthouse overlooking Las Vegas, faced with an immediate paradox that I somehow kept making worse.
The more I drank to try to forget Virgil and Sarah, the worse it got.
I was old enough to know better by now. The only way to truly forget everything that had transpired was to get so fucking drunk that I might turn into a medical emergency, and as in my head as I was, I was not that desperate. Never would be.
But how the fuck was I supposed to resolve the unresolvable?
“You wanted to destroy me? Well, the Morrils can’t destroy what’s already broken.”
Even now, well after the fact, I had no idea how the fuck to address that. Already broken? That implied that she’d been broken for some time now. Did she mean over us? Over the longer Virgil saga? Sometime in between those two points, maybe because of the Reapers or something?
“Your world is no different than the Reapers’.”
Of all the things she had said… that wasn’t really that fucking wrong, was it? No, I never rode a bike. No, I never killed a man.
But maybe…
Fuck, no! No! I would not—I took a huge gulp of the remaining fifth drink in my hand—let myself be thought of as anything like a Black Reaper. I was not! I was a businessman, they were bikers. End of story!
“Just because you don’t use guns and motorcycles doesn’t mean you don’t play the same games of power, control, and greed.”
Why the fuck did what Sarah say have to stick in my mind like this? Why couldn’t I just fucking shrug it off without having to be crippling drunk? Why?
Because it’s the truth.
That thought flashed in my mind for only a split second, as if someone else had put it there. It came and went as quickly as many other thoughts might, here one moment, discarded so quickly thereafter I might as well have never thought it.
But then it came back.
And it stuck.
And a heavy part of me began to realize that it wasn’t just a part of me desperate to find a solution to bring Sarah back into the fold. She could be six feet under for six years, and it would be true.
My world is no different than the Black Reapers.
What a… strangely relieving thought.
No, not relieving in that I somehow thought I could go ride a bike and adopt some stupid name like King or Heartcrusher. I might have accepted the reality of the core of the idea, but there were going to be superficial similarities that would never come to fruition.
But if I acknowledged it…
I didn’t have a good reason for why it made me feel better to just accept it. Maybe I could stop pretending that I might still control them; since the very thought of someone trying tocontrol me was insulting, I had to admit the same might be true of those in the Black Reapers. Maybe some psychoanalyst might dive deeper into me and say it allowed me to be a fuller version of myself, but honestly, fuck that. In business, we were judged by our profits and losses, and I was going to view this realization in the same way.
And then it gave me an even crazier idea.
