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One morning, a morning that seemed just like every other morning here, the burner phone started to ring.
I didn’t even know I still had it on me. But there it was, in the bottom of the handbag I always kept on my person.
I searched it out and stared at it.
What could whoever on the other end of the phone say that I would want to hear?
Nothing. I let the call go to voicemail, and then it was silent.
FOREST
When I’d received word that everything was settled at the safehouse, I returned home to try and get some rest. But I found it weirdly empty. Mrs Jamroz wouldn’t be coming by to polish the still-pristine countertops, leave gossip magazines lying around by accident next to the toilets, line the voodoo dolls up neatly where they’d flopped over on their cursed shelf.
My second night alone with little sleep, I went out for a walk around the city. My anger, which I’d put on pause to sort out the practicalities of the situation, had returned to me.
At this point I didn’t know who I was angry at. Was it Apollo? Ria? Myself? The most likely answer was all three. But it was so much anger I didn’t know what to do with it. It was too late to bottle it up like I always had.
And maybe this, now, was the outpouring of anger built up over the course of a decade, two decades. Two decades of being a Brock.
Maybe I wasn’t really angry at Ria, or myself, or even Apollo. I was angry at the dead man, Emory Brock, who decided to wait until he was nearly dying to inform his illegitimate sons that they were the heirs to his fortune, and had thus dictated the fates of the rest of our lives. Because when you know something like that, there’s no going back. No matter how all five of us debated simply declining and returning to our old lives, we’d all found that it was impossible.
The truth does not always set you free. Sometimes, the truth is a trap.
As it had been in the case of Apollo revealing Ria’s pregnancy to me. I wondered how long he’d known that Ria was working for me. Or if he hadn’t known, really, but was simply hedging his bets.
I realized he’d set me up perfectly to implode the relationship either way: one phone call telling me that Ria was working for him, one phone call telling me that he’d known Ria was pregnant with my child before I had.
The thought boiled my blood again. Thathehad known, that Ria had toldhim, but not me...
But there was a deeper hurt, one I’d ignored when I’d gone nuclear about not being told.
It was the feeling, deep, deep down... that there must be something wrong with me. Something that meant Ria hadn’t wanted to tell me that I was the father of an unborn child. That Ria didn’t think I was trustworthy, that she thought I would make a bad father, that she simply just didn’t think that I might want to know...
Yes. I was angry at myself.
It was in such a wretched state that I found I’d paced the city for such a long time that I was in the vicinity of Sylvester’s flat.
I considered this was maybe not a coincidence. So I turned up at his door, having been let in by the concierge who knew me as his brother, and hammered on it.
He answered after a minute, groggily pulling a robe on as cover. “Forest?”
“Can I come in?”
The sound of giggling came from inside the flat. I grimaced.
“Yeah, sure. I have guests, though.”
“Guests you were undressed around? Guests, plural?”
He waggled his eyebrows.
The sight I walked into in his apartment was worse than I’d imagined. People in various states of undress were leaning, laying, stretching across all areas of his living space. With Sylvester’s taste in décor, it looked like I was entering an upmarket strip club.
“It’s not an orgy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I scoffed. “Oh, at least it’s not an orgy.”
“I’ll get rid of them. Go to the guest room and I’ll get you when the coast’s clear.”
