Chapter 47 #2
Mary puts a protective arm around me. She always knows when I’m scared.
“Who’s gonna fuck up who?” Bender asks, coming right up to the bars. “My brother? Is that who?”
“Fuck you,” she says.
“I’m talking to your sister.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” I say.
“Hey, those handcuffs are really tight,” Mary says. “How about you gimme the keys so I can take them off her?”
“They’re really tight?” Bender says with a mock face of concern.
“I can’t feel the fingers on my right hand,” I say. “I don’t think there’s any blood going to my fingers.”
“Come on,” Mary says, ever my protector. “You already have her in a cage. There’s no need to handcuff her.”
“It pleases me. Isn’t that enough?”
I glare.
“Fine, come here,” Bender says. “I’ll adjust them.”
“You will?”
Bender taps the bars with his keychain. “Put ‘em here.” He points at Mary. “You—back to the wall.”
Mary backs up to the wall .
I go to the bars and turn so that he has access to the cuffs.
Can I grab his phone? His gun?
He circles my wrists with his hands, and there’s a sickening click before he makes them tighter.
“Ow! Hey!”
Mary rushes up, but he backs up just in time, laughing. “Any other requests?”
“Gimme the keys!” Mary demands.
“She’s not gonna need those hands anyway.”
“Come on,” Mary pleads.
“Psycho,” I say.
“My goodness, such attitude! I said I’d help you find Mary, didn’t I? And look. I brought you right to her. And now you’re giving me attitude? Is that any way to treat the newest kyre of the Ghost Hound Clan? The last remaining brother?”
My blood goes cold. Luka is dead? No, there’s no way. “You’re lying.”
“Your boyfriend is currently ensnared in what I like to call a triple trap. Do you wanna know what that is?”
“No,” I whisper miserably.
“A triple trap is a trap inside a trap inside a trap,” Bender says. “By now, he’ll have learned that one of his own loyal men gave up his hair for testing. Sad.”
So he’s not dead yet. Okay.
“Doesn’t say much about his leadership, does it? His own guy heard I wanted one of his hairs for testing and sought me out. He was that desperate to bring Luka down. The Albanians are extremely serious about their bloodlines,” Bender continues. “Sadly for Luka.”
I grit my teeth. Luka was good to his men and a good leader, and one of them turned on him? He’d hate it.
Worrying about Luka helps take my mind off my hand, at least.
“He’ll have the address of the lab by now, as well as the schedule, which is slated to be on the testing docket.
..” He glances at his phone. “In about one hour. The place is out in New Jersey, and my guess is that he’s already there.
I’ve got sharpshooters in place, and he’ll be killed before he even gets in. ”
I feel like throwing up.
“I’ve also got an assassin inside just in case he makes it that far. And you know what else is so perfect? If I’d killed Luka myself, I’d have the whole clan gunning for me, but if somebody takes him out trying to stop a DNA test?” He gives me a smug shrug. “Nobody avenges the death of a fraud.”
I shift my shoulders, trying desperately to ease the pain. “He’ll smell your trap.”
“He’ll still go in.”
Bender’s right, of course. Luka doesn’t back down from things. Nobody takes what’s his.
“Not only that, but he’ll go in alone. It’s not the kind of thing he would ask his men to help him with.”
“If Luka wants to stop the test, he’ll stop the test.”
Bender just laughs and shakes his head as he checks his phone.
I exchange glances with Mary. In another life, we might think it was funny that he was explaining his whole plan like a Bond villain or something. But maybe that’s an actual problem for criminals—the only people you would tell about your plan are the ones you’re planning on killing.
Bender’s right that Luka wouldn’t bring his men to raid a testing facility.
A lab is not Fort Knox.
Miserably, I think of my fight with Luka. He was being bossy, but he was just trying to help.
If only I could figure out a way to warn him. My gaze falls on Bender’s phone. If we could get it away from him...
“If he does manage to get in and stop the test—pretty big if—it won’t matter because I split the hair sample so it’s being run concurrently at another lab. Once the test results are out there, he’s a dead man. His own people will kill him. The men of the clans hate a fraud.”
“How are you so sure that he’s not a real Zogaj?”
“My mother told me, and she heard it from my father.”
“Oh, so it must be true,” I snip.
“I doubted it myself at first. Mom was off her rocker, especially at the end there, so I didn’t think she meant it literally.
Nobody cared because Luka was out of the picture.
Quite possibly dead. But when he came back and I heard the rumor and looked at the photos, I realized my mom was telling the truth.
You only have to look at the pictures. Alteo and I look like the old man, whereas Luka doesn’t. ”
“Sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me.”
“More like a wish come true.” Bender scrolls on his phone.
“I had a good thing going. I kept our clan safe from law enforcement, and Alteo set me up with more money than I’d ever be able to spend.
But then Luka had to come in and ruin all of that.
” He glances up at Mary. “You know he gouged out his own brother’s eyeballs? I’d call that a red flag.”
“Depends on the brother,” Mary says.
Bender doesn’t think that’s funny. “I decided it was time to take over. My first idea was to get Luka arrested, connecting him to clan crimes that I knew about, but this is much better, don’t you think? The mysterious Luka Zogaj killed while trying to conceal evidence that he’s a false king.”
I stand there wishing desperately that I knew Luka’s number. That we could get Bender’s phone and send him a ‘here’s my location’ text. But then I remember the restaurant. He owns it, right? Mary could look up that number and leave a short message there.
“Luka totally looks like his father,” I say.
“Are you kidding?” Bender scrolls furiously.
Mary leans against the bars nearby, playing it cool. We’ve always been really intuitive with each other, and she’s decided to follow my lead .
“Also, what father banishes his kid to some jungle correctional school?” Bender continues. “The father of a bastard, that’s who.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say.
“Here.” He holds up his phone with an image of Bender and Alteo. I recognize Alteo from one of the newspaper articles. The phone is too far away to grab, unfortunately.
“I can’t see,” I say.
“Do I look stupid to you?” He waves his phone around. “This what you want?”
Sigh.
“My fake brother has finally met his match,” Bender crows.
“So that’s your triple trap?” I ask. “You kill him when he goes to the lab, or else his men kill him?”
“Keep up, that’s only two parts of it. If my shooters don’t get him and if he somehow survives his own people killing him, I’m guessing he takes his millions and heads overseas.
Or will he? That’s where you come in. A few fingers in the mail might encourage him to change his plans.
Albanians can’t resist the siren call of a severed finger. ”
I feel sick.
“A good cop covers his bases,” he adds.
“Too bad you’re not a good cop.”
He laughs. “True enough, but I’ll be an amazing kyre.
But I know what you’re thinking. That that part of the plan is pretty weak.
Are you really that good of a piece of ass?
Will he come for you? Or will he look at the fingers I send and toss them on his way to hashtag beach life? We’ll see about that.”
“Yeah, we’ll see,” I say.
I have this strange sense right then that’s hard to describe. It’s something good, like the feeling of peace and hope coming over me.
Like Luka might be near.
Wishful thinking, no doubt. After all, Luka has the DNA hair test to deal with, which is a matter of life and death. My last text was just that we needed to talk.
Still, I have the uncanny feeling that he’s near.
Bender rakes his gaze over my body. “Maybe I’ll even take a taste for myself before I kill you.
Or we can have some hot sister action in exchange for a merciful end.
” He draws near. “Maybe we do a twist on Scheherazade where you two can cook up increasingly exciting thrills for me in exchange for extra days.”
“Gross.” Mary goes back and sits against the wall.
“Personally, I’ll go with death,” I say.
He snorts and checks his phone once more.
Just then, I catch movement on the basement stairway—one black shoe silently alighting on the edge of a step and then the next.
He came.
My pulse races in my ears.
I hop up and go right up to the bars, determined to distract Bender. “Can I tell you again that you absolutely don’t look like your supposed father? I’ve seen pictures of the patriarch, and it’s like night and day with you two.”
“Are you on crack?” Bender says. “I look exactly like him.”
“I know what I see.”
“Have you even seen a picture of my father when he was young? There’s no question we’re related. And if you really think about it, it’s obvious that the prophecy was about me, being that Luka was never truly a son. I’m the true son who will kill the king and ascend to the throne.”
Bender’s back on his phone, sauntering toward me. He’s really invested in showing the world he’s a Zogaj.
Luka creeps down. I can see enough of him now to see his gun.
“Thinking about side-by-side images of you and Luka’s father reminds me of those memes where people supposedly look like their dogs, except one is human and the other is an actual dog, and nobody in their right mind would think they were related. ”
Bender glares at me and looks back down. He’s near enough now that I can see an alert flash up on his phone.
He furrows his brow.
“That’s how much you don’t look like that old geezer—not even the same?—”
He moves like lightning, grabbing my hair through the bars. A gun barrel presses into my cheek.
“Drop it or she dies,” Bender says.