by Ace Gray
“Does it matter?” He tipped his chin as a toast before swigging from his glass.
And the answer was no. It never did. My life was all things wrong and dark and debasing. There was no adventure, just an exploration of all things wild and wicked. So I tipped my chin just as he had and raised my glass a little higher.
“Sláinte,”
The bitter taste clawed at my throat, but I choked it down. That bitter taste equated to bliss. The second I was high on X I could forget again. Turns out my loyalty was bought the same way as all the lackies—with blood and drugs.
“I wanted to talk to you about Cole Ryan,” my father said just before he drank again.
I arched my eyebrow. That name came up from time to time, usually when my father was feeling wickedness and vengeance flow freely. I’d been told the story of Cole Ryan beating my father within an inch of his life while permanently disfiguring his body like other children were told bedtime stories.
“What about him?” I asked as I shifted in my seat to prop my heels up on the table.
“Any news?”
I shook my head as I let my fingertips drag down the valley of my abs.
“You’d be the first to know.”
I sat staring at the painting, studying the brush strokes and composition, evaluating the artwork. It was supposed to turn my stomach. The red splattered every which way represented the gruesome spray of blood. I tilted my head and compared it to the scene in the warehouse last night and smiled. It had only been three men and three executioner style bullets but the way they’d fallen, the spatter… My bloodlust and artistic impulses had been temporarily satiated.
“Brye,” Emmett, my bodyguard, my friend for lack of a better term, interrupted beside me. “We should be getting back.”
“Just a few more minutes.” I waved him off, knowing that I didn’t need to beg or plead. “Please,” I added anyway.
Emmett nodded and stepped back, knowing my fondness for art. It was creation while I was destruction. When I was here, I could slip inside the recesses of my soul to appreciate the beauty in this world. And I loved beauty because it’s equal and opposite—ugliness—had grown like ivy to overtake my heart.
My eyes swept the room as natural as the breath filling my chest. I never knew who was waiting, watching. When my eyes shifted side to side, it was in time with the wretched ticking of the clock I called a life. It was habit.
There was nothing out of the ordinary except…
She was small, but she filled up the room with golden light as warm as sunshine. The thin shirt she wore covered every inch of her except the shoulder it slid off, but her silhouette was visible beneath in the bright natural light of the museum. Long legs peeked out from a tight short black skirt. It wasn’t the pure poetry of her body that drew me toward her though, it was the way she trembled as she reached toward the painting in front of her. And when her fingers fell away, she let the tips tap on her shimmering pink lips in thoughtful ponder.
A contented smile spread across her face and she sucked in a deep breath. When she blew out a heavy exhale it inflated her smile as she turned away from me and began a slow and easy shuffle to the next piece that caught her eye. She moved gracefully and walked on her tiptoes despite wearing a fresh pair of tennis shoes.
I wanted to wreck her, possess her.
I followed from a distance, studying her as I had the artwork earlier. Her lines were far more delicate and artistic than the work around me. Her colors more vivid too. Her hair was golden leaf more dazzling than the top of the Carbide & Carbon Building. Her eyes were a chilling seafoam green, inviting me to swim in the tumult of thought behind them.
She twisted toward the form behind her, studying the stone where it wove on itself freestanding in the center of the gallery. I stepped to the other side and let my gaze flit from the marble to her face and back again.
“You can just ask me my name, ya know.” She smiled without raising her eyes from the stone. Her fingers were roving too close again, following the contours of the figures in their embrace.
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” I purred and she shuddered beneath my voice.
“I’m Filly.” She looked up from under feathered lashes, and my heart tripped on itself. I couldn’t help but furrow my brow as I rubbed my chest.
“I’m Brye.” I didn’t hold out my hand to her and I couldn’t explain why. Touching her just seemed…significant. I settled on tracing the shape of the sculpture in between us as she had.
“Is that short for Brian?” She studied me closer now, her eyes seemed to strip me while she waited for the shapes my mouth would make. I shifted under the scrutiny but couldn’t look away.
“No, it’s Irish. Celtic originally.”
She nodded and turned away, finding another painting to get lost in. I missed her appraisal as soon as it was gone and hated myself a little for it. That didn’t stop me from stepping to her side. I told myself I was giving slow chase to my prey as I kept my hands clasped behind my back but in reality, she made me feel human. Something I hadn’t felt since...I tried to shove the memory of Rosalyn down the second it bubbled to the surface.
“What are you doing?” Emmett hissed under his breath as he stepped toward us but I shot him a sharp warning look and he froze. I knew it was a shit idea unless I was going to fuck her in the bathroom, but something tempted me to steal a few more minutes in the art museum. To steal a few more minutes talking to Filly.
“This one is so sad,” she murmured in front of a piece that looked anything but to me.
“I don’t see sad, I see chaos.”
“And isn’t chaos somewhat sad?” She turned to me and narrowed her gaze to really evaluate me, much the way she did the painting. The weight of it settled on my shoulders and reached around my throat. Or was that my heart? I hadn’t felt that thing work since… I sucked in a deep breath.
She saw right through me. It was those big, doe eyes. The spoke their own language. They made me sure of it. She saw the monster. She saw the turmoil, the torture, the burden I carried, too. But what was worse was that she saw the last little bit of goodness tucked as a kernel into my soul. She knew me. In a glance, she knew the ins and outs of me.
I hated it.
And yet I craved it too. It took everything in me not to lean in and kiss her. To steal her goodness and breath to fill me up and keep me afloat through what would come later. Because the shit would assuredly come later, and while I hated this moment for its softness, someone finally saw inside. No one had bothered to try in years.
She tried to hide her small smile as if she could actually hear my thoughts.
“See the brush strokes in the piece,” Filly interrupted my thoughts as she turned away from me, her face drawn as she pointed up toward the canvas. I followed her finger. “They’re thick, frantic, which does say chaotic. But they’re sweeping, supple, unending in their movement too. And if you step back the image itself feels…” She took one flutter step back. “heavy,” she finished as her hands came up and circled herself as if she needed shelter from the weight.
Filly was an unexpected surprise no doubt about it. She was beyond beautiful and the shape of her mouth as she spoke made me imagine filthy things, but it was her eyes that I was drawn to. The shape, the color and the way she saw the world. Her observations could have been about me, about my insides, just as easily as they were about the painting. The want to hear more made my skin crawl.
Being stripped made me feel alive and I didn’t deal in life. I forced myself to think about the bullet wounds from last night gracing her forehead. As soon as I did, fear real and present curled up in my throat.
I could have sucker punched myself.
“Brye, please.” Emmett cleared his throat behind me. “She’s bad news.”
Unchecked defensiveness flared in my chest and the mere reaction gave me pause. My eyes went wide and my head swam a little when I finally turned to face him.
“Roz,” he said her name l
ow and the warning was inherent. He’d been there to watch her disintegrate into nothing. He’d been there to watch me grow hard and cold since that night on the ice. He was right to warn me if for no other reason than I missed Filly as soon as I turned my back on her. Men like me didn’t wax poetic, we whacked poets.
“You know what I love about art?” Filly spoke and her voice was no better than a siren song; I turned back to face her whether I wanted to or not. “It’s ugly.”
“What?” I arched back and my eyebrow shot up.
“Most people like art because it’s beautiful, and don’t get me wrong, some of it is. But when an artist decides to create something ugly, they’re putting so much of themselves out there. They’re showing raw truth. There’s a different kind of beauty in that.”
Fuck. Me.
She knew my soul. Or the void it had left in my chest when it evaporated for good. I started to walk away. It was really the only thing to do with a girl like her. No kinky sex was worth the way she made me feel…things.
There’s a different kind of beauty in that. Her words spun in my skull. They spun in my heart.
I shook my head again. I didn’t have a heart. I housed ugly.
There’s a different kind of beauty in that.
“Have dinner with me?” I asked over my shoulder, looking back at her beauty and not thinking about the ramifications, just about her words.
She hadn’t moved from her thoughtful pose in front of the sorrowful painting, she still held onto herself, still considered the complexity of what was in front of her. I waited for one, two, three heartbeats and she didn’t flinch. She didn’t answer. I sighed, feeling a weight slip off my chest as I turned to follow Emmett from the gallery.
“Tonight,” she said at the last moment. “I’m only in town for one more night.”
“I’ll pick you up.” I kept my back to her as I thanked the demons that watched over me.
“I’ll meet you,” she replied.
I smirked and shook my head. I pulled my wallet out of my back trouser pocket and thumbed through for something to write on. There was nothing but a twenty dollar bill. One I happened to know was counterfeit and covered in cocaine. I smiled as I snapped for a pen from Emmett.
“Brye,” he warned. I arched my eyebrow with a smirk as I snatched the pen from his hand.
The address was scratchy on the fibrous bill, but in the end, it was legible. I turned and rolled it into a small cylinder out of habit before I handed it to her. Either she didn’t notice or didn’t care about the meaning of that shape as she lifted it to her eye like a telescope.
“See you later, alligator.” She laughed before she fluttered to the next piece of art, studying it the same way she had the chaos painting.
See you later alligator? I chuckled at the innocent phrase, at the virtue and naiveté that seemed to seep from her. I got a little hard when I thought about snuffing it out.
Emmett walked quietly at my side as we strode out of the museum and purposefully to the car idling at the curb. I could feel his unspoken words the second we were out of the gallery, I waited until my hand was on the door to ask.
“Let me have it.”
“Dinner? Really?” His disapproval was thick in his voice.
“I couldn’t help myself.” I shrugged as we slid into the backseat beside each other.
“She could ruin everything.”
I rolled my shoulders first then my neck. Fuck him. Dinner wasn’t going to ruin my claim to the throne. Some chick wasn’t either. If that night on the ice hadn’t torn me to shreds, nothing would. Nothing could.
As if reading my mind, Emmett murmured, “Rosalyn?”
“She was a long time ago.”
“And in some ways, she’s still every day,” he answered knowingly from the seat next to mine.
“She’s just a quick fuck.” I waved Filly and tonight off as much for his benefit as mine.
“Liar.”
Somehow Filly had spoken to the soft, untested flesh still hidden by the scar tissue that had formed in Rosalyn’s absence. The scar tissue I tried to deny. I smiled as I thought of the first moment I’d laid eyes on her, on that timid would-be touch toward the painting. Would she quiver like that if she reached out to touch me? Would she tremble beneath me? Would she see the beauty in my ugly?
Or would it be her blood dripping in place of Rosalyn’s, staining the pure crystalline snow a deep, dark crimson?
“It’s just fucking dinner,” I snarled.
“I pray, Brye.” Emmett helped chase the ghosts away. “Every fucking day I pray to God for you.”
My shoulders tensed and I spat the words out like they were broken glass. “Emmett, God doesn’t come to Chicago anymore.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about Brye. Shadow followed him, I’d seen it lashing out from his suited form, hungry, angry and wild. There was something wicked in him. I could tell if for no other reason than I had always been drawn to the villains in my parents’ stories; they were the ones with the depth, with the stories to tell. And I was inexplicably drawn to Brye. I mean, the way he’d looked at me when I spoke about the art... Something had brightened up behind his eyes, something I was sure he tried to keep a damper on.
He was unlike any of the boys I’d known. Where the boys of my childhood seemed to chase my skirts and pray for kisses, I got the sense Brye wouldn’t chase anything. He’d simply take. A shiver crawled up my spine.
I looked up to find a man with bright blue eyes watching me from the park bench across the path. My breath caught only for me to realize a moment later it wasn’t the exact right shade of icy blue. I smiled briefly as I compared him to Brye. He was handsome enough but missing the something more that overtook the room in Brye’s presence. The man licked his lips, but it was Brye’s, pillowy and oh-so-kissable that I could envision. I shook my head at myself, at the way I’d remembered each and every detail. When I looked away, I caught sight of a man jogging, sporting the same closely shaven haircut as Brye. His strong jaw wore the same scruff. I pushed up from my bench before realizing it wasn’t him. It was obvious when I look at his body. Brye’s body was…
Oh, sweet Lord, his body was drool-worthy.
I was intimately acquainted with the perfect form, the Adonis of Greek sculptures but Brye—shit. I wasn’t a virgin despite my dad and insane Uncles’ best efforts, but I’d been all gangly limbs and rushed kisses. I’d never gotten to run my hands along the taut muscles and deep valleys of a man. And damn was Brye a man complete with hooded eyes that seemed to undress me leisurely but thoroughly. The simple scent of his deodorant was crisp and cool and lingered in the space next to me even after he was gone.
He’d lingered with me even after he was gone.
I took a deep breath as I strolled along the Lakefront Trail, hoping the wind would whip Brye away from me. I had no business being intrigued by someone in Chicago. Let alone him. The gentle lap of the lake as it waved against the concrete breaker helped soothe my whirring mind. He was trouble. Undoubtedly. And likely the type my parents had warned me of. Or maybe they were exaggerating about it all. After being here for a few days, I couldn’t fathom why my parents hated this city.
It screamed them. Art. Architecture. Grit and grind. All with a hint of magic. I scanned the buildings nearby and could almost picture them driving the Charger up these streets or casually leaned against a brilliant building. For some reason, I felt like I was home.
Oh the questions I’d have once I was safely in San Francisco. Even if it did put me in unending shit. I’d let their vague answers slide for far too long.
I strolled toward the Navy Pier and my stomach rumbled at the divine scent wafting from the tourist pizza spot crowning the walk. It may have been kitschy and far too busy, but deep dish was one of the last things on my to-do list born from tattered postcards and a stack of photos, maps, and smashed pennies.
“Bar or dining room, gorgeous?” The gruff man smiled warmly at me.
“Bar, p
lease.”
He jerked his head toward the woodgrain U bar and I slid onto one of the furthest chairs. He checked my passport, then smiled up at me.
“Parlez vous Francais?”
“Oui. But English is my first language.” I took back the most recent incarnation of my passport, the one that listed our old Marseilles home as my address.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing alone in a rough city like this?” The bartender slid a coaster in front of me and leaned over the bar. He had thick Italian flags unfurled on both wrists.
“Chicago is wonderful.” I felt everything I’d seen in three days fill me up and ride the rush of my words.
He laughed and rearranged a few of the cocktail napkins. “I suppose it’s not too terrible here at the Pier or over at Millennium Park but don’t let that fool you. It’s not safe out there.” His eyes darted to the door, then to his tattoos, and something about his tone, his movements, reminded me of my parents for a totally different reason.
I swallowed. Hard.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He cupped his hand over mine and I watched the flags on his forearms ripple in what seemed like the winds of fate. He smiled reassuringly. “Drinks on me.”
“A good hoppy beer.” I pushed my unease down. “And a Chicago original deep dish.”
“Coming right up.”
I swiped to open my phone and googled Chicago Italian. Mafia auto-filled into the search bar. The results almost cost me my appetite. Headlines about gang violence, blood feuds, and FBI investigations filled my screen. One, in particular, caught my eye and sent blizzard shivers down my late summer warm spine.
Infamous crime boss, Mickey Maloney, found murdered in Mexico
Mexico. The connection seemed significant if for no other reason than the way my hair stood on end. I closed the browser and my thumb hovered over the phone icon as I considered calling my parents and telling the truth. I’d talked to them this morning, making up an elaborate story about a turquoise workshop in Taos, New Mexico.
