Chapter 18
VAUGHN
“Thanks for this.”
My jaw grinds as I look at my brother across the table. “I’m not doing this for him, you know. I’m doing it for you.”
Val rolls his eyes. “Which is why I just thanked you, dick.”
“I just want to be clear—”
“Vaughn, there is nothing that has been made clearer to me in the last few months than your opinions of our father.”
I smirk. “As in, I liked him better when I thought he was dead?”
“Jesus fucking…” Val looks away, shaking his head. “How’s the Syndicate. How’s your Bond villain mansion. How’re your psycho little friends.”
“Fine. Palatial. Still psychotic,” I grunt. “How’s your boy toy?”
“Don’t.” Val’s gaze rips across the table into me. “I fucking hate when you act like Roman is a fling. We live together. He’s not going anywhere. I love him.”
I glance down. “Sorry. I…” I exhale. “I know that. My apologies.”
Once upon a time, my brother and I were close. We had to be, growing up in the traumatic hellscape of emotional abuse, physical neglect and poverty that we were raised in. Our mom turned tricks in the living room. Dad boosted carburetors and dabbled in whatever bullshit petty crime he could.
Now, there are a million kids out there with parents who turn to the dark side and do whatever the fuck it takes to put food in their stomachs and keep a roof over their heads.
But our parents didn’t do what they did for us.
They did it for themselves. For drugs.
Oxy. Heroin. Meth. I distinctly remember the scent of paint thinner and gasoline when they ran out of money and had to resort to huffing those.
But the neglect was the good part. It’s the rest of it that almost broke us.
When Mom’s temper got physical. When one of her Johns would slip into the glorified closet that Val and I called a bedroom and try and touch us. When Dad stole the shitty, fourth-hand toys Val and I had and pawned them for meth money.
The story Val's heard is that eventually one winter, when the heat had been cut off, the kitchen was empty, and Mom and Dad had been AWOL for three days straight, we left.
Rather, I left, and I took Val with me.
We bundled up in whatever clothes we could layer and I took him downtown with the harebrained idea of sneaking into the luggage compartment of a bus at the Greyhound station.
Instead, we stumbled across a furniture store; one that looked so fucking warm, with big, soft beds in the window.
I broke in the back door and brought us inside, my brother blue in the face and half dead, only to discover that the store was actually a front for a safe house and drug distribution center belonging to the Obsidian Syndicate.
Instead of killing us, they took us in, brought us to New York, gave us a place to live and food to eat, asking only that we commit ourselves to the organization in return.
We worked in a warehouse for a few years, packaging up drugs for street-level sale until the DEA came crashing in one day.
Val was knocked unconscious by a flash grenade, and I made a choice.
A really fucking hard one.
I decided that he deserved a shot at something beyond a life of crime. So I told the Syndicate guards that he was dead, left him my wallet, and escaped.
Val was found by the cops, with a wallet containing a few bucks and my YMCA ID card, and no memory of who he really was.
We had some hard years after that. I was clawing my way up through the lower ranks of the Syndicate.
He was fighting for survival in the foster system of New York—as Vaughn, since he had no memory of who he was aside from an ID with a photo that looked a lot like him since we’ve always looked so similar, and the name “Vaughn Bancroft” on it.
Again, this is the story he knows, because that's what I’ve told him.
The real one is too hard to explain.
How do you tell someone that you’ve had various other personalities inside your head since you were old enough to remember?
How do you explain that the real reason you left home that night was because the manifested personality of a grandfather you’d never met had been talking to you at night for weeks?
That this ghost is who told you about the safe house and guided you there that night into the arms of an organization that he once called family?
Yeah. Needless to say, I haven’t told Val that part.
There’s a lot I haven’t told him. It’s probably why there’s still this wall up between us, even after reconnecting over a year ago, and why I unintentionally always seem to say the wrong thing to him.
“Val.”
He glares at me across the table. “What.”
“I’m sorry. Truly. I wasn’t trying to imply that Roman isn’t important to you.”
He looks away. “I know you don’t like it, though. Us, I mean.”
“Jesus, Val.” I frown. “I couldn’t give less of a fuck who you love, guy or girl.”
He rolls his eyes. “I don’t mean you’re homophobic, dickhead. We both know you're not. I mean you disapprove because of Roman’s last name.”
I very purposefully keep my mouth shut.
“See?”
“What?” I finally growl. “Want me to lie? You’re right. I don’t like that you’re quite literally in bed with the bratva.”
“Says the man who leads a fucking global criminal empire!” he tosses back.
I want to flip the table and scream that I did everything I could to keep him away from that life. That I never wanted him to end up anywhere near the life our parents lived, or I later chose.
But if I do that, I lose him. And as much as we sometimes drive each other nuts, he’s still my kid brother.
I hold up my hands. “Okay, truce. Please.”
“Fine,” Val grunts. Then he flashes me a small smile. “But only because you showed tonight. Seriously, thank you. I know you still have your differences—”
“Let’s just drop it, okay?”
Like I said, I liked Morgan Bancroft much better when I thought he’d ODed on heroin with our mom twelve years ago.
Then, four months ago, he came back from the dead.
It turns out that while our mom had ODed, Morgan managed to get a shot of Naloxone into him before the drugs could finish him off.
Since he assumed that Val and I had both died after running away years before, he left McKeesport and spent the next twelve years finding himself in Alaska.
Himself and, allegedly, sobriety.
That is, until he saw Val’s name and photo in a New York Magazine article about masculinity and the arts, and reached out.
My brother thinks it’s nothing short of a fucking Hallmark movie miracle.
I vehemently disagree.
“He’s fucking late,” I growl, glaring at my watch.
Val sighs. “It’s fine.”
“You only get the table for ninety minutes,” I say flatly. “This place has two Michelin stars, Val.”
He shoots me a look. “Didn’t you tell me you own the joint?”
“Part owner,” I mutter. “But it’s the principle of the thing. You’d think after being a top five contender for world’s shittiest father, he'd make the effort to show the fuck up on time.”
My brother gives me a cold look. “Will you cut him some slack? He’s trying, Vaughn.”
“He's an addict.”
He shoots me a venomous glare. “People can change.”
I shake my head. “No, they can't.”
Shit.
Roman is in recovery for alcohol abuse. Six months sober.
“That…came out wrong,” I grunt. “Sorry.”
Val shakes his head and looks away.
“What I meant to say,” I sigh, “was that I don’t give a shit if he’s over his addiction. What I give a shit about it the hell he put us through.”
Again, Val doesn’t know the half of it, and never will. Because I love him, even if he and the happiness he's found with Roman annoy the fuck out of me.
“He actually wants to talk about that, if you’ll let him,” Val says. “We’ve had some really good talks, just the two of—”
“I don’t think you should do that.”
His jaw clenches. “Duly noted.”
I drum my fingers on the tablecloth and then glance at the time again.
“By the way,” I say, “it’s come to my attention that your phone isn’t always as secure as it should be.”
Val grins. “You worried about the nudes I send to Roman leaking?”
I roll my eyes. “Some of the conversations we have over text have strict guidelines—“
“Relax, James Bond,” Val sighs. “I'm not an idiot. I delete anything incriminating. Also, hello, I’m in a relationship with someone like you?”
No, you’re not.
Just then, Val stands, grins, and walks past me.
Fuck me.
I turn, my face a mask as I watch Morgan embrace Val warmly, both of them grinning like they’re old buddies.
Val has really warmed to Morgan’s “sober life, settling old debts” routine.
I haven’t. And I fucking won’t.
I know Val had his own horrors to deal with later in life, in the foster system. But my horrors came knocking much earlier, and this motherfucker wasn’t there to protect me, his own son, his own flesh and fucking blood, from them.
I actually knew Morgan had lived. I knew he'd been playing out Old Man and the Sea fantasies in the Alaskan tundra for more than a decade.
But when Val and I first reconnected I told him Morgan had died with our mom because I wanted to protect my brother.
Morgan and Val finally pull apart and clap each other on the shoulder. Before I know what’s happening, Morgan spins, rushes me, and throws his arms around me in a bear hug I didn’t ask for and sure as shit don’t want.
I stand there, arms stiff at my side and my nerves screaming before I manage to pull back.
Outwardly, I smile coldly.
Inside, I’m losing my fucking shit.
“Excuse me a minute,” I growl before I turn and walk to the men’s room.
The door has barely closed behind me before I whirl and slam my knuckles into it so hard that it dents. I do it again, then again, only stopping when my hand roars in protest.
I run my knuckles under cold water, then grip the sides of the basin and stare into the rushing faucet. I lean down and splash my face, swallowing and tugging at my collar before I lean over the sink again, breathing hard.
My eyes lift to the mirror in front of me.
The flicker of the monster behind my eyes. The swirling anger.
Hello, Demon.
But that can’t happen now. Not here. Not any of them.