Chapter 22 Jig’s Up, Mofos
Jig’s Up, Mofos
Seeing our combined lie-rents flustered to the point of speechlessness had an oddly calming effect on me.
Maybe it was simply nice not to be the only group of friends losing its shit.
And the lie-rents were plainly losing their shit, even if some of them were working very hard to hide just how much of their shit they were losing.
Celia and Porter huddled together against the wall farthest from the body.
Perhaps they actually liked each other beyond the facade, but really, who knew.
Genuine, the ’rents were not. The two of them kept sliding their glasses up the bridges of their noses, when their glasses surely couldn’t be sliding that often.
Porter was also shifting his weight from foot to foot a little too regularly.
My mom and dad stood separately, bookending their group.
Monica’s face was eerily blank, and she scarcely blinked, while Reece, fresh from his shower, blotted with the back of a hand at a sheen of sweat rapidly beading along his brow and upper lip.
He flicked jumpy glances at everyone else in the room, barely remaining on Magnum’s dead body for more than a second at a time.
Orson leaned against the closed door, looking between the body and his supposed son, who was pressed protectively to my side. My crew and I remained on the bed surrounding Bobo, all of us tense despite our seated positions.
The ’rents might not be the worst of our enemies. That didn’t make them, by extension, trustworthy chums. It didn’t even make them decent people.
Alexis, the self-proclaimed seductress who admitted to using her wiles to get her way, folded her arms tightly over her chest. Her posture was precise and perfect as ever, but the crease of her lips twitched to one side.
I caught the slight movement three times before deciding that the normally stoic woman was as ruffled as the rest of them.
When they first rushed into my room after my dad’s summons, it was with what felt like rehearsed exclamations of shock and dismay at the dead body spread-eagled at their feet.
There were lots of gasps, stuttered cries, ohmyGods, and what the hell happened heres.
There were even a few belated Are you all okays.
Orson, Porter, and my dad especially goggled at the spectacle of their dead naked boss, his deep wounds with relatively little blood, and the pallor quickly settling into what had been a healthy complexion.
I caught my mom and Celia staring specifically at the man’s limp cock, almost as if they’d wondered what kind of heat the jillionaire was packing.
His body was fit and toned, and my mom at least was definitely checking him out.
Gross. Something was seriously wrong with the woman.
My dad was the first to ask, specifically, why on earth Uncle Magnum was there, dead as a doorknob—and still not dead enough for me.
My response was a terse, “You tell me.”
Betrayal stung extra sharp when my mom’s eyes narrowed in accusation: “Did you hurt your uncle Magnum, Joss?”
At that point, Griffin and Brady rocketed up from the bed, Bobo barking at their sudden, jolting movements. Griffin told them I didn’t owe them a single answer. They were the ones who needed to explain themselves to us.
Oh, but being forthright with us wasn’t in their plans.
Possibly an entire minute eked by, during which nothing momentous happened beyond a ratcheting up of the already suffocating tension. With heavy, disappointed sighs, Griffin and Brady sat again. It was obvious: Our ’rents were total shits. We were better off without them.
When the ’rents merely fidgeted, Layla said, “What? You’re caught with your pants down and you’ve got nothing to say for yourselves?” She scowled and shook her head. “Typical.”
Typical of what, exactly, I didn’t know. Nothing about our situation was normal, not by a long shot.
“You could start by apologizing, ya know,” Layla added with a marked harrumph. “It’s the very least you could do after all the majorly messed-up crap you’ve done to us.”
Brady also humphed. “If they start, there’ll never be an end to it, that’s how much apologizing they’ve got to do.
Not that I’m in the mood to forgive them for any of it.
No way. They went too far. Waaaaay too far.
Besides, from the looks of them, not a one of them’s got the guts to suck it up and even try to make things right. ”
“Hey,” Porter and my dad protested at once.
Brady shrugged. “Just tellin’ it like it is, fake dads. You don’t like it, well, then ya damn well shouldn’t’ve stabbed us in the back with a whole kitchen’s worth of knives.”
With a slight hitch, he added, “We trusted you.”
“What do you mean, ‘fake dads’?” Porter hedged, pushing his glasses up his nose.
Layla tsked. “He means, jig’s up, motherfuckers.”
“Layla,” Celia automatically censured. “Watch your mouth, and your tone, too, while you’re at it.”
“I’ll do no such thing, Jackie. You’re all here, with a dead fucking body between us, still not wanting to say a damn word that matters ’cause you’re waiting for us to talk so you can figure out what we know and what we don’t know.
’Cause you’re still planning on lying to us, straight to our faces. ”
As one, the ’rents exchanged telling looks. Even my mom and dad gazed at each other from across the room, sharing an entire conversation through their stares.
“We know everything, okay?” Layla said. “Ev-er-y-thing.”
She waited a long beat so that could really sink in.
“You’ve been found out. Caught with your arms in the cookie jar, up to the elbow. Caught with your dicks stuffed all up in the neighbor’s wife, ya get me?”
“Layla,” Celia breathed on an affronted wheeze.
If she’d been listening to endless recordings of our private conversations, surely she couldn’t truly be surprised by how Layla spoke when she wasn’t holding back. Not that dicks in neighbors’ wives had anything to do with anything, but my girl had always been way better at bluffing than I was.
As much as we’d managed to learn thus far, it was more like a whole heap of diddly-squat than everything, considering how much life-altering shit we still didn’t comprehend. I wasn’t even sure we were in the ballpark of “everything.”
But I wasn’t about to split hairs, especially not when Layla was on a roll.
“I assure you, none of us”—she gestured to the five of us; Bobo perked his ears at the attention in his general direction—“are in any mood to play.” She let her warning hang.
“In case ya failed to notice, it’s your disgusting boss lying dead on the floor.
There’s no talkin’ your way out of this one.
” She harrumphed another time, glaring openly at all the liars crowded into my bedroom.
My mom looked around at her friends before taking a half step forward. “Not sure where all this anger toward us is coming from—”
Layla, Brady, Hunt, Griffin, and I all huhed in disbelief at the same time.
A bit more timidly, my mom powered on. “Maybe you can start by telling us why Uncle Magnum is naked, and by all appearances dead, on Joss’s bedroom floor.”
I opened my mouth to answer but Layla was already muttering under her breath: “Uncle Magnum.” She was only gathering steam. “Uncle Magnum, you say …”
I clamped my lips shut and got out of her way.
She jabbed a stiff, accusatory index finger at the air above the corpse. “That man’s not our uncle anything. You didn’t meet him in grad school. And he’s no family friend. What he is, is a nasty-ass, revolting pervert who tried to rape Joss.”
Half the lie-rents sucked in stunned gasps. The other half grew stonily silent. All their stares landed on me.
“That’s right. He tried to rape her. Fucking lucky thing that my girl Joss here’s a fucking badass who stabbed the shit out of him before he could take it too far.”
Griffin grunted, his breaths coming harder, and I leaned my head on his shoulder to calm him.
“Not only do you owe us apologies, you owe us all the answers and explanations. More than that, you owe us protection.” Her voice grew thick. “We believed you were our parents. We believed you’d keep us safe.” She sniffed. “Instead, you conspired against us, lied to us, murdered us—”
“We didn’t—” Porter started.
Layla snapped up a hand, instantly stopping him. “You spied on us. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, ’cause did ya catch it, ya fucking killed us?”
Several of them started speaking at once. Layla flung up another hand. “Maybe you didn’t pull the trigger, but what you did was just as bad. You knew it was happening.”
“Honey, we didn’t know,” Celia managed to interject.
“Maybe at the beginning you didn’t, but tell me you didn’t guess at it.”
This time, when Layla finally gave them an opening, none of them said a thing.
When she sniffled again, Brady rubbed her back, and Bobo rested his head on her thigh. Automatically, her hand dropped to pet behind Bobo’s ears.
Looking at him instead of them, she added, “You allowed a predator to feel justified in preying on a friend I love like a sister.”
My heart squeezed.
“Magnum came here and snuck into her room in the dead of night because he knew there’d be no consequences. ’Cause he knows you’ll do whatever it takes to get the answers you want for your beloved science.” She spat the word.
Celia opened her mouth but ended up saying nothing.
I reached over and grabbed Layla’s free hand, holding it tightly.
She sniffled again. “Magnum knew none of you would stand in his way. He owns you all. Hell, he owns this entire town. He wanted to shoot his load inside Joss, so he came over here to do it, didn’t matter one bit that she didn’t want him to.”
The ’rents as a whole, save for Alexis, squirmed.
“You know why?” Layla asked them.
They stared back at her.