AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Kenzo sends me to things like this—things that any of ourwaka gashiraor even a common foot-soldier could take care of—because I’mgoodat them.
And by “things” I mean “fixing problems”.
Except now I have a new one.
As I drive through the mostly empty and yet stilltoo fuckingloudstreets of New York, my mind drifts back to her face.
Specifically, the way she looked at me.
Most people break when they’re faced with death. They panic, try to find some way out. But not her. She was scared, yes, and she did ask menotto kill her. But there was something else in her eyes. Defiance, and something else I can’t quite place.
It’s sticking with me.
Fuck, I should have made it clean. I should have left her dead on the floor next to those men, her blood mixing with theirs. But instead, I let her go. And now, she’s a thread I can’t quite cut loose.
My phone rings through the Bluetooth in the truck, and I answer without looking at who it is.
“Yeah.”
When I’m greeted with nothing but silence, my brow furrows. But when I hear the slow, rhythmic breathing through the open line, my eyes snap to the display screen.
Unknown number.
Fuck. I know who it is.
“That time of year again already, Jonas?”
The heavy breathing silences sharply for a moment before he speaks.
“Well, you know me, Mal…” the voice from my past murmurs quietly, his tone raspy and gritty.
“I’d rather I didn’t.”
Jonas chuckles darkly and quietly. My lips stay thinned and unmoving.
I don’t keep track of this date. I have no interest in memorializing it in any capacity. But Jonas does. And that’s why this darkness from my past insists on calling me on this date, every fucking year.
“What the fuck do you want, Jonas.”
“Toremind you, brother,” he hisses back. “To make sure youneverforget the day you killed our father.”
“He wasn’t our father,” I say tersely, mechanically. “Nor are you and I related, at all.”
“Oh, but we are, Mal,” Jonas murmurs lowly. “We are forever?—”
“Get help, Jonas,” I say quietly. “Stop letting that monster and the childhood he destroyed in us pull the strings on your life.”
Jonas is silent again for another moment.
“Just remember, brother,” he growls in his rasping tone. “One of these days, I will find something—someone—that you love. And I will destroy them, right in front of you?—”
“Find help, Jonas,” I mutter. “And lose my fucking number.”
I hang up and kill the engine outside my temporary residence in Soho. For a second, I breathe in the silence of the truck, trying to purge Jonas’ voice from my head. Then I head inside.
The building is nothing special—just another loft-style building tucked among the trendy, cobbled streets of lower Manhattan, with most of the other residents being coked-out models or married guys coming to use their downtown fuck-pad.
For me, it’s just a place to disappear to when I’m forced to be here.
