Saxon looks around. “Fine, fuck. But let’s make this interesting.” He crosses to the kitchen and grabs a bottle of Jack Daniels from the counter. “You share, you take a slug when you’re done.”
“I don’t drink,” I say. “Haven’t had a drink since the day Della-Marie died.” I swallow hard. “I woke up after the wreck, and the first thing I saw was the windshield smashed to fuck, and Della-Marie off in the grass. Thrown through the windshield, sliced to fuckin’ ribbons, neck all twisted at the wrong fuckin’ angle.” I taste bile. “I swore, in that moment, I’d never drink again. Haven’t and won’t. Ya’ll wanna play Saxon’s game, turning this into a drinking game, be my guest. I don’t judge. You do you. But I don’t drink.”
Saxon twists the top off the bottle as he swaggers over to the couch, takes a seat in the corner, tosses the cap onto the coffee table. “I was an enforcer for a crime syndicate on the East Coast. Enforcer, soldier, whatever. Not the mob. These guys were seriously well-funded, so I got a black-market version of spec-ops school, kinda. Room clearing, hand-to-hand combat, weapons handling, explosives, ranged firearm work. I, uh…I did bad shit to bad people. A lot of bad shit, to a fuckin’ lot of bad fuckin’ people. I did the wet work. The dirty shit the bosses ordered but never touched themselves. I never hurt nobody innocent, though.” His face twists, darkens. “I was ordered to, but I couldn’t. And that’s why I’m here.” He takes a long pull on the bottle, the whiskey glugging twice before he holds it up, hissing. “Next.”
Solomon stares at his brother, and then crosses the room, snatches the bottle, perching on the arm of the couch next to Saxon. “I was CIA. Recruited out of Harvard. Had a choice—finish my law degree outta Harvard and start billing hours at some big shot firm in DC, like our dad, or take the offer the CIA recruiter gave me. I saw how fuckin’ miserable our dad was, and is, so I said fuck it. I bailed on Harvard, joined the CIA, and spent the next decade in all the darkest, dirtiest, shittiest hellholes on the planet. An op went seriously wrong. An informant sold me out, sold my team out, everyone got fuckin’ killed except me, and I’m only here because one person put their life on the line for me, and I’m not talking about our employer.” He pulls a hard slug, then holds it up over his head like Saxon did. “Si, your turn, brother.”
Silas growls, but takes the bottle and slumps to the couch beside Saxon. “Our father was…it was bad.” He looks at me. “Beat the fuckin’ hell outta all of us. Mom and us three. But mainly Mom and Sol, because he was the oldest. Sol got his lucky ass sent to an all-boys boarding school in fuckin’ Europe, dressed in fancy uniforms and learning Latin and shit, and me and Sax were stuck at home. Sax got the worst of it, after Sol left. I tried steppin’ in, but…” He shakes his head. “Wasn’t just him wailing on us. He expected perfection. We messed up anything, the littlest fuckin’ thing, he kicked the shit out of us, told us we were useless worthless pieces of shit, that whole bag.”
The other two brothers stare at their toes, faces closed off and dark.
Silas continues, runs his hand through his copper hair. “We ran. Sol and I, we ran away. Sax was sixteen and I was almost eighteen, we stole ten g’s in cash from Dad’s safe, a couple of his Rolexes, and his car. We made it to DC, pawned the watches. We lived in Dad’s Aston Martin for a few months, got jobs at Mcdonald's. Traded the car eventually for fake IDs, making us eighteen and twenty-one. Dad never even fuckin’ looked for us. We both hooked into the crime syndicate. Sax became an enforcer. They discovered I’ve got an ability to talk people into just about anything, so they made me a sales rep basically, but for drugs, guns, and hookers. I was a mover. Big time. Moved so much fuckin’ product it ain’t even funny. I was on track to be a boss, because I also wasn’t afraid to step in and get dirty, do my own enforcement, and as I said, I moved a fuck-ton of product. They placed Sax on my team, and we were a pretty unstoppable fuckin’ team.” He looks at Saxon. “Then the big boss got into a pissing match with another family, that shit turned into a bloody fuckin’ back and forth series of vendettas. Sax got ordered to whack someone who had no business being anyone’s fuckin’ target. My orders weren’t much better—instead of whacking an innocent fuckin’ girl, I was supposed to cozy up to an FBI agent and feed her information on our so-called enemies. It was a dumb fuckin’ plan from the get-go, and it nearly got us both whacked. She’s working a desk job in Seattle now, and I’m hiding out here because like Sax, if I show my fuckin’ face, I’m gonna end up at the bottom of Lake Mead.”
He takes a long, glugging pull, and then offers it up.
“Way to put itallout there, bro,” Sax murmurs, annoyed and amused.
“Did you get cozy with the agent?” Rev asks.
Silas tilts the bottle side to side. “Not talking about her. Next?”
“You got cozy,” Rev says, smirking. He takes the bottle and swirls it. “You guys know my story, I guess. Orphan, got kicked around. Joined the Marines, ended up in the Recons.”
“There’s something even I don’t know,” Myka says. “And I’ve been wondering about it.”
Rev frowns at her. “There is?”
“How’d you and Chance get out of the Marines? I mean, did you just retire? Or did something happen?”
Rev shrugs. “Not a real story, exactly. There were a couple missions that didn’t go right. Our boy Julius caught a round to the throat—survived, but barely. Then Phil lost his leg from the knee down, an IED. We got two new guys, fresh out of BUD/S. Wasn’t the same without Phil or Julius. The new guys were good, don’t get me wrong. But…Phil and Jules were the backbone of our team. Phil was always there to crack a joke when shit got tense, and Julius was just…solid. Never got freaked, never got nervous, he just always knew exactly what to do. Then, Kwan knocked up his old lady on leave, decided he wanted to be around for the kid, so he rotated out. Julius gone, Phil gone, Kwan gone? Half the team we’d worked with for years, gone. It all happened within a few months.” He swirls the bottle again, looking into it. “Then we got shit intel on a mission. Our position got overrun, there were way more bodies than intel told us, and we barely made it out alive. If it had been the old crew, we’d have pulled it off. But with three goddamned rookies, we had to cut and run just to save our fuckin’ skins. I guess Chance and I just lost confidence in the team. Once you lose that confidence, you can’t really do the job. So we got our walking papers.” He takes a little pull, then another long one.
Chance takes it, next. Stares into it. “When we got out, we were both just…adrift. It’s no secret anymore, but Rev ended up back in with the cartel, and I just…through no virtue of my own, I just wasn’t interested in that. So I moved to Hawaii. I wanted to connect with my dad’s family, my culture on that side. That’s when I got these.” He slaps his shoulder, indicating the tattoos. “I connected with them, with the culture. In a big fuckin’ way. But I also ended up getting connected with my mom in a very real, very dark way. That’s some shit I ain’t ready to talk about, though.”
Rev eyes Chance, and I wonder what he knows that Chance isn’t saying. Not my place to know, if Chance doesn’t want to share. Must be pretty damn dark, though.
Chance takes a hard slug on the bottle, sets it on the table and slides it toward Lash, who started all this.
Lash takes the bottle. Takes a slug. For the first time since I’ve known him, his eyes reveal the pain and darkness within. “I am Romani. What others have called a gypsy, but to us, this is a slur. Like the N-word to African-Americans. My people are pacifists, and nomads. I grew up traveling, making crafts with my mother and sister, learning to keep our caravan running with my father. We went everywhere. Russia, Georgia, Belgium, Italy, the UK, everywhere. It was a beautiful life.” He takes another slug. “It happened in France. A little town far from anywhere. There was a misunderstanding. In days past, our culture had no concept of personal property. We believed in communal property. If I have a hammer, and my friend needs a hammer, he will take my hammer and use it. I will not think it is stealing—it is notmyhammer, it is simplyahammer which was in my possession for a time. When I next require a hammer, I will find one. But the rest of the world believes this thing ismineand may not take it unless I tell you so. It creates misunderstandings. It created the notion of the thieving gypsy. We did not consider it stealing, it was merely a difference in cultural understandings. What happened with my father is a tale as old as time.” He sighs. “There was a salvage yard for automobiles. My father needed a part. So he took it. It was a salvage yard. It was all junk. He even left some other parts he no longer needed, in trade. But he did not pay, and he did not ask. The owner of the salvage yard became angry. He murdered my father, after a bad argument. And then the townspeople chased my family away. My brother left our caravan and became addicted to drugs, and died. My sister married a shop owner in Prague and became pregnant, and stayed. Then it was only my mother and me.”
He’s quiet for a long time.
“She was lost, then. Lost to me, lost to the world. In time, she just…drifted away. One morning, she was…” He shakes his head. “She did not wake up. And it was only me. I had no family. No home. No purpose. I knew a man in Germany who could fake papers, for an identity. So he created for me a new name, a background that was not Romani, at least on paper. And I joined the army, in Germany. From a pacifist, to a soldier I went. But they fed me, they clothed me, they gave me skills. At first, I was only a mechanic. I fixed the trucks and the tanks and other things. But then my unit was sent to Bosnia. There was an ambush, and I was forced to fight. It turned out, I was quite good at it. And strangely, I found I actually enjoyed it. In time, I found my way to the KSK, German special forces. Then, many things happened. And I found my way here.”
“Skipped a few things,” Saxon notes. “Toward the end, especially.”
Lash swigs again. “Be thankful, Saxon. That is more than I have told anyone about myself, ever.”
Saxon nods, then looks at me. “Said you’d share more, even though you don’t drink.”
I feel Anjalee look at me. “You need not share more,” she says. “You have shared enough.”
I shake my head. Plant my fists on the top edge of the couch back, eyes closed. “I was team lead on a mission in Afghanistan. Clear an emplacement that was chewing up our supply line. Insert, infil, clear, exfil. Something we’d done any number of times. I just…to this day I do not fuckin’ know what happened. Read the map wrong, I dunno. All those fuckin’ hills and ridges and shit look the same. We came in from the wrong heading. Meant to circle around and hit ‘em from behind, instead we walked up right into their faces. My navigation error. And they were ready for us, knew we were coming. Whole unit was wiped out, except me and one of my guys. He got hit, too, and I carried him to extract. I was hit in the leg, but he took one to the head. Left him alive, but he’s a vegetable. Barely functions. Exists, breathes, but…the man I knew is gone. And I…after that, I couldn’t deal. I got my unit killed.”
“What’d the investigation say?” Rev asks, knowing how such things go.
“Said our intel was wrong, and shit got leaked. They were ready for us. Knew we were coming. I was not found culpable, wasn’t my mistake I got my guys killed. That’s the official line. I know it, mentally, but I walked them into a fuckin’ ambush, and I watched them all get mowed down around me. Hard to not blame yourself for that shit.”
Rev just nods. “When that last op went bad, we blamed ourselves, all of us. We knew it was bad intel and worse luck, but you still blame yourself. We didn’t even lose anyone and I still blamed myself for how shit went down, and I know Chance did too. If we’d lost guys?” He shakes his head. “Bad shit, brother.”
