AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Wanna join us?” I ask bitterly. “Maybe you can bring one of your mistresses.”
He doesn’t flinch. “I’m arranging for about twenty other people to go, my friends’ kids.”
“What is this? The world’s elite’s Thanksgiving? If I’m going to party, I’m going withmycrew.”
“This time you do precisely what I tell you to do, Arch. That best friend of yours, Kai Droga. Take him.”
Now I laugh in his face. He knows that Droga and I don’t talk after what went down during the Block Party two years ago and the fire. We are enemies. And that’s an understatement. I haven’t seen the dude in over a year.
“Are you losing it?” I ask, gaping at Dad.
He takes a step closer, then another one. Slowly. Like a predator. I might be tall and strong, but my dad is taller, heavier, and is the most intimidating man I know. The Secretary of Defense has the ability to make even the most powerful people shudder in unease under his gaze.
And right now, something in his eyes makes me swallow hard.
“Droga was your best friend.” His voice is low but so cold that it could freeze fire in seconds.
I could lie and say, fuck that bastard. Droga traded our friendship for a girl.
Yet, my father knows,alwaysfucking knows, what I think.
My silence is my answer, though I hate it.
He nods. “Get Droga on that island for Spring Break. Any way you can. And anyone you remotely care for.”
Something is wrong. “What’s going on?”
Instead of an answer, he starts walking out, already talking to someone on the phone.
I’ve come back to that conversation a hundred times after the Change. If I knew what he knew, I would’ve taken my friends’ entire families to save them from what was to come. Instead of taking fucking bimbos and models and people I only kept around for their pretty faces and important connections.
But the darkest thought is not that. The worst one is that my own father knew that in a matter of weeks, millions would be dead. And said nothing. Not even to me. That’s how I realized that if a job is more important than your loved ones—fuck that job.
“Corlo, lock the doors, dim the lights,” I order and go to the bar to make myself a drink.
I want to be alone tonight. It’s become my permanent state. I want to drink. I want to remember the moments that made me happy.
When I had a family.
When Dad cared.
When Droga and I traveled across Mexico with no worry about the future.
“Corlo, play ‘One Of These Nights’ by Eagles.”
It used to be one of Mom’s favorites. She used to tell Adam and me stories about how she and Dad met when he was in the army. He used to be romantic.
“He wanted to change the world,” she said.
The music starts trickling through the speakers.
I walk to the desk on the other side of the room and press my fingertip to the scanner. The drawers open with a soft pneumatic sound—my treasure chest.
There are a few family pictures in one of them.
Dad, Mom, little Adam and me, twelve. On the beach. All smiles.
We used to smile so much. And laugh. I forgot what Dad’s laughter sounds like.
