4. Cal Walker
Present Day
(Age twenty-six)
Alexa, Play: Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites - Skrillex
S cary Monsters and Nice Sprites by Skrillex played through my speakers at a much lower volume than the song deserved.
However, I wasn’t able to crank it the way I wanted to.
I was currently parked across the street from a kid’s play park in my murdered out Bentley, waiting for Naomi to come back with recon on my next target. I was already conspicuous enough without blasting rave-level decibels of dubstep all over this suburb on a casual Tuesday afternoon.
Not that these boring ass people wouldn’t benefit from a little bit of excitement… I just didn’t want to get another fucking lecture from Damian.
‘ The loudest man in the room is the weakest, Mr. Walker.’
Fuck. Off .
If I had to listen to that asshole quote ‘ American Gangster’ one more time, I was going to put a bullet through my own damn skull.
As it was, I usually just sat there and absorbed whatever bullshit he was trying to indoctrinate me with.
At the ripe young age of ten, I learned that there was no arguing with Damian Ryker. You just obeyed, or you paid for it.
Happily, we were more or less aligned in our interests, and I rarely felt the need to argue with him.
Taking the deal to work for Damian that day in the precinct had been the best decision of my life. He had stayed true to his word and set my sisters and me up in a house nicer than anything little ten-year-old me had ever seen on fucking TV, let alone in real life.
We all still lived there in this glitz-ass townhouse downtown in Silent Hollow.
Everything had been financially taken care of. He said it was because ‘I had earned it.’
Which, I guess was pretty fucking true.
Ryker had started conditioning me literally the day after we put my mother in the ground. Some may hear something like that and think it harsh… but I was willing to learn.
The funny thing about being raised in a cage is it makes you angry… and angry people want vengeance.
The first few kills Ryker weaned me into were child abusers. Parents who had done to their kids what had been done to me, Cass, and Naomi… Or worse. As soon as I learned what their crimes had been, I had no problem slitting their throats.
I remembered wondering what it had been like for Cass to kill our mother… Well, thanks to Ryker, I didn’t need to wait long to find out.
For the first few years, when I had been too small, Ryker used to deliver my prey to me bound and gagged. Over time, he taught me how to get strong—how to fight.
He had a whole team of people who were experts in our craft. I learned all sorts of shit.
How to pick locks, how to stalk people, how to hack into secure networks, and how to become invisible.
But most importantly, Ryker had taught me that life was fucking short and to take whatever the fuck you wanted today because you might not live to see tomorrow.
With that outlook on life, I had ripped through my early twenties in a blazing glory of money, sex, murder, and really good drugs.
As long as I showed up and never missed a job, Ryker didn’t give a shit what I did in my spare time.
Cassandra did… somewhat. She didn’t like that I worked for Ryker. She had been against it from day one.
It was a pretty regular fight we got into… one she didn’t really have a leg to stand on, if I was being honest.
“Oh, you don’t like it, Cass? Go cry into your law degree.”
I smirked at the thought, sliding my Ray-Bans down my nose and settling deeper into the black leather of my seat. Tugging my hoodie further over my head, I tapped my thumbs on the steering wheel to the beat of the song.
That usually shut her the fuck up. She could turn her nose up at the way I provided for us all she wanted, but she always took the money the same way Naomi and I did.
She made enough on her own now as a high-powered Ivy League lawyer to move out and get her own place, but she would always know where she got her start from.
My fucking blood money.
Whatever. It’s not like her hands were lily white. Not like Naomi’s…
Speaking of the angel, she was skipping up to my Bentley with her usual bright smile.
She was wearing a cute little white dress and flip-flops, her bright blonde hair piled on top of her head with a bunch of clips that looked like tiny daisies.
Naomi was this little pulse of sunshine in my otherwise depraved life, and she was the apple of both mine and Cassandra’s eye.
Cass hated that she came to help me with my… hobby.
Naomi popped open the passenger door and climbed into the car, wrinkling her nose up at my music.
She reached forward and fiddled with the dial, switching the Bluetooth to her phone. I rolled my eyes as she keyed up some T Swift. Naomi was literally the only person on the planet that I would allow to change the music in my car.
“Find anyone?” I asked her, punching the ‘on’ button and firing up the engine.
Her smile faltered, but she nodded, her brown eyes darkening.
All three of us looked similar. We all had dark hair, brown eyes, and olive skin; however, Naomi started dyeing her hair blonde from as early as I could remember.
“Yeah. There’s a little boy who moves like he’s injured under his shirt. Kind of like that kid last month that had all the cigarette burns.”
Rage flared through me at her words. My own scars from the burns our mother had crushed into my chest bled out a phantom ache.
You see, on paper, I was Damian Ryker’s weapon. I killed for him regularly, and the more accustomed I became to murder, the less I cared about the reason behind the jobs he assigned me.
As long as the jobs didn’t interfere with my one rule, I didn’t really give a fuck who I was killing.
What’s my one rule, you ask?
No. Kids.
Women? Sure. I wasn’t under the delusion that women were any more innocent than their male counterparts.
Look at my mother. She made Satan look like a saint.
As far as I was concerned, both men and women had equal potential for evil, but I did have a line.
And it was the age of majority.
Ryker had tried to put me on a job with a kid once, and I had lost my fucking shit. I told him that I didn’t care what he did, but if I found out he was taking jobs with kids as the marks, we were done.
At that point, I was valuable and dangerous enough that he couldn’t really argue with me. He just gave me one of his more considering looks and conceded.
“No kids.” He agreed, and since then, instead of spending my weeks between jobs at raves losing my mind on molly, I’ve been hunting down monsters like my mother… and Naomi has been helping.
You see, someone like me can’t really sit at a child’s play park and watch kids all day. The moms got understandably… antsy .
But Naomi could. She sits on a bench and makes small talk with the moms, all the while keeping an eye out specifically for kids who are showing signs of abuse.
Then, she comes back to my car, points out the kid… and then the real fun begins.
“That’s him,” she said, pointing out her tinted window to a small boy who had broken away from the crowded park. He was sullenly kicking an empty can down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets on what I assumed was his way home.
“Put your seatbelt on,” I demanded, though I couldn’t look away from the child. He was holding his elbows close to him as if moving them too much hurt.
I narrowed my eyes, and Naomi rolled hers.
“Such a mother hen.” She smirked, pulling her belt across her waist and clipping it into place.
I shot her an affectionate grin and tapped her on the nose.
“Hey. Someone needs to look out for the Gnome,” I chirped, and she scowled.
“God. If our mother wasn’t already dead, I would kill her just for calling me Naomi. Gnome has to be the worst nickname in the history of nicknames,” she grumbled.
I laughed.
“Such a rough life you lead, little gnome.” I smirked, throwing the car into drive.
“Now, let’s find out what kind of monster is hurting this little kid so I can show them what a real monster looks like.”
Naomi gave me a smile that somehow crossed the line from innocent to sinister, and my heart swelled.
“Have I ever told you I’m so proud to call you my big brother?” she asked softly, and I glanced at her from behind my Ray-Bans, my tattooed fingers tightening on the supple leather of the steering wheel.
“I could stand to hear it more often.” I winked at her, and she laughed.
“You’re such a ham.” She giggled, and I cranked up the volume.
“Whatever. You love it. Now listen to Taylor. If you’re going to insist on blasting this shit in my car, you better fucking pay attention.”