24. Blaze #2
He blinks at me. “She might’ve been a shitty mom, but I don’t want her dead or anything. I wish she’d have been able to leave while I was still there, but I guess she got tired of being his punching bag without me around.” He grimaces. “Sorry. You probably don’t want to hear this shit.”
I shrug. I don’t really know what he wants me to say, but it’s not like I’m a stranger to having a shitty family life. “If you want to talk about it, I’ve heard Asch whine about his mom plenty.” I grin. “And he’s tried very hard to be nice whenever I was pissed about my dad.”
“This is probably the kind of shit I should save for my imaginary therapist,” River says dryly. “But yeah. All of this bullshit comes from somewhere, right?”
We sit silently for a while before I say, “You think Pandora wants kids?”
The question startles him into another moment of silence.
“I don’t know,” he finally says. “You already met her parents at Thanksgiving—all four of them—but you probably don’t know that her mom almost died giving birth to her sister.
Her papa has a reputation for being even more unhinged than Pandora, and you know about Ezio’s family now.
” He licks his lips. “There are more rumors, but I don’t know what’s true. ”
The entire family was chaotic.
But warm, too, in a way I’ve never experienced. Everybody joking around, eating food that Giulio Pavone had prepared. Vanessa Pavone hadn’t liked all the ribbing, but everybody else had laughed.
The Thanksgivings at my house are always as dry as the turkey.
“So, is that a yes, Pandora wants kids, or no?” I ask. “I guess it doesn’t matter. I can’t decide if I’d be a good dad. It was part of the plan though. Get married and have kids to carry on the Bouchard legacy.”
He shakes his head. “I have no idea. She’s never said either way. I don’t know what kind of mother she’d be.”
“The fun, take-your-kids-to-gut-a-man kind?” I suggest with a snicker.
Of course, my dad had made me watch a man get beaten to death when I was still in elementary school.
“Probably,” River agrees, though he doesn’t look amused. “Do you want to be a dad?”
It feels weird to be considering the future. My Bouchard legacy is probably gone. I can’t imagine my dad will hand over anything to me at this point. That means I don’t have to worry about an arranged marriage, I don’t need to pop out kids to be heirs.
I won’t have endless millions or billions to squander away. I’ll have to do real work, and my degree actually matters.
“I have no fucking clue. But if Pandora wants it, sure, I’ll pump her full until she’s got a little Blaze inside her.”
The image of Pandora with a big, pregnant belly is appealing and completely absurd, all at once.
Would Pandora even be able to handle being incapacitated for all those months?
River shakes his head, but a faint smile ghosts across his lips. “Could be a little Asch, or a little River, too,” he points out. “I doubt she’ll want you to be the only one who fucks her even if she’s trying to get pregnant.”
“I’m sure my sperm would beat yours in that race,” I say smugly.
River punches my arm lightly.
Honestly, we’re only twenty. It’s way too early to be thinking about kids. I don’t want to worry about any of this while other threats are looming over our heads.
“When you find Rachel’s killer, do you think that’s enough?” I look at the punching bag in the corner of the room. “Will Pandora be satisfied?”
“She’ll find something else to focus on,” River says. “There will always be evils in the world, and she’s never going to stop trying to make things better in her own way.”
I’m not sure I agree with him.
If Pandora wanted to improve the world, she wouldn’t be going about it with violence and carnage. Zayden could have died with a simple bullet, but she’d sawed his limbs off and made him suffer.
That’s revenge.
That’s making the world suffer everything she’s suffered.
If I were anyone else, I’d call her out on it.
But I want her to get what she wants. I want Pandora to thrive in the violence and the destruction and to bring about the end of the world like she always says she will.
She’s beautiful when she’s making her enemies bleed.
“We’ll see when we get all this shit done.” I finish off my water bottle. “By the way, how do you feel about performance boxing?”
River shrugs. “It’s fine. It’s gotten boring, honestly, since I started the other fights. But I don’t want off the team or anything.”
“I’ve been thinking about our main problem right now.
” I pull out my phone and tab over to my notes.
“John Allers. Everything points to him having been the one who had Rachel for all of a week. He goes through women fast. Not all of them last only a week, but he’s been a regular with the Bouchards. ”
River’s expression darkens. “And everyone’s okay with that,” he says, his voice going harsh. “A woman a week, no problem. Just disappear them.” He shakes his head. “I don’t understand why they’d kill her, though. She wasn’t really mouthy or anything.”
“He might have fucked up and gone too far.” I shrug. “Anyway, there’s no way we’d be able to get past all of his security. So we need to lure him to us.”
“That sounds great in theory,” he says, “but how would we actually do that?”
I grin at him. “Don’t you know that rich people love watching the lower classes beat each other up?”
If there’s one thing I know, it’s how all us rich assholes tick.
Especially the rich assholes who are part of the Bouchard inner circle.
I start a group text with the more proactive members of Kappa Alpha.
Blaze
I hear you all want to organize a big event.
Have I got the event for you.
Jeremy
Fuck off, Bouchard.
Peyton
Hear him out.
Helping him get that internship must have really turned his opinion on me.
“What are you doing?” River asks.
I grin. “Catching flies with honey.”
Blackmail isn’t the only way to get people to cooperate, after all.