He shakes his head. “No, today is the one day where I don’t want to hear a single word about them. No kidnapping, no bombing, no nothing. You got that, Trevor?” He narrows his eyes.
I nod my head. “Of course. Wouldn’t want to upset the birthday boy.” I tease him and slide off the couch. Talking to him clearly isn’t going to get me anymore information.
“Where are you going?” Butch asks me. “Stay and have a little fun.”
“Yeah, we know hardly anything about you,” Matthew remarks. “Now’s the time to get to know each other.”
My heart races in my chest. The last thing I want to do is get to know these guys better. At least on a personal level. They don’t need to know anything about me, but I need to know everything about them.
I straighten my shoulders but try to untense a bit, breathing out slowly through my nose.
“My life isn’t exactly all that interesting,” I tell them. “I kill the people I’m told to kill; I move on.”
“That’s way more interesting than you think, dude,” Matthew says with a chuckle. “You must have…thousands of bodies under your belt.”
I take a sip of my drink to give myself a moment to think. “I could have a couple more tonight.” I smirk.
Butch laughs. “Come on, tell us about the first kill,” he insists. “We all have one.”
“Yes, we all have that first blood we felt on our hands,” Dante mumbles. “Tell us about yours.”
I blink at them, but quickly pull myself together. “You really want to know about that?” I tilt my head to the side, my eyes narrowing slightly.
“You’re new, you owe us a story or two,” Dante insists.
“You don’t trust me?” I ask.
Butch scoffs. “This ain’t about trust. Lighten up a little.” He smacks me on the shoulder. “You’re as hard up as ever. Maybe you need a little fun tonight.”
Dante’s crooked smile says he agrees with his brother.
“Alright,” I say slowly. “If you really want to know.”
“We do,” Matthew says and his pale eyes scan my face expectantly.
“He was a friend of my father’s,” I tell them. “He was planning on taking some of my father’s money and blowing it on a gambling debt; course, he didn’t plan on stopping afterward. My father wanted to teach both of us a lesson. He put a gun in my hand and told me to use it. No lesson, no preparation. He just told me who I was going to kill and sent me on my way.”
“What was the punishment if you didn’t?” Dante asks, his voice quiet, curious.
“He never told me, but the look in his eyes said that someone was getting shot that night,” I explain. “So, I found his friend…while he was drunk off his ass and paranoid that one of the loan sharks were there to kill him. When he saw it was me, he laughed his ass off. He didn’t think I’d really do it.”
They’re all staring at me now, waiting in anticipation as if the ending to the story isn’t obvious. Even while I talk about it, twenty years later, my chest tightens and I can still see the look on his face in my memories.
“I shot him point blank in the head. A lucky shot, but a shot nevertheless,” I say. “Blood was everywhere. I wanted to throw up, maybe I did, I don’t remember. I was barely eight years old and the recoil was like a kick to the chest, but he was dead.”
“Damn,” Dante says slowly. “Eight? That’s younger than me or Butch were.”
“That’s not the end,” I tell them. “Someone else was there.”
“Who?” Matthew asks. I’ve got them on the hook now.
“His daughter,” I say as I casually take a drink.
“Did you kill her too?” Butch asks, his eyes sparkling.
Bile rises up my throat, and I swallow it back down. “What do you think?” I ask, my dark eyes meeting his for a second.
It’s quiet for a long moment between us before Dante finally speaks again. “Fuck man, you’re a serious killer, no wonder my dad picked you up,” he says with a dark laugh. “Bastard can kill a little girl, he can kill anyone.”
