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“Angelo!” Bobby skates another circle around my office. He is standing on a platform with wheels, some kind of handless Segway device. It’s completely juvenile, but there is no telling him that.
“Yes, boy?”
“The house feels… empty,” Bobby says, whirling around on a rug more expensive than he is.
“It does, doesn’t it.”
“I used to hate how crowded it felt. Now…” he shrugs. “Maybe we should find another girl.”
I raise a brow at him. “Another girl?”
“I got a taste for girls. But this one, we’ll make sure she can’t get knocked up. And we’ll make her dirtier.”
“Women aren’t pets, Bobby. You can’t just get one because you have an urge.”
“But maybe we could. And maybe we could keep this one.”
“Maybe,” I allow.
I may miss Mark and Tilly. I may even regret that my life, lived as it has been, has no room for a young family. But I will always know that one small speck of life emerged from the darkness of my world, and it lives free forever unburdened by this chaos.
“Or maybe I could get a puppy. A Pit Bull,” he suggests.
“Maybe.”
“Or an alligator!”
“Maybe,” I allow again as he takes another swoop around the room. It is only a matter of time before he breaks something…
“Oof!”
As if on cue, Bobby trips on the rug, careens over my desk and ends up in a vaguely man-shaped lump in my lap.
“Or maybe it’s just you and me, old man,” he grins in the wake of his destruction.
I cup his face and kiss him deeply. Bobby is my boy, a splinter of my soul walking around in another body. As long as I have him by my side, I can tolerate any loss. He makes a grunting, rutting animal sound and settles himself into my lap. He weighs too much to sit there, but I find myself not caring.
“Maybe,” I agree one final time.
He cocks his head and looks at me curiously. “Why do you keep saying maybe?”
“Maybe I have a surprise for you, boy.”
Bobby’s eyes light up. “A girl?”
“Even better.”
“An alligator!?”
I gesture over his head to the television, where international news is still running the story of the tragic and mysterious disappearance of Lord Digby Spencer.
“What?”
“They’ve looked everywhere,” I say.
“Yeah. I know,” Bobby shrugs. “I guess we got rid of him real good, huh?”
“They've looked everywhere but our basement.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath, which I would call a gasp, if Bobby was the sort of man who gasped.
“No. Fucking. Way.” Bobby claps his hands like a kid at Christmas. “Can I play with him?”
“Of course you can, my boy. It wouldn’t be a happy ending if you didn’t get a reward for all your sacrifices. Two conditions. He has to keep all his limbs, and you can’t kill him.”
“There’s a lot of scope in that brief,” Bobby grins.
“There is,” I agree.
It might be considered cruel to imprison a man for months and then unleash Bobby on him. Then again, it was foolish for Digby to try to come for our girl. Tilly may be on the other side of the world, but she will always be mine, and I will always bring pain to those who wish her harm. That’s the closest a Vitali will ever get to a happy ever after, and I am satisfied that this is…
The end.
