I know that fucking voice. I know it even before I open my eyes and join the realm of the living again. It’s the sort of voice that makes you really not want to bother.
I am sitting in a chair in a dark room with one light focused squarely on me. I cannot see anything besides the man in front of me. He has a remarkably smooth face for someone his age. Treatments have removed the lines that would have shown character. Or perhaps they are absent because he never had any to begin with.
The man in front of me is known by many names, but I only know him by one: Bastard Pete.
Bastard Pete got his name because he was born out of wedlock to a prominent member of the royal family. Story goes Bastard Pete was supposed to be murdered and thrown into the ocean, but he was saved at the last moment and put up for adoption.
Ever since, Bastard Pete, or BP for short, has been a fucking plague on the planet. That’s what Mummy and Daddy issues along with infant abandonment trauma looks like, so Aiden says.
“The absolute fuck are you doing?” I ask the question with a relatively calm tone. I’m not tied up, but I do have several weapons pointed at me by shadowy figures, so, same same.
“It’s time you and I had a conversation,” he says.
“I don’t think so. I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“See, here’s the thing about your family,” BP says. “You’re smart, but you’re arrogant. And you think you can do whatever you want to women.”
I snort at that piece of self-righteousness, because I know what BP does to women. He is no friend of the gentler sex, and we both know it.
I hear a soft sobbing in the corner. It’s Ella. As I turn my head toward her, she calls out to me. “I’m sorry! I didn’t have a choice!”
“Quiet,” BP says to her. “The men are talking.”
“Looks like you take really good care of your ladies,” I deadpan. Aiden knew she was working for someone. I wonder if he knew this. My eldest brother likes to play a lot of things close to his chest. But I don’t think he would ever have allowed me to go off with a spy working for one of the most corrupt men on the planet.
“If you take the deal your idiot brother didn’t, she won’t have to cry, because we won’t have to kill you, understand?”
My jaw tightens as BP casually makes a confession. He killed Teddy. It makes sense. It’s not like he wasn’t on the list of suspects, we just didn’t have any proof. He didn’t claim his wrongdoing.
Until now.
“What do you want?” I try to keep myself calm as I ask the question. I channel Aiden’s energy. He wouldn’t freak out. I want to lunge at the man in front of me with his round face and his low cheekbones and his piss brown eyes and punch him until he doesn’t have a face left. But that would get me a bullet and I already know our family has low lead resistance.
“A stake in the family business. Our fingers in your pies. That sort of thing.”
I pretend to think about it for a second. BP is giving me some Agent Smith vibes right now, all the way down to the thin line of his mouth. It’s tempting to give him the finger, and make him give me my phone call, but I am not dealing with the law, and the only thing I would get is a bullet to the back of the head if I refused.
So I do the smart thing.
“Sure,” I smile. “Why not.”
He looks at me suspiciously. “Don’t try to fucking trick me.”
“Why would I do that? You’re going to pay me, I’d imagine, and I am tired of being under Aiden and Leo anyway. Those two think they run everything. I have ideas, too. And they keep throwing me into fucking rehab every time I so much as sniff the wrong way.”
BP’s expression starts to shift as I do what anybody who has ever had to talk their way into drug money does, lie with just enough truth to be believable.
“I don’t like that you killed Teddy, but he was always soppy,” I say, hoping Ted doesn’t start immediately haunting me.
“He was,” BP says. “At the end, he cried like a little bitch.”
That last little bit of information is a test to see if I’m really open to being corrupted. Maybe I should have played harder to get, but I don’t see how that would have worked. If I’d made them convince me, there’s a chance he would have given up and just shot me. And that would be a pity because I would lose the chance to kill him.
I’m glad I’ve been well detoxed from drugs, because it’s giving me the self-control to keep holding back the urge to surge forward and rip his fucking throat out with my bare hands. I will kill him one of these days, and it will be brutal, it will be cruel, and most of all it will be slow. He will be keenly aware of his life ebbing away from him. He will beg for the end, and the end will not come, and…
I smirk and snap back into myself. Those thoughts are of the kind I have tried to silence my whole life. First with video games, then with Vicodin, then with, well, whatever I could get my hands on. Maybe it’s time to give into them. Maybe it’s time to admit to myself that I’m not really all that different from Aiden, or even Leo. I often tell myself I am not as dangerous or as bad as my brothers. The frightening thing is, I might be worse.
“What do you want me to do?” I change the subject.
