“Try leaving and I’ll have you locked up in the basement,” Aiden says. “Test me, and you’ll see I am not joking.”
With that, Aiden turns on his heel and leaves the room. He knows he is at a point of potential explosion. He cannot risk listening to more of Luke’s immature words. Luke should know better by now, but his frontal lobe appears to be taking its sweet time growing in.
“Can you fucking believe that guy? Thinks he’s our father,” Luke says to me once Aiden is gone.
“Yeah,” I say. “He does. And you know better than to make him worry when all he’s doing is trying to keep us safe. You know what he’s like. And you know why he’s that way.”
“Yeah,” Luke sighs, beckoning the doctor over to finish sewing up his head. “I thought going to fight would be a good thing, you know? Better than getting back into drugs.”
“You already got back into drugs,” I say simply. There is very little judgment in my voice, but I want him to know he is not going unobserved. We see what he’s doing, and we are going to get in the way of it.
“I had a little,” he says. “Just to take the edge off. I knew it was a mistake, so I went to the fight place. I won like a thousand dollars too!” He grins, proud.
Luke is the sort of man who does not stay down for too long. The damage that gets done when he is down can be absolutely devastating, though.
“Can you talk to Aiden?”
“About what?” I ask. I can imagine a lot of things that Luke might want me to talk to our eldest brother about.
“He’s going to force me to get clean. Can you tell him to just get off my back?”
“It’s not the worst thing to do,” I say. “We need to find who killed Teddy, and you’ve been off your face since it happened.”
“I like being off my face.”
“Yeah. Well. When we work out who is trying to kill us all, you can go back and get as high as you like on whatever you like. For now, try not to get Aiden to kill you. We have to avenge Teddy.”
“Yeah. We do,” he says. “No leads yet, though, right? I tried to see if anybody at the fights had anything to say, but they clam up every time. I tried beating something out of a couple of them, but…” He gestures to his head.
“There’s the girl,” I say. “Ella.”
I watch as Luke powers down in front of me. He knows something. I’m fucking sure of it. But he doesn’t want to say. Luke has a bad habit of running off half-cocked on his own. This drug thing. This fight thing. It’s all the same shit. It’s his way of trying to handle stuff without help. And now he’s holding back on something important.
I’m not going to let him do that. I’m going to find out what significance Ella Chick has.
And I’m going to do it tonight.
CHAPTER 4
Leo
It is three in the morning, and I cannot clear my head. I cannot think of anything, or anyone, other than Ella.
I don’t drive to my apartment. I drive to hers.
I break in, which is easy enough, and I find myself in her space. It’s cute, classic, and full of duck decor. There’s something charmingly innocent about picking a motif like that. Very reminiscent of much older women, but also of times gone by.
There are three plates with ducks painted on them arranged on a shelf as I walk in the front door. There are duck pillows on the couch. A duck coffee cup sits on the draining rack, washed and ready to be used tomorrow morning.
I think the goth phase is just that, something newer. She has a few dark items, but not that many compared to the ducks.
I look through her things, but there’s not much to indicate any information about Teddy. There is no notebook markedSecretsAbout Teddy’s Death. There’s actually very little genuinely personal at all.
This cramped little apartment full of ducks shouldn’t remind me of my massive modern penthouse, but it does because these two spaces both lack a familial touch. Connections are not placed to the fore here. I do not see any family photos. There are some snaps with friends on a little cork board, but they look like they were taken some time ago.
I open her bedroom door, and I step inside.
My cock throbs with anticipation. I have not come here to be a good man, or to do good things. I have come here to follow my lustful curiosity. I’ve dressed the reason for my break-in up in a reasonable urge to learn about Teddy, but this part, the part where I stand over her bed and watch her sleep, this is wrong.
