The Hunter

by Shen, L. J.

  She opened, looking alert, like it wasn’t two in the morning. She’d been waiting for me.

  “Well?” Her eyes widened in anticipation.

  “You told your dad. You’ve never asked him for this kind of favor.”

  “I had to help you in some way,” she said quietly.

  I knew how much it had cost her, how much it wounded her sense of who she was, and vowed to make it up to her.

  “Can I go Christian Grey on your ass and invite you for a trip in my private plane?” I flashed her my pearly whites.

  “I guess. But no BDSM.”

  “Boo. You’re no fun.”

  “Invite someone else, then.” She laughed.

  I pulled her out, barely resisting the urge to kiss her.

  “Fun is overrated. Let’s go.”

  The private plane was plush and yacht-styled, all mahogany and crème accents and brass fittings. I didn’t want to think about the amount of Cillian and Gerald jizz these custom seats had seen, and I was so mad at them when I thought about the amount of pussy they had access to on this ride. In fact, I almost decided not to save their ungrateful asses for not sharing their toy with me.

  Almost.

  Then I remembered pussy didn’t matter anymore, unless it was attached to a certain redheaded banshee.

  I was on pins and needles all the way to Maine. Whether Syllie got what he deserved or not, I still needed to tell my brother and father the refinery was about to explode. I didn’t know when, exactly, Syllie wanted to put the plan in motion. Logically, I had at least until the morning to get to them, and the flight was a short one. But what if Da wanted to see the refinery as soon as he landed? That was a golden opportunity for the fuckers to blow his ass up.

  My old man was exactly the kind of person to go check on his property at four in the morning, as soon as his feet touched the ground.

  Sailor talked about everything and nothing to lighten the mood. She gave me the ins and outs of her face-off with Lana and Junsu, said she was checking out other places to practice, but that she was hanging the bow, so to speak.

  “So what will you do now?” I tapped my foot on the floor.

  A stewardess with a black uniform leaned down to offer us refreshments and food with a plastic smile. She was young-ish. Young enough to wink at me after Sailor was busy unscrewing her bottle of apple juice while I cracked open my root beer. The stewardess brushed my shoulder with her hand when she left, telling me she was there if I needed anything.

  Sailor saw it, but said nothing.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want her,” I said.

  “You don’t owe me an explanation,” she replied, peeling off the label on the cold, dripping bottle of juice. “The deal is off. You can do whatever you like.”

  “I’d like to do you, then,” I deadpanned.

  “Hunter.” She sighed. “Friends, remember?”

  She was exasperating.

  “So what are you going to do, if not archery?” I asked again, sitting back, watching her through hooded eyes. I couldn’t believe I’d thought her to be anything less than gorgeous a few months ago. I was addicted to every curve of her face now.

  “Promise not to laugh?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Now it was her turn to laugh. I grinned.

  “I want to study journalism.”

  “Why?”

  “Food critic.”

  “Dope,” I said. We were pretending my family wasn’t on the brink of exploding. I appreciated that she went along with the charade.

  “Right?” She bit her lip.

  “Totally.”

  “Hunter…” She trailed off, bringing her thumb to her mouth.

  Uh-oh. There was concern in her voice. “When was the last time you slept?”

  “Fuck if I remember.” I shrugged. “Four days ago?” That sounded about right. I did take catnaps, dozing off for ten minutes here and there.

  She tapped her shoulder and said, “I promise to wake you up if you get a notification or a phone call.”

  I stood and walked over to the crème and navy velvet sofa where she was seated. I pressed my head against her shoulder and closed my eyes. She kissed my hair.

  It was the sweetest sleep I ever had.

  There really was no reception on the godforsaken hill where the refinery was positioned. Right next to it were the living facilities of the workers, where Da and Cillian were staying to show solidarity and I guess to convey that they weren’t above slumming it with the blue-collar folks. (Spoiler alert: they were.)

  Luckily, there was reception on the way to the facilities, so I had time to text Troy, Sam, Mom, and Aisling, letting them know we’d gotten here okay. Apparently, Syllie had been singing to the FBI and trying to pin everything on this Boris dude, since he thought they had more than they did.

  He was going to rot in jail for a long-ass time.

  But none of it would be worth it if I couldn’t get to Da and Cillian.

  I bounced my leg in the back of the Range Rover that drove us to the refinery, looking out the window. Dawn gradually broke, leaving the frosty mountains aglow in pink and yellow.

  When we finally pulled up at the apartment complex by the refinery, someone opened the door for us and announced that Da and Cillian were in Da’s room upstairs. I bolted after him while Sailor thanked our driver and asked to speak to the manager. I’d asked her to ask them to evacuate the refinery and surrounding area completely. Even if we weren’t there when it exploded, it was likely to reach the apartments and even farther down the street to the fisherman’s village.

  I took the stairs to Athair’s room three at a time. When I reached his door, I swung it open, not bothering with a knock. I found Cillian and Da sitting at a corner desk of an extremely modest room that had a double bed covered with an orange, fuzzy quilt. The furniture looked clean but dated. They were both wide awake. Da was drinking scotch. Cillian sifted through a bunch of documents, looking like he gave very few fucks about my surprise entrance.

  On the desk next to Cillian, his phone flashed with an incoming message.

  Fucker had reception somehow.

  Unbelievable.

  Fresh anger ripped through me, tripling in quantity. They’d ghosted me.

  I stormed inside, picked up his phone, and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall and broke in HALF, which—I’d been pretty sure until today—was fucking impossible. Screw polo. I was obviously a wasted baseball hero.

  “You want to tell me you haven’t had reception for twelve hours now? That you haven’t checked your emails and phones for that long? Bullshit! I tried to reach you dozens of times before dragging my sorry ass here. Why weren’t you picking up?” I leaned down, roaring. Flecks of my saliva flew onto their faces.

  Cillian flipped a page in his document, refusing to acknowledge my presence in the room. Da took another measured sip from his drink.

  Don’t kill them yourself. It’s what Syllie wants.

  “You want to tell him or should I?” Cillian asked flatly, his eyes still on the goddamn document.

  My father looked me straight in the eye, smirking. “You’ve passed the test, son.”

  I had visions just then: visions of myself bashing my father’s head against the wall behind him.

  Visions of wrestling Cillian to the floor and punching the smugness out of his fair features.

  Stuff like that. But I just flashed my craziest, don’t-forget-to-smile grin, which must’ve looked a lot like the promising start of a psychotic episode. “I did? How. Fucking. Fun. Please enlighten me, Father Dearest.”

  Cillian finally had the courtesy to dump the document he was reading on the desk. He glanced up at me. “When you came to us about Syllie, Athair didn’t want to believe it. To me, Syllie was always a loose cannon. I took it upon myself to assign Troy Brennan to the task of seeing what he was up to, what dish Sylvester was stirring for us in the disaster pot.” Cillian delivered his speech in a matter-of-fact way that implied he was recit
ing a cabbage soup recipe.

  So that’s why the FBI came kicking down Syllie’s door. Troy already had sufficient legally-obtained evidence on him.

  “We found out what he was up to with Boris Omelniski and his little friends in Maine, about the plan to blow the refinery with us in it. We made sure it was empty and all faulty machinery had been shut down. It was a money-sucker, but we couldn’t take any risks.”

  My whole body simmered with rage that threatened to choke me.

  “Then why did you put me through all this bullshit?” I hissed, my teeth clenched together. “Shut me down every time I tried to warn you about him? Made me go through dozens of sleepless nights of listening to the fucker, on top of doing college work and working full time for your asses? I jumped through hoops and lived on zero sleep to prevent this bullshit…and you’re telling me you knew about it all along?”

  My father stood, stepping around the desk and opening his arms. It occurred to me, albeit sadly, that no matter how badly he treated me, I still referred to him as Da, even in my head.

  “Hence, you passed the test.”

  “Fuck your test!” I seethed, pointing at him. “Fuck it in the ass with a twelve-inch dildo. I almost killed myself trying to save you. I bent over backwards for you. I went to war for you. I was willing to burn, to die, to perish. For. You.”

  It was Cillian’s turn to stand. “As I said, it was your dirty job to pull. Pull you did, and in a timely manner. Something that, fortunately, has never been a problem for you, judging by the lack of baby mommas knocking on our door.”

  “Go to hell, Cillian.” I dragged my fingers through my hair.

  “Already there. It’s called life.”

  “So you trusted me to crack this riddle, but not enough to rely on me?” I turned my attention back to Da.

  Troy Brennan was about as ruthless and skillful as they came, and Sam Brennan was the golden child of the underworld. Those two could win a cold war with a decade-old laptop and a BB gun. That’s what they did for a living. Of course they’d unveiled Syllie’s plan before I did.

  “Correct,” my father said, a twinkle of warmth in his eyes. “Needless to say, the will shall be altered accordingly. You are my heir. My child. A Fitzpatrick. You will keep your job at Royal Pipelines. And you will get a corner office, the one next to Cillian’s. You proved yourself a true member of the family, Hunter.” He opened his arms, expecting me to…what? Jump right in?

  I smiled tightly. “Fuck you, your money, and your last name, old sport. If I have to earn being your family, I never will be.”

  We rented a car and drove the four hours back to Boston. Hunter was silent the entire time, save for the first ten minutes, when he rehashed everything that had happened with his father and brother in a strange, detached voice that didn’t belong to him.

  “That’s how little faith they had in me.”

  “You didn’t exactly give them prime reason to trust you before, though.” I argued their point, not necessarily because I agreed with them, but because I knew how miserable it would make Hunter to be estranged from his family. No matter the complexities of their relationship, he loved and adored Cillian and Gerald, looked up to them. He always wanted to be like them and never thought he could.

  “You sound like them.”

  “You mean, logical?”

  He scoffed. “Did you know about my dad hiring yours?” He sent me a sidelong glance, scowling as he continued zipping through the open road.

  “Are you insane?” I asked. “Of course not.”

  “And if you knew?” he pressed.

  I was hoping he wouldn’t ask that. I shook my head. “I don’t answer hypothetical questions.”

  “Newsflash: you’re about to answer this one,” he shot back.

  “You need to calm down.”

  “What I need is someone on my fucking side.”

  “I am on your side,” I growled.

  “You’d be in my bed, if you were,” he had the audacity to say, no trace of guilt or remorse in his words. “Yet you aren’t.”

  “That’s because I’m on my side, too.”

  “Meaning?” He scoffed.

  “Meaning I don’t want to be any more attached to you than I already am, because you obviously don’t feel the same.”

  “And if I do?” he asked after a charged pause.

  I shook my head. “You don’t. You’re incapable of that. You come from a long line of adulterers. How would you know any different?”

  He sat back, shaking his head. I immediately knew how awful that sounded. How disgusting I was to him. “Cat’s out of the bag now. So if I’m a serial adulterer like my parents, does that mean you’re going to be carving people’s faces like a pumpkin like your daddy? Are we playing the gene game now? ’Cause rest assured, darling, we may not be the same brand of fuck-up, but we are both far from the realms of normalcy.”

  I said nothing. He was right.

  Hunter continued, “What would it take for you to know I’m serious about this? About us? A grand gesture? A binding contract? A fucking ring?”

  “Maybe stop being ashamed of me. Of us,” I bit back. “That could have been enough.”

  I referred to the night with Knight and Luna, to all the times he’d minimized whatever it was we’d had. I was sure he caught the reference.

  Hunter got a text message. He opened it, driving.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, throwing his phone to the central console as more text messages poured in, lighting his screen in white. His screensaver was a picture of a woman’s ass with the saying: Go hard or go home.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he punched the steering wheel, seething. “I need to catch a plane to London. Something came up.”

  “What?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Vaughn,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I’m dropping you off at home. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep my pants on while I’m there. As for you, try not to kill anyone, yeah?”

  Now a week had passed since Hunter grabbed me by the arm and stormed out of the refinery apartments in Maine. It was the first time since he was a boy in the rain that I’d seen him truly broken.

  I hadn’t heard from him since he’d left for London. I didn’t want to ask Aisling about him, but of course I couldn’t help myself. She said he’d gone for the weekend and hadn’t been picking up anyone’s calls. When I finally broke down and visited his apartment, he wasn’t there.

  Not two days ago, and not yesterday, long after he was supposed to be back, according to Ash.

  Hunter had disappeared, and with him, my favorite summer.

  “Thank you so much for doing this. I know how much you loathe the media.” Vanessa Shieling of the Good Morning, Boston! show leaned forward and tapped my thigh, a veneered smile on her face.

  There was something almost clownish about her Botox-enhanced perfection. Her carefully swept blonde hair was too shiny, too put-together. She straightened her back in her seat, brushing nonexistent wrinkles from her A-line red dress.

  “How do you know I dislike interviews?”

  She wasn’t wrong. The best part about retiring from archery was I didn’t have to talk to the media anymore. Because while Royal Pipeline’s refinery didn’t explode, the Junsu and Lana case did. The media wanted my side of the story. I refused, but then Crystal, whom I still had a contract with, argued that by not addressing it, I was letting the rumors about my own misconduct roam free.

  “You did nothing wrong, at least this decade. You killed her dog, not her parents,” she spat over the phone, and I cringed. But she wasn’t wrong. I needed to set the record straight once and for all.

  “Thirty seconds,” the director of the show called from the depths of the darkness in front of the well-lit studio. There was a whole other world in front of the stage, with Boston’s landscape in the background—one with cameras and wires and people with head mics and frantic assistants, living in the shadows of the glamorous TV world. There was also an audience. The
seats were jam-packed and full of viewers.

  Vanessa gave the director the thumbs-up. “We have everything we need?”

  “Yup,” he answered.

  Everything they needed? I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Ready?” She turned to ask me.

  “As I ever will be,” I muttered.

  Once we were on air, Vanessa began questioning me about the rivalry with Lana, the roots of it. I told her about Spot and about Lana’s injury, which I’d caused. I came clean about my part of what happened. Then we discussed all the things that had been done to me. Lana and Junsu were facing serious allegations, and likely weren’t going to participate in any official sports in this lifetime. Then Vanessa turned her line of questions to more private matters.

  “Let’s talk about those paparazzi pictures.” Vanessa rested her chin over her knuckles, frowning in concentration. “You were seen storming out of your former archery club with a half-naked Hunter Fitzpatrick on your heels. For viewers who are not aware, Mr. Fitzpatrick is the nineteen-year-old heir to Royal Pipelines and a notorious playboy. Earlier last year, he was involved in a scandalous sex-tape incident that—”

  I raised my palm. “No.”

  “Excuse me?” She smiled tightly.

  “No. You cannot reduce him to being a playboy, to…to some guy who had a sex tape. He was filmed without his knowledge while doing something…” I wanted to say “that he regretted,” but Hunter probably didn’t regret one second of it. “…something that should’ve been done more privately, yes. But he is not some silly heir. He is hardworking and honest and generous and caring. He would put himself at risk for those he cares about.”

  I thought about the pub brawl he’d gotten into when we barely knew each other, about the lengths he’d gone to to save his father and brother. I even thought about that stupid fundraiser, when I’d freaked out and he’d held me in his arms, refusing to let go until I was completely okay.

  “Hunter has made mistakes, but so has the rest of humanity,” I continued. “Only difference is Hunter has had the public eye on him since day one. He never had a chance to figure himself out privately.”