Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
LUKA
The call comes in the next morning just as Orton and I are getting out of a meeting. My guys located Declan, the last of the guys who attacked and killed Sara.
My vengeance is wrapping up.
“Bundle him up and bring him to the tech dock.” I pocket my phone.
“They got Declan?” he asks.
“Yep.”
The tech dock is a gloomy stretch of waterfront. There’s a direct shot out to open water where sharks are sure to find a corpse before the authorities ever will.
I get Orton up to speed on the situation with Bender. He’s shocked and angry and has lots of feelings about Edie, but I give him a hard look, and that’s that.
“Fine.” Orton looks thoughtful. “In other news, I heard rumblings of some guy offering serious money for a hair off your head. The guys were talking about it. Now that I hear all this, I’m thinking it must’ve been this fucking cop. Bender.”
“Bender needs to die,” I say.
“He wants to show you up as a fraud and make us turn on you,” Orton says. “If he gets that hair to test, he’ll be sadly disappointed.”
Or not, I think, marveling at how convinced Orton is that I’m a true Zogaj after all that my brother said.
“I knew that girl wasn’t right,” he grumbles as we reach the door.
I give him another hard look. “She kept important secrets in the face of enormous pressure, and she warned us off.”
“She lied,” he says.
I slam him against the wall, forearm across his throat. “She’s mine.”
His gaze sharpens. “Is that how it is?”
My voice drops to a deadly whisper. “That’s exactly how it is.”
Shouts from inside.
I let him go and barge in. There’s a man tied to a chair, and that chair is currently on its side.
“Good job,” I say to the guys. “Go get a sandwich. We’ll call you when we need some cleaning.”
The guys clear out.
The man makes pleading sounds from behind the bandana that’s tied around his mouth.
Orton rights the chair and yanks down the bandana.
“Please. Whatever you want. I’ve got money. I’ll do a freebie kill. I’ll do ten.”
“Are you looking for mercy?” I lean in close, my voice a razor. “You didn’t have any mercy for that girl you killed down in Tucumayo, did you?”
“It was a job.”
“She was a kid.”
“Just business,” he says.
“She was a kid,” I repeat.
He straightens. “She was a whore.”
I grab his throat, meaning to rip it out .
A calming hand holds my arm. Orton. “He wants you to kill him fast.” Don’t take the bait, he means.
“Right.” I leave him there, bleeding and broken, and grab a Dr. Pepper from the machine.
“What’s up?” Orton asks, strolling over.
“I’m not feeling it.”
“We could keep him on ice for you.”
“It’s not that.” I take a sip and stroll over to the guy. “A young girl suffered because of you. She was just a kid.”
The man eyes me, panting. Bleeding.
Orton comes up beside me. “Still not feeling it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does your intuition say?”
Orton’s a big believer in intuition, especially with me. He buys into the idea that the kyre has divine prescience.
The guy squirms and whines.
“Shut up,” I say to him.
“You know what I think? I think you’re not ready to be done with this whole thing.
” Orton makes a hand motion meaning the whole Ghost Hound Clan thing.
“Once you complete your vengeance, the mission is complete. We’ve always waited for the next mission to come up.
What if we say we’re done with missions? We could choose this. Permanently.”
“Yeah, I know your feelings on the matter.”
“But do you know your feelings? You like it. It suits you.”
“You sound like Edie.”
“You’ve discussed this with Edie?” he asks, shocked.
I nod. If you had told me that night in the hotel bar that I’d be discussing this sort of thing with her, I would have been shocked, too.
Orton and Storm have always been my inner circle. Women were always just transactions.
“So you’re just... all the way in with her,” Orton says.
“I’m all the way in. And that’s not up for debate. ”
“You need to think long and hard before you let a girl influence you,” Orton warns. “You have power. You have wealth. People are fucking scared of us. We’re at the top of our game. Once you walk away, you can’t come back. This is your destiny.”
“You’re not listening,” I say. “She’s good with all this.”
Orton straightens. “That little girl?”
“Don’t let the pastels fool you. She’s one of us.”
I tell him about Bender threatening her family and fucking her up.
How she gave him nothing he could use, and what she did give, it was to protect us.
A fucking civilian and she ran that cookie op.
I tell him about her impulse to go down to Tucumayo and make them answer for what they did to me. Bloodthirsty. Loyal.
“In the world of fight or flight, she fights,” I say. “Right in there with me.”
“You have seemed more focused since she’s been around,” he observes. “And she’s really down with this life?”
“She’s down with this. Down with me.”
Orton grunts.
I gaze out the dusty high window. It’s so dirty, you can barely see the sky. “And she’s mine,” I say with finality. No need to use the L-word with Orton.
Edie with her unicorns and cherry lip balm and sexy lips and fake squints that are supposed to look like my squint. Mine .
“And I love her.”
Orton stands there, just staring at me. “Wow.”
The guy whimpers. We still ignore him.
“Not like she doesn’t make me crazy, though,” I confess. “She thinks relationships have to be like democracies. Even when one person knows a shit ton more than the other person about how something should be played, it doesn’t matter because, apparently, it’s a fucking democracy.”
Orton laughs. “Trouble in paradise.”
“Fuck off.”
“What happened?”
I tell him about the text fight. I don’t know why I’m telling him. He’s never had a real relationship, either.
The guy is moaning.
“You came for the vengeance, but you’re staying for the power—and the girl,” he adds.
“You’re right.” I pull out my piece, level it at the hitter’s head, and pull the trigger
“It’s done,” Orton says. “With every prick, the spider’s web tightens, thorn for thorn, blood for blood. And now the vengeance is done.” Orton lights a match, lets it burn down to the end, and then throws it into the small puddle near the drain.
I grab my phone to turn on the sound and see the texts, the first string from Storm:
They have your DNA at Stackhardt Labs out near La Guardia. Fuck that. Bust some heads?
Then another:
Now or never. Shut this thing down?
Then another:
DNA thing is up and down the grapevine. People already saying you’re not blood. We can get to the lab if we leave now.
And then there’s a string from Edie, ending with:
Need to talk ASAP.