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I’m wiping a tear from the corner of my eye, still looking away as I shake my head furiously.
“Eloise.”
“What.” Fuck, I hate him so much.
“Eloise.”
I grit my teeth as I whirl on him. “What?!”
In one motion, he reaches for his jacket on the couch behind him, grabs the gun from underneath it, and aims it at the back of the brunette’s head.
My eyes widen as my mouth falls open. “NO?—!”
The gun goes off with a thunderous bang, spraying blood and gore across the floor between us. Whirling, I drop the glass, letting it shatter on the ground as I bend down and start to vomit and cry at the same time.
I can hear Massimo behind me, walking over to the bar cart. “The next time,” he murmurs quietly, “they’ll send me the fucking blonde I asked for.”
I convulse and puke onto the floor again, tears burning my face and stomach acid on my chin.
“Look at me, Eloise.”
I can’t.
“LOOK. AT. ME.”
Shuddering, I turn to him.
“Do as I say and get that fucking will,” he growls quietly, standing there, naked, blood on his chest and a drink in his hand. He waves the gun in the other one. “Or the next time you witness that, it’ll be your dear sister with my cum in her cunt and her brains on the floor.”
11
ALISTAIR
Ten years ago:
If my life were a movie, this would be the part where I’d ruefully reflect on how my father would never approve of such childish pranks in the name of rivalry.
But this is real life. And my father fucking loves pranks.
We’re talking the full range here: fake snakes or bugs in the cereal box, olive oil in the soap dispenser, plastic wrap over the toilet bowl. It’s one of the things I love about him.
Ironically, it’s one of the things about Vaughn Black that can also drag a blade across my heart. Not because of anything he does. But because his childish sense of glee in just about everything in life is a sobering reminder for me that I am not of his blood.
I’m not able to find genuine joy in things with a snap of my fingers the way he is. Maybe I never was, or maybe that ability was ripped from me by fire and broken glass.
I was six when my world turned upside down. Oddly, but perhaps mercifully, I don’t remember much of life with my birth parents before the car crash. Most of what I do know comes from my father, and even then, it’s mostly lacking in detail.
I don’t have names—first, or last. My father told me when I was young, though, that they were using fake IDs, as they were in the US illegally. I know they were unmarried, but madly in love. They were clients of a friend of Vaughan’s. And he always told me that when they heard about the accident that rainy night that killed them and spared me, he and my mother knew instantly that they would take care of me—that I was meant to be a part of their family.
And I am, in every conceivable way. I’ve spent a lifetime re-wiring myself as a Black, rather than…whatever name I had before. Which is why I get fucking enraged whenever someone tries to attack me with the “A” word.
Adopted.
I fucking hate that word.
I hate how it acts as an asterisk after my last name with a disclaimer. As if my name isn’t Alistair Black, but rather “Alistair Black…sort of.”
It feels dehumanizing. I also consider it an affront and an insult to Vaughn and Marilyn Black—two strangers who saw a shell-shocked, scared little boy in a hospital room who’d just lost everything, and selflessly decided to give him a new life.
