Chapter 10
Luke
“Wakey wakey, sunshine.”
I know that fucking voice. I know it even before I open my eyes and join the realm of the living again. It’s the sort of voice that makes you really not want to bother.
I am sitting in a chair in a dark room with one light focused squarely on me.
I cannot see anything besides the man in front of me.
He has a remarkably smooth face for someone his age.
Treatments have removed the lines that would have shown character.
Or perhaps they are absent because he never had any to begin with.
The man in front of me is known by many names, but I only know him by one: Bastard Pete.
Bastard Pete got his name because he was born out of wedlock to a prominent member of the royal family. Story goes Bastard Pete was supposed to be murdered and thrown into the ocean, but he was saved at the last moment and put up for adoption.
Ever since, Bastard Pete, or BP for short, has been a fucking plague on the planet. That’s what Mummy and Daddy issues along with infant abandonment trauma looks like, so Aiden says.
“The absolute fuck are you doing?” I ask the question with a relatively calm tone. I’m not tied up, but I do have several weapons pointed at me by shadowy figures, so, same same.
“It’s time you and I had a conversation,” he says.
“I don’t think so. I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“See, here’s the thing about your family,” BP says. “You’re smart, but you’re arrogant. And you think you can do whatever you want to women.”
I snort at that piece of self-righteousness, because I know what BP does to women. He is no friend of the gentler sex, and we both know it.
I hear a soft sobbing in the corner. It’s Ella. As I turn my head toward her, she calls out to me. “I’m sorry! I didn’t have a choice!”
“Quiet,” BP says to her. “The men are talking.”
“Looks like you take really good care of your ladies,” I deadpan.
Aiden knew she was working for someone. I wonder if he knew this.
My eldest brother likes to play a lot of things close to his chest. But I don’t think he would ever have allowed me to go off with a spy working for one of the most corrupt men on the planet.
“If you take the deal your idiot brother didn’t, she won’t have to cry, because we won’t have to kill you, understand?”
My jaw tightens as BP casually makes a confession. He killed Teddy. It makes sense. It’s not like he wasn’t on the list of suspects, we just didn’t have any proof. He didn’t claim his wrongdoing.
Until now.
“What do you want?” I try to keep myself calm as I ask the question.
I channel Aiden’s energy. He wouldn’t freak out.
I want to lunge at the man in front of me with his round face and his low cheekbones and his piss brown eyes and punch him until he doesn’t have a face left.
But that would get me a bullet and I already know our family has low lead resistance.
“A stake in the family business. Our fingers in your pies. That sort of thing.”
I pretend to think about it for a second.
BP is giving me some Agent Smith vibes right now, all the way down to the thin line of his mouth.
It’s tempting to give him the finger, and make him give me my phone call, but I am not dealing with the law, and the only thing I would get is a bullet to the back of the head if I refused.
So I do the smart thing.
“Sure,” I smile. “Why not.”
He looks at me suspiciously. “Don’t try to fucking trick me.”
“Why would I do that? You’re going to pay me, I’d imagine, and I am tired of being under Aiden and Leo anyway. Those two think they run everything. I have ideas, too. And they keep throwing me into fucking rehab every time I so much as sniff the wrong way.”
BP’s expression starts to shift as I do what anybody who has ever had to talk their way into drug money does, lie with just enough truth to be believable.
“I don’t like that you killed Teddy, but he was always soppy,” I say, hoping Ted doesn’t start immediately haunting me.
“He was,” BP says. “At the end, he cried like a little bitch.”
That last little bit of information is a test to see if I’m really open to being corrupted.
Maybe I should have played harder to get, but I don’t see how that would have worked.
If I’d made them convince me, there’s a chance he would have given up and just shot me.
And that would be a pity because I would lose the chance to kill him.
I’m glad I’ve been well detoxed from drugs, because it’s giving me the self-control to keep holding back the urge to surge forward and rip his fucking throat out with my bare hands.
I will kill him one of these days, and it will be brutal, it will be cruel, and most of all it will be slow.
He will be keenly aware of his life ebbing away from him.
He will beg for the end, and the end will not come, and…
I smirk and snap back into myself. Those thoughts are of the kind I have tried to silence my whole life.
First with video games, then with Vicodin, then with, well, whatever I could get my hands on.
Maybe it’s time to give into them. Maybe it’s time to admit to myself that I’m not really all that different from Aiden, or even Leo.
I often tell myself I am not as dangerous or as bad as my brothers.
The frightening thing is, I might be worse.
“What do you want me to do?” I change the subject.
“We think, if you play nicely, that you’d be the better brother to be in charge of the Levin fortune,” BP says. “We think you’re smarter, and better placed. Of course, the other two will have to be dealt with, but you’ll do that because a true king has no problem removing pretenders to his throne.”
Oh, god, this fucking lump of bullshit thinks he can talk me into overlooking the murder of one family member and get me to kill the rest of them too.
I suppose there is precedent for it. He’s right about kings. They’re known to kill siblings. Slightly less sick than marrying them, I suppose. They did a bit of that as well, from time to time.
He’s looking for a weak, debauched fuckup to take out the rest of my family for him, probably before he removes me as well. And I guess I fit the bill of debauched fuckup. Good for me. I know how to play that role to perfection.
“I just got out of rehab,” I say. “I mean, I broke out, technically.”
“We’re aware,” he says. He looks smug about it.
“I’ve just got one request,” I say.
“What’s that?”
The tension in the room ramps up several notches. They don’t trust this deal yet. Nor should they. They’ve got to be ready for the double cross, or for me to snap and go for them. I’m unpredictable at this point, because I’m unknown.
“I want the girl,” I say. “I want her as part of my fee. She comes with me.”
BP’s smirk becomes condescending as hell.
I see so many thoughts unspoken in that expression.
He was planning on having her come with me anyway.
She, feisty little fuck toy that she is, makes for quite a handler for men like us.
We think we are in charge of her, and the whole time she is capable of betraying us one after the other.
There is no way I am leaving her behind. She is coming to face justice too.
“Take the girl, go back home. We will be in touch in time. When we are, make sure that you do as you’re told. If there’s even a hint of a double cross, it will go poorly for you.”
I stand up and crook my finger at Ella. She rises miserably from the floor and follows me out of the room. I am escorted out into a cab, with Ella beside me.
“I am sorry,” she keeps repeating. “I am so sorry. I didn’t have a choice. You have to believe me.”
We get into the cab, and I give the driver directions to the house. I have to assume the driver works for BP, so conversation is limited, but Ella just keeps whispering to me about how this wasn’t her fault, and how she couldn’t stop it.
That’s precisely what she’d say if it had been her fault and she could have stopped it, so I do not know if I can believe her, but I decide to hear her out.
She did a good job picking the Levin brother most used to being drugged and waking up in strange places with people I do not like. My tolerance is higher than most.
“He didn’t cry,” she whispers to me.
“What?”
“Teddy. He didn’t cry at the end. He fought them, and he almost made it out, but the driver he thought was one of your people was one of theirs, and that’s how he got shot. I’m sorry.”
She bursts into tears.
I feel a grim sense of having finally understood the truth.
This is what we have wanted and needed to know from the beginning.
It’s also what she could have told us right away, if she’d wanted to.
But then, of course, she was hunted by Leo and then by Aiden, and obviously still under the influence of BP.
I know how that fucker works. His manipulation, blackmail, and general depravity are legend.
One after the other, this woman has been taken and used by men. And as much as I would love to paint her as the evil seductress who lured my baby brother to his doom, I already know it is more complicated than that.
“Don’t cry,” I tell her. “Teddy didn’t, and you won’t either. Driver, stop the car. We’re going to walk.”
The cab driver stops, I pay the fare, and I take her out onto the street. It is late at night and we are lit by shop windows still displaying their wares to an empty world, but I feel a sense of relative privacy here that we did not have in the car.
I remind myself that I have to understand her better. I have to stop making assumptions, good or bad.
“It’s my fault. This is all my fault,” she sobs.
“I thought this was such a good career opportunity. They said it was like being an escort, but I wouldn’t have to sleep with anybody.
And then they killed him. And then they said that I was responsible too, and this was all my fault and then they made me come for… ”