Page 99 of Ruthless Devotion
Great, I’m having an imaginary argument in my head. But imaginary Brian is right. This is risky. But there aren’t a lot of people at the club tonight, and they’re all pre-occupied with the ladies, which is generally what they’re all preoccupied with after ten pm, and there’s a live sex show about to start, so no one is going to be wandering out to the horse barn in the cold.
I need to kill this motherfucker, weigh down his body, get it in the lake at the deepest point… and then I have to worry about the car. But, if I can pull this off, when he inevitably is reported missing, there at least won’t be a record of him being here tonight. The Black Gardens doesn’t keep records of that sort of thing. Plausible deniability for clients who are cheating on their wives or carrying out illegal or barely legal deals. This place is a hot bed of cheating and crime. There are no cameras, no written records. Every employee here has signed an NDA so iron clad that if they were to breathe a word of anybody’s comings and goings, they would be destitute down to the seventh generation of their descendants. As long as I can dispose of all the physical evidence, it may as well be Peter Pan’s Pleasure Island. I’m not even entirely sure they’d talk to the authorities if they did find this guy’s body.
So maybe I did choose the right location for this after all.
Sterling doesn’t know it’s me he’s meeting. He thinks it’s another member of the club that owes him money from a poker game last week.
When he sees me, he visibly pales. He looks like he’s seen a ghost. I get this reaction a lot.
“Tony?… It can’t be… It’s… you…”
I help him along. “It can’t be… too much time has passed. I should be older. Did I drink virgin blood to stay young? Who is my plastic surgeon? Oh wait, no I died in the Stryker building two decades ago… it can’t be… Am I a ghost? Did I magically survive? Did I fake my own death?”
He’s still gaping at me, and I’m not sure my sarcasm is even landing, he’s so shocked at seeing someone who looks so remarkably like my father. And the sordid memories it brings up… the truth that this man, for all his finery and outward exterior, is not a good and respectable person.
“The answer to all of those questions is no, by the way. I’m his son, dipshit. And I know what you did to my mother.”
I’d think he can’t get any paler, but he surprises me as even more blood drains from his face. He turns and runs like the coward that he is, but I’m stronger than him, younger than him, and faster than him. I chase and catch my prey well before he gets within screaming distance of the main building. And I was right, there’s no one out here.
Just me and him out under the stars with the air so chilly, we can see our own breath as we struggle in the dirt. I land a hard punch and knock him out cold, then I drag him back into the barn and tie him up.
I go outside and kick the dirt around to cover up the signs of struggle. I look for incriminating evidence that may have fallen off him or me. Nothing. Good.
I go back inside the barn, put on a pair of gloves, line up the barn tools, and wait for him to wake up. I get tired of waiting and splash some water in his face. He splutters and looks around wildly.
“There he is. Man, you cannot take a punch.”
He struggles against the ropes tying him to the wooden post.
“I learned those knots in boy scouts, and got a special badge for it, so… don’t bother. You’ll just get splinters.”
“Listen, I… I don’t know what you heard but… those were crazy times. She wanted it.”
I smack him because he should know the last thing I want to hear about my mother was that she was some whore just spreading her favors around to all and sundry.
“Or…” I say, getting right in his face, “You paid my father to access her. You carry responsibility for what happened that night.”
He shakes his head wildly. “No, it wasn’t anything like that… it wasn’t. She was fine. She wanted it. She was into it. It was some kink she had.”
I take a piece of duct tape and cover his mouth. That was the wrong fucking thing to say. Some kink she had. Like hell.
I pull a photo out of my pocket. It’s of my mother before the abuse started, before my father started passing her around like cheap meat to all his friends and associates—for a price. Everything was about money with my father. Everything and everyone in his vicinity needed to be earning to be worth anything.
I shove the photograph of my mother back when she was happy and carefree, right in this piece of shit’s face. I barely remember this time period. I barely can hold onto the memory of her at all, but I remember this day, both of us running through the sprinklers and her laughing in the summer sun. I was three when this photo was taken. It was just six months before the abuse started, before my father finally figured out how to monetize her. It wasn’t enough that she’d given him a son, an heir to the family criminal enterprise, no, that hateful man still needed his pound of flesh.
Pale skin, green eyes, raven hair. My mother’s strong Irish looks came through loud and clear.
Sterling tries to look away from the photograph.
“She didn’t look this happy by the time you got ahold of her, did she? Kind of hard to believe it was some kink she had, given how much she changed.”
I was too young to understand the light that dimmed from her eyes, the depression that took hold.
He’s trying to scream through the tape. He wants to talk to me, explain his side of everything. This motherfucker doesn’t have a side.
“Look at her! Look at what you did!”
He finally looks, and there are tears in his eyes. An amateur would think these were tears of guilt, remorse, but Brian trained me well. These tears only say he knows what’s coming. He’s only sorry vengeance has finally come for him. I pull the gun from the concealed holster in my pants.
