Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Hayden
Mason is losing, and he knows it, he's been arguing that he isn't for the last forty minutes.
"That's not how you hold a cue," he says, watching Miles line up his shot.
"I'm winning, so shut the fuck up," Miles says.
"You're winning wrong."
"There's no wrong way to win, Mason," Miles snaps at him, and I have to laugh.
"There absolutely is and you're doing it." Mason points at me across the table. "Tell him."
"You're losing," I say.
"I'm strategically behind." He straightens up, then smiles. "There's a difference."
I lean against the wall with my drink, and I hear Olivia's laugh carry down the hall.
She's in the kitchen with Lileah and Trixie and has been for the better part of an hour, the three of them are making plans for something involving lunch with Autumn at a place in town that Lileah’s been trying to get Olivia to try for weeks.
I catch pieces of the conversation. They’re being girls, talking about girl things.
Lileah's voice lifts slightly, something changes in her tone, and I catch the tail end of a sentence without meaning to.
I set my drink down.
"—two weeks, not one call, nothing—"
Olivia's voice, quieter. "Has she tried calling him?"
"Of course she has," Lileah says. "He's not picking up. Lincoln keeps telling her he's fine, that he's sorting something out, but he won't say what he means. Autumn is worried, you know what she's like. She'd never say she was scared but she is. It’s been two weeks.”
The pool cue in Mason's hand connects with the ball taking my attention away from the conversation, but now I’m thinking about where Cain is.
Two weeks.
Cain went quiet two weeks ago. It’s also been two weeks since I killed Leo.
I take my phone out and find Cain's name, I stare at it for a second before I call it.
It rings. Four times, five, then his voicemail. I end the call without leaving a voice message for him. Mostly because I know he never listens to them.
"You alright?" Miles asks behind me.
I turn around.
"When did any of you last speak to Cain?" I ask.
Nobody answers immediately.
Mason looks at Miles. Miles looks at me.
"Two weeks maybe," Mason says slowly. "He came to the house, remember?”
"And since?"
Silence.
That silence is its own answer, and I don't like a single thing about it.
I try the number again. Same result. Four rings, voicemail.
The door opens.
Declan comes into the room, he was out for most of the day, and then said he wanted to go to The Pit for something.
“What’s wrong with you?” I ask him, as he shakes his head, grabbing a beer for himself.
"The Pit," he says. "My prints don't work."
Nobody speaks.
Miles is already at the laptop before the sentence is finished, pulling it toward him, logging into the software which he works on for Cain. We watch him. The loading circle spins. The page loads.
Then it doesn't.
Access Denied. Credentials no longer recognized.
Miles sits back in the chair, and I know we are all thinking the same thing. What the hell is happening?
"He locked us out," Mason says. "He actually locked us all out."
"Looks like it," Miles says.
"Why would he—"
"I don't know."
I'm staring at my phone and I'm doing the thing I've been trying not to do since I heard Lileah's voice in the kitchen.
I'm thinking about Leo. Thinking about the rules.
I'm thinking about the file Cain gave me with Patrick Holt's name in it, the careful planning of it.
The fact that every target Cain has ever handed me has been prepared down to the last variable.
Every angle covered, every risk accounted for before I was ever near it.
Leo wasn't in a file.
Leo wasn't planned. Leo wasn't covered. Leo wasn't accounted for.
Leo was me, alone, in an apartment, with a gun and three years of anger and the absolute certainty that it was the right thing to do.
Since I’ve known Cain, everything, through every job and every complication and every time something goes sideways, Cain does not go quiet.
He doesn't disappear, and he would have told Autumn where he was.
And he has never, not once, declined my call.
I call him again.
One ring.
Voicemail.
One ring. That means he saw my name and put the phone face down, or he's somewhere he can't talk, or—
I stop that thought before it finishes.
"H." Miles's voice is very quiet. He's watching me from the chair, the laptop still open in front of him. "What do you know?"
I look at my brothers. I don’t say anything to him.
"Hayden," Mason shouts. "What do you know?"
I put my phone in my pocket, and I look at all of them.
"I think," I say slowly. "We need to talk to Dad."
The three of them look between each other, and we all walk out of the games room, and make our way to dad’s office.
I knock on the door.
"Come in," he shouts, he knows it’s us, there isn’t anyone else in the house.
“Boys,” he raises a brow as we all walk into the room. "Sit down."
Dad looks at each of us in turn, then stops at me and a small smile tug on his lip.
"You tried calling him," he says. Not a question.
"Multiple times," Miles says. "Goes to voicemail after one ring."
"The system locked us out," Declan says. "Prints, credentials, everything."
Dad nods slowly. Like none of this is new information. Like he knew the shape of this conversation before we walked through the door.
Mason leans forward in his chair. "Dad, where is he?"
Dad is quiet for a moment looking between the four of us. "I know where he is," he says.
The room exhales and tightens at the same time.
"Then—" Mason starts.
"I said I know where he is." Dad looks up. "I didn't say I was going to tell you."
Mason goes to say something but stops when Dad continues.
"He's safe," Dad says. "That's all you need to know right now. He's not in danger, he's not hurt, he's not—" he stops. "He's dealing with something and he'll talk to you when he's ready to talk to you."
"That's not good enough," Mason says.
"Mason." Miles, quiet warning.
"No, I'm serious, he goes dark for two weeks, locks us all out, Autumn hasn't heard from him, and he'll talk to us when he's ready. Is that supposed to be enough?"
"Yes," Dad says simply.
Mason stares at him.
"Is it because of the business?" Miles asks carefully. "The lockout, is he shutting it down? Is something coming that we don't know about?"
Dad looks at him for a moment.
"Everything that happens in this family," Dad begins, "has a reason behind it. You know that. You've always known that." He pauses. "Cain doesn't do anything without a reason."
It's not an answer. It’s, somehow, completely an answer.
I haven't said anything since we walked into the room.
I’m standing in this room listening to my brothers ask questions I already have the answers to and I’m saying nothing.
The weight of that is sitting on my chest like something physical, like a hand pressing down.
I can't move it and I can't speak, and I can't do anything except stand here and hold it.
"When will he talk to us?" Declan asks.
Dad is quiet for a moment.
Then he picks his glasses up from the desk, and he holds them in his hand. "Soon," he says.
"That's not—"
"Soon," he says again. Already knowing when Cain will be back.
I haven’t been able to relax, the wait for Cain is horrible. I’ve seen him when he’s in a bad mood.
The front door opens and my whole body tenses up, I’ve seen Cain pissed off, just never at me.
Cain walks in. He doesn't look at anyone immediately; he goes straight to the whiskey cabinet in the corner like it's the only thing in the room and I can hear my heart hammer in my ears.
That's when I see his face.
The light catches it when he turns to take the bottle out, and I go very still.
His lip is split, healed but recent. There's a bruise along his jaw that has gone yellow at the edges. A cut above his left eyebrow, closed now but deep enough that I can see the shape of it from here. His knuckles, when he wraps them around the neck of the bottle, are scraped and scabbed.
He's been in the Pit. Not running it. In it.
He carries the bottle and a glass to the table and sets them down, the sound of the glass hitting the wood is loud in the complete silence of the room. He pulls out a chair, sits down and pours two fingers of whiskey. He looks at the glass for a moment and then he looks up.
He looks at all of us.
We know Cain, we know every version of him, every mood, every temperature he operates at. We know what he looks like when he's working through something, when he's calculating, when he's cold, when he's satisfied.
We know what he looks like when the bomb hasn't gone off yet.
This is that.
Nobody speaks.
Mum's hands are folded in her lap. Lileah is very still beside her.
Olivia hasn't moved in the armchair, and I can feel her eyes on the side of my face, but I can't look at her right now.
I can't look at anything except Cain sitting at the table with a split lip and two weeks of something I caused on his face.
He picks up the glass, downs the drink, and sets it down.
Then he says one word.
"Rules."
His hand comes up before anyone can speak, one finger raised, flat and final and the room understands it immediately. You don't talk over Cain. You never talk over Cain. Every single person in this room learned that lesson at some point and I learned it the hardest.
I think about the training. The specific, deliberate, suffocating training that Cain put me through when he decided I was going to be useful and useful meant being broken down first. Six weeks of it.
Every morning before anyone else was awake, every evening after everyone else was sleeping.
The sessions that left me on the floor not because he wanted to hurt me but because he wanted to make certain I understood that pain was not a reason to stop, that emotion was not an excuse to deviate, that the body would do what the mind told it if the mind was disciplined enough.
He made sure I understood that. He made sure it was carved into me.
And I broke it anyway.