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“Favorite memory?” she prompts gently. “Remember back to when you were ten. Or fifteen. What memory makes you smile?”
I mean… apart from the prostitute thing? A cathartic snigger rolls along my throat and out to pique her interest. But I don’t tell her that story… it’s not mine to share. “When I was eight, and remember I was the youngest back then, we decided we wanted to race motorbikes around the property. Make it competitive. Find out who reigned supreme and all that shit.”
She grins in my peripherals. “I’m sure that was a calm, quiet day at the Malone home.”
“It was ridiculously loud and dumb.” I snort. “Timothy bought us practically anything we wanted, no matter how dangerous or stupid it was. And it wasn’t because he wanted to spoil us or anything. He just had money to blow and didn’t really care how we spent it. He was busy doing his stuff, and we’d long before learned how to stay out of his way.”
“So you had motorbikes?”
“No.” I smirk. “Webuiltmotorbikes.”
“Oh god.” She brings her free hand up and rubs her temple. “I’m certain everyone walked away unscathed, then.”
“Nope. We busted ourselves up so bad, we convinced the old prick we’d had a falling out and whaled on each other. Ridiculously, this made him happy.” Anger courses through my veins. But beneath that is a simplewhy?Why did he hate us so much? “So Tim was, like… twelve at this point, right? Maybe thirteen, I guess. He’s the oldest and the wisest. And because he was named for our father, he held power over the guards that far exceeded the power the rest of us had. Even Lix. He pulled a car out of the garage and drove it up to the front door of the house.”
“At twelve? Archer, he was driving at twelve?”
“Pretty well too, considering he could hardly touch the pedals with his toes. Me, Micah, and Lix were waiting at the front of the house. Getting kinda noisy, which drew the attention of the soldiers who were paid to keep us alive. We didn’t have to be happy or healthy, but we had to live. So whenhe brought the car to a stop and waved us closer, one of my father’s soldiers attempted to stop us.”
In my peripherals, Minka’s lips grit into a half grin, half ‘uh oh’.
“It was one thing for him to tell us no,” I continue. “He could’ve even snitched to our father, which probably would’ve stopped our adventure there and then.”
“He didn’t?”
I drag my bottom lip between my teeth and shake my head. “He grabbed my brother by the hair and tore him out of the car so fucking fast, he made his scalp bleed.”
“What?!”
“Guess he thought it was thein thing, since he’d seen our father do it a million times.”
“He was not your father!” Minka explodes. Because she’s protective to a fault. Is it even a surprise she’s the woman I chose to marry? “He was the paid help, Archer! He had no right to touch him.”
“Felix slipped a knife between the guard’s ribs and dropped him on his ass so fucking fast, you’d think he slit the man’s tendons.” I meet her eyes. “Maybe we were no better than mongrel dogs. Maybe that’s why we were treated as such.”
“Archer—”
“Tim was bleeding from the scalp, while the rest of us took turns kicking the shit out of a dying man.”Am I ashamed? Should I be?I’m honestly not sure. “He held no remorse for hurting a boy, and I have no doubt, had he been left unchecked, he would have done worse. So we pulverized his ribs to mush and reminded every other guard who watched on that we wouldn’t be trifled with. Maybe Old-Man Tim hurt us—there wasn’t a lot we could do about that—but we’d murder any other asshole who tries.”
“This is your most treasured memory?” Her voice catches and her thigh tightens beneath my hand. “Are you serious right now, Archer? I asked for happy!”
“Oh, nah,” I snicker. “That was just the context to our day. So we got into the car after that and figured out how to move the driver’s seat forward. Then we carpooled that bitch all the way to a motorcycle store and burned up our father’s credit cards. We bought engines, chains, wheels, and whatever other random shit we thought of that day. Then we came home with our loot and raided the garage for whatever else we wanted. We spent an easy twenty grand on materials, which was more expensive than if we’d just bought bikes outright, and then we spent the next week Frankenstein-ingour creations. I was the smallest, and Felix was the most impulsive. So Micah and Tim spent more time on ours than they did on their own. Days and days and days of greasy faces and bonding between brothers. Neither Tim, nor Micah, seemed to mind helping me and Lix. They didn’t get frustrated at us for not being as capable as them. They didn’t punish us the way our father would have.”
I bring the car around a corner now, my eyes on the road, but in my mind, I see my old life. My old home. The property Minka will visit today, and no matter how much I wish I could too, I simply can’t.
“In the end, we had four really ugly fucking contraptions. They hardly even resembled motorcycles. I mean…” I search her eyes, chuckling under my breath, “we used wood, Mayet. Plastic. There was probably a chopping board from the kitchen. A skateboard. Pretty sure Felix installed a TV onto his.”
I turn back to the road, but I see her smile in my peripherals. Her affection.
“Tim’s was pretty bland, since he’s always been about power, not flash. Micah’s was a little prettier, since he’s good at seeing the beauty in things. Felix’s had racing stripes and bling along the side that glinted off the sun.”
“And yours?”
I release a contented sigh and squeeze her thigh. “Mine was made with love as four brothers came together to create fun in a cruel world. We spent the rest of that final day racing them around the circular driveway. We crashed, a lot. We crashed into each other too often for it to be accidental. We were busted up and bruised. Blood-smeared hands and faces. Tim’s head was still tender because of that asshole. He’d hiss if he forgot and scratched his hair. But smashing his nose because he drove his bike into one of the parked cars?” I laugh. “He didn’t mind one bit.”
“Who won the races?”
“I have no fucking clue. I’m not sure we ever stopped to keep score. But we smiled a lot that week. We made memories. And once it was done and our father came home from a meeting in Manhattan to find his driveway trashed and several of his cars scraped, he belted the piss out of us all and kept us separate for weeks after. I’m not sure if he was punishing us, or if he honestly thought we’d been fighting each other. He wanted us at odds, but he didn’t want us to kill each other. I didn’t see any of them for the longest time after that.”
