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Chapter twenty-one
Out of all the emotions, anger was the easiest. It was better than sadness. Better than guilt. Better than grief.
Fuck grief.
Give me rage.
I sat on top of the bathroom counter, painting the last traces of black around my eyes. With every stroke of the brush, more and more of Lincoln faded away as Death slowly appeared. My mouth curled into a grin, stretching the thinly painted lines around my lips into a smile.
Deuce always told me,“You can’t paint your face, Lincoln. The medics can’t see if you’re hurt.”
Fuck the rules and fuck the medics. I didn’t plan on bleeding.
The steady rhythm of deep bass echoed up the stairs and into my loft from the auditorium below, giving my walls a pulse that matched my own.
Dad finally accepted that I was not following him—and generations of Huntington men—into the corrupt game of politics. It was just another item on the long list of ways I’d disappointed him. And he made sure to remind me of it almost daily. But he did eventually end up buying an old theater as an “outlet” for me and a way for him to save face with his friends. It was much easier to explain why your son didn’t go to college when he was running a successful business.
We’d converted the entire second floor into a loft for me to live in. Tatum used the theater to hold ballet performances for her dance studio, and I used it for concerts and the occasional amateur MMA fight.
If it were up to me, I’d have gotten rid of the stage and kept the cage up full time. No more ballet in this motherfucker—just fury and bloodshed. I’d been doing mixed martial arts since I was thirteen years old, right after that night at Crestview Lake. The night my father handed me an axe and told me it was time to earn my place in this world—hisworld. There were nine of us on the edge of the lake that night: three teenage boys, three human lives that were supposed to represent the worst of us, and three monsters disguised as fathers.
The night air was cool thanks to a breeze coming in off the water. The tall trees surrounding the lake watched over us like a panel of judges. Or a jury. Or the Jesus statue with his dark, glassy eyes.
There was a fire beside us, but it didn’t bring me warmth. I was chilled to the bone.
Three people kneeled in front of us—a woman and two men. A burlap sack had just been torn from over their heads, and their hands were tied behind their backs. Dad, Pierce Carmichael and Kipton Donahue all stood behind them.
Chandler, Caspian and I listened carefully to our instructions as our fathers spoke about burdens, cares, and effigies—about sacrifice. The kneeling people were sacrifices, symbols of what was “wrong” in the world. Poverty. Greed. Hunger. And in the minds of our fathers, killing them would purge the world of the things they represented. I knew my dad was fucked up. I’d overheard him making threats over the phone, accidentally walked in on a couple of heated meetings, and caught him dicking the maid one time, but this was next-level crazy.
We each got a weapon. Chandler had a gun. Caspian got a knife. And me, an axe. Then Caspian’s dad said, “It’s time. Rid us of these burdens.”
The wooden handle seemed to weigh a ton as I clenched it in my fist. My chest burned and my heart raced. I didn’t want to do this. We were here for the regatta and for all the grownups to kiss ass and pretend to like each other while secretly plotting to take over companies or screwing each other’s husbands and wives. What did killing these people have to do with any of that?
Caspian stepped forward and sliced his “care’s” throat. Chandler held his finger on the trigger and pressed, aiming right at the woman’s chest. Neither one of them even flinched.
I swallowed.
My turn.
If I didn’t swing, they would have all thought I didn’t have what it took to be one of them.
Screw that. They weren’t better than me. I belonged here as much as anyone else.
I lifted the axe over my head and swung.
And I missed, hitting the guy on the shoulder with the axe. He screamed against the gag in his mouth, tears sprang from his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, and I fought back the urge to puke.
Dad leaned over and snarled against my ear. “Don’t you dare fucking embarrass me.”
I did end up embarrassing him, and he never let me forget it. It took me three swings to kill that man. The rage wasn’t inside me then. I was just another teenage boy trying to live a normal life in an extraordinary world. The poison of the Brotherhood hadn’t seeped into my veins… yet.
But something about killing a man before you finish puberty changes shit inside of you. As the blood poured out of the man known asGreed’sbody, a darkness crept inside mine. If feeling the crunch of a man’s bones underneath the blade of an axe and hearing his screams behind a cloth rag as his tears and blood soaked the earth wasn’t enough to fuck a kid up for life, I didn’t know what was.
I saw the change in Chandler and Caspian too. It awakened a beast inside us all. We just decided to feed ours in different ways. I fed mine hatred and rage with a drug and alcohol chaser. I was an embarrassment to my father, even though I’d sold my soul to prove I was worthy of our last name. He hated me. I hated him more. Up until the day Lyric took my hand after her mother’s funeral, I didn’t care about anything. How could I? I killed one man to earn the respect of another man who refused to love me. How could a person who thought so little of another’s life pretend to give a shit about his own—or anyone else’s?
But then Lyric grabbed my hand and asked me to take her away, to escape, to leave the pain behind. And that was what I did. I became her escape.Webecame each other’s escape. Right until the night I grabbed her hand and took her too far.
She was dead because of me. I knew she didn’t do drugs. It was the one part of me she wanted nothing to do with. Still, I showed up at her apartment with a nose bag asking her to sniff it off my cock, not caring if she’d said yes or no. I fucked her anyway. I fucked her with a line of coke coating my dick and her heart stopped beating because of it.
