25. Jet
JET
Sev and I exchange a glance as we follow the old creep.
“So where does the Master come from?” I ask. “I don’t think we’ve heard quite that honorific used within The Society before.”
Robertson glances over his shoulder, an ugly curl to his lip before he forces that smile back into place. “Our ways here in Scotland are different than that of the Americans. Do remember, we have been in existence much longer than you… children.”
“Well, you are old, that’s true,” I say, the smile on my face momentarily genuine.
“Jethro,” Sev admonishes.
“Who’s watching Cotton by the way? I’ve been meaning to ask,” I ask Sev. “Don’t tell me you left her with mom.”
“She’s with Cassian.”
“Surprising.”
Sev just gives me a warning glance and a slight shake of his head as we approach a large door where two soldiers stand sentry.
At a nod from Master Robertson, one slowly opens the door.
Robertson steps to the side. From his angle Severin gets a first look inside.
I’m about to make some remark, something about the overkill with all the guard but before I open my mouth, the very air shifts around us.
Dread fills me when I feel rather than see my brother stiffen beside me.
It’s so out of character, so absolutely not Severin Blackstone. My big brother whom I often dismiss as simply being a bore with a stick up his ass but who I know has risked his life to protect mine, who was the anchor in my life when I needed one.
I see him now stop and steel himself, see the effort it takes him as he clenches his hands, his jaw tight.
It all happens in slow motion, but it can’t be more than a second, a moment in time but I follow his gaze into the room as the door is pushed wider and I understand why this sudden change in Severin.
I understand the shaking of the ground beneath his feet because I feel it too, now. I feel the slipping, the falling, the sliding back in time. Backwards to a decade ago. More than a decade.
When I was a boy and Sev newly a man.
Sweat trickles down my spine.
My heartbeats turn to loud thuds.
Blood rushes in my ears and the boy I was then cowers, whimpering inside my head.
It takes all I have to remain standing.
There, inside a room where the walls and the ceiling are painted black, where a massive stone desk sits in its center is a man we both recognize. Considering the role this man played in our lives it is a face neither of us could ever forget no matter how many decades pass.
We walk into the room, and I wonder if anyone else noticed that moment.
The instant where both Blackstone brothers stumbled.
Where a sensation I haven’t felt except in the deepest darkest nightmares creeps up on me and it takes all I have to remain upright.
To wrap my brain around what the fuck is happening.
The door is closed behind us.
The man behind that table closes the folder before him as if he just now notices us. As if surprised to see us.
Fucking bullshit.
He raises his ugly head, a grin playing along his lips because he knows the effect he’s had. And it’s exactly what he wanted.
“Councilor Senna, I hope we haven’t kept you waiting long,” Master Robertson says.
I blink, turn my head to look at Robertson in his weird robes and my fingers twitch, itching to reach for the pistol tucked into the holster at my ankle and put a bullet between his eyes and another between Senna’s.
But it’d be signing my death warrant and Sev’s and Amal’s because two more soldiers stand behind the Councilor, four in total in the room with us.
Because we are on their island in the middle of a roaring, furious ocean and we are at their mercy.
Sev gathers himself before I can. “Councilor,” he says with a nod of greeting, and he almost sounds like himself.
“Severin,” the Councilor’s mouth curves upward into a mocking grin. He’s seen it. Seen Severin wrongfooted. “How unexpected to see you again.” He turns his gaze to me. “You and your brother. Jethro.” I hear the distaste as he says my name. As he looks down his nose at me.
He stands, and I’m at least relieved to see he’s wearing a suit, not the ceremonial robes of a Councilor of the Tribunal presiding over a trial.
I think Sev must be relieved, too. Because the memory of it, of Councilor Senna a decade earlier as we stood before him in the Tribunal’s court of the New York chapter and Sev explained the action we’d taken.
Sev who took us back to The Society to ask for their help because there was no other way.
We were different then.
We were innocent then.
“Sit, please,” the Councilor says as if we’re simply old friends visiting.
He gestures to the two uncomfortable wooden chairs that have been set before the stone table.
Something in that gesture, in the way he moves his hand or maybe it’s the hand itself, I don’t know, but something has all the blood in me turning to ice, a sensation of utter panic taking root at my core.
That whimpering boy in my head wants to run. Fucking run.
This feeling is something I haven’t felt in a very long time. In years. A sensation of dread I thought I could somehow forget.
The Councilor waits until we each take a seat. Robertson remains standing to the side, the soldiers unmoving around us.
Senna resumes his seat, the leather of the enormous armchair creaking as he does. He doesn’t waste any time. Instead, from a box set slightly to the side, he lifts out the thing that got us here in the first place.
My grandfather’s watch.
I look at his hand, at the scar on the inside of his wrist. A small thing. Something I’m not sure is real because I see it for only a second before he turns his hand over and I’m looking at that watch again.
I imagine Amal somewhere in this castle now. Is she afraid? She must be. They won’t hurt her, I tell myself. Senna is here to deal with us, not her. She has nothing to do with The Society. We do.
We did, at least.
When Sev went to him it was because he knew he had leverage.
He had something The Society wanted. Needed.
Silence. He could expose our grandfather’s abuse.
Expose The Society itself. And when I killed my grandfather, when I finally took the ceremonial dagger he used to keep me in line and drove it deep into his neck, I solved a problem for The Society.
I didn’t know it then, not in the moment.
No, in that moment, I wasn’t thinking. There was too much pain.
Too much shame.
And just like that, seeing that watch in his old man’s hands, I’m back there again. In that basement room. Naked and freezing and scared. So fucking scared.
Our grandfather was a member of The Society. He had deep pockets and powerful allies. Wherever there’s too much money and no soul, there’s no shortage of perversion. Of perverse men. Or women.
It started on my eleventh birthday. I still remember the first time. The party my grandfather arranged for me to attend, a secret between us. Everything was always a secret. It had to be.
The party where the guests were masked so no one saw the other.
They only saw me. I wasn’t only unmasked, but I was delivered to them naked and terrified.
The only thing I wore were the marks my grandfather put on me when I would not cooperate, when I would displease.
When I would hurt those bastards worse than they hurt me.
That’s where my rage comes from. It’s how the evil in me was born. I am a Devil because I dealt with devils. Because devils killed any innocence in me and in its place left a burning unquenchable rage, a fury that burns hot and ever more violent. Never sated.
I realize in that moment that is what Amal is. My mercy. My absolution.
A cleansing of all that shame.
When Severin found me, I was covered in the blood of the masked man who lay shredded in the bed I hated. Drenching it. Blood seeping into every fiber of it.
I knelt on the floor, the expensive Persian rug ruined, my grandfather spluttering his last breaths, the ancient ceremonial dagger buried deep in his neck.
I always wondered if the fiery tip of it burned him before the sharp edge sliced into his old parchment-thin skin, causing a different kind of burn.
I remember that thought being the only one in my mind when my brother entered the room.
I killed my grandfather.
I think if Severin had walked into the room even a minute later than he did he’d have found three bodies, not two.
My plan was to kill them then kill myself.
I needed to finish it. To end the endless pain of which the physical was nothing in comparison to what it did in my head. To the damage to my soul.
But Sev walked in and he took one look at them, at me, and just as I would have pushed my grandfather’s corpse from me and plunged the dagger into my own chest, he saved me.
Severin saved my life.
And then, when I was calm and all sharp objects had been removed from my vicinity, he took care of the problem. Made the bodies disappear. All that blood cleaned up and the room sealed forevermore.
That’s where The Society came in.
But nothing is ever done without a cost. A consequence.
Now we sit here side-by-side before the Councilor again and I see that watch my grandfather wore and I swear I hear the over-loud ticking timing my punishments. Although it’s not possible. It’s broken. I smashed it the day I killed him. I made sure it would never make that sound again.
“Gentlemen, we had an agreement.”
Severin doesn’t look at me. He opens his mouth, but I answer before him.
“Councilor.” Senna’s soulless eyes land on me. “My brother didn’t know I’d taken it. He was under the impression I’d destroyed it, as was agreed. Any consequence is my own.”
There’s a moment I wonder if he was ever one of those masked men. If he’d ever been in that room. I wouldn’t know. I’ll never know. But I shudder at the thought.
“Unfortunately, that is not how things work, Jethro.” He opens his folder, flips through some papers before closing it again. “You killed two of our men. You’ve been repaid in kind.”
Meaning he’s killed two of my men.
I grit my teeth and wonder if Malcom is one of the two or perhaps the new one, the one who turned green at the sight of blood. Guilt gnaws at me. I’m not so much a devil that I dismiss the loss of two lives especially when the consequence was not their own.
“The woman,” the Councilor says.
“My wife,” I correct, tensing even more.
“Of course. What do you know of her?”
“What do you mean what do I know of her?”
“She is now aware of our existence.”
“Because you went a little batshit—”
“Jet,” Sev’s hand clasps around my arm and he gives me a warning look.
“What? What the fuck is this? It was a watch, an old watch. No one would have been the wiser—”
“But they are wiser, aren’t they?” Senna interrupts. “Because of you. When your brother struck an agreement with us to help conceal your crime—”
“My crime?” I’m on my feet in an instant and in that same instant, two sets of hands clasp over my arms and shoulders.
“What was my crime exactly, Councilor? Tell me, what exactly was I guilty of? Being raped? Or being beaten? Or simply fighting back?” I spit, shoving off the arms of the guards.
“Enlighten me oh great Councilor of the fucking Tribunal!” I pound my first into the desk making Senna jump.
Soldiers grab me again, haul me away from Senna.
“Jethro.” Sev is at my side. Two men pull at him, too. “Let me handle this. Let me take care of it.”
“No, not this time. Last time, I couldn’t do it.
Last time, you had no choice. Now, I have the choice and I'm taking it." I turn to the Councilor. “My brother will accompany my wife off this island. I am the only one you need to deal with here. I’m the one who kept the watch in the first place. I’m the reason it got into the wrong hands. I am the only one you will punish. I’m here.
I’m cooperating. Now get your fucking goons off my brother and me before I break their fucking arms! ”
“Sit down, Mr. Blackstone,” Senna demands, on his feet himself, his fist pounding the table but not having nearly the same impact. “Both of you. Sit down and be reasonable!”
The soldiers force us into our seats and Sev gives me a pleading look so I grit my teeth and dig my nails into my palms to stop. Because he’s right. Attacking Senna will only get us killed.
“There’s no need for such dramatics, Mr. Blackstone,” Senna tells me. “I do not deny that what happened to you should never have happened. Not to any child. We are all agreed on that. However, Society members were never found to be a party to the events.”
“Events.” I snort. “Call it what it is as unpleasant as it sounds,” I say, hypocritical though it may be because today is the first day I’ve named it myself.
Rape. Rape. I was fucking raped by multiple men who paid my grandfather for the privilege.
My grandfather who then turned around and blackmailed them for the perversion he fed.
And I still hate myself for it. Still feel all that shame. I will never not.
“I’m trying to do right by you, Jethro,” Senna says, his tone gentler.
“Your grandfather was posthumously excommunicated from The Society, and your family was given the choice to stay or go. Severin, as the head of the family, you chose to leave us, and we honored your request with terms agreeable to us all. That agreement was broken when you, Jethro, decided to keep memorabilia–”
“I’m going to fucking—”
“Brother,” Sev barks, hand over my thigh, his tone stopping me. “Focus on what’s important now.”
He’s right. And what’s important is somewhere upstairs in this godforsaken place and I need to get to her and get her off this island.
“That watch should have been destroyed but because it was not, it has cost more men their lives. I do believe you are here in good faith, and I understand what happened to you may be triggering.”
“Jesus. Fucking. Christ. Fucking get to it.”
“And thus, I will draw up a new agreement with updated terms.”
“Great. I’ll sign it. Now I’d like to get my wife and get the fuck out of here.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to spend the night, at least.” He gestures out the window where hail pelts the glass. “One night, Mr. Blackstone. Tomorrow, the forms will be ready. Once you sign, you will be permitted to depart.”
“You can email the forms. I’m getting my wife and we’re all leaving now.”
“We don’t use electronics for such communications as I’m sure you and your brother would understand. It would be a shame for anything…untoward, to find its way into the wrong hands.”
I’m about to ask what kind of threat that is when Sev stands. “Councilor. It’s fine. My brother just misses his bride. I’m sure you understand.” Before I can say anything to either of them, my brother turns to Robertson. “If you can have your man show us to our rooms.”