by JA Huss
He looks at me and when I meet his gaze straight on, I suddenly see my eyes staring back at me. We are more alike than I remember. Same build. Same muscles. Same hard jaw. Same blue eyes. Same dark-blonde hair.
He opens his mouth to say something. Maybe an explanation. Or maybe just another excuse.
But then we both turn and look at the stairs.
Because someone is coming up after us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - EMMA
I run up the stairs because I know Zach is coming after me. Sure enough, when I reach the landing of the next floor up, I hear the door below bang open. “Emma!” he yells. “Don’t!”
But I keep running. And when I get to the next floor I stop and punch in the emergency exit code.
0000.
It’s dangerous to lock a fire door, isn’t it? But less so when the code is easy to remember.
I throw the door open just as another one, far down the hallway, bangs closed.
I pause, aware that Zach is coming up behind me, hear nothing, and then walk quickly forward.
Zach bursts through the fire door just as I reach the end of the hallway and enter the living room.
“What the fuck?” I mutter. Stack and stacks of newspaper and too many guns to count lined up against the wall.
“Emma!” he yells. “Stop!”
I’m stopped. I’m shocked. I’m… “What the fuck?” I say, walking towards the windows. “What the fuck is this?”
“Emma, please,” Zach pleads. “Just let them handle this their own way.”
“What is this?” I ask, walking up to the window and pointing at the first article.
“I don’t know,” Zach says. “I swear to God. I’ve never been up here until a few minutes ago when I came with Joey. I can’t even begin to understand what’s been happening.”
“‘Baby Boston caught again,’” I say, reading the closest headline. “‘Jesse Boston busted for drugs.’ ‘Jesse Boston leaves yachting association in disgrace.’ ‘Jesse Boston—'” I whirl around to face Zach. “What is this?”
He shakes his head, then says, “It’s exactly what it looks like.”
“Well, it looks like… it looks to me like…”
Zach is already nodding.
“They did this to him? They fed those stories about Jesse to the tabloids?” It hits me then. I know who gave Hot Tonight Show the security footage. “Johnny did this?”
Zach throws up his hands. “You know as much as I do.”
“His brother? Ruined his life?” It’s only then I fully realize that neither Johnny nor Jesse are here. “Where are they?”
Zach looks past me and I turn to see what he’s fixated on.
Another door. “Where’s that go?”
“Upstairs,” he says. “I think that’s where they are.”
I head toward the door, pull it open, and start running up the stairs. It occurs to me that I am so deep inside the innards of this building, no one would ever hear me scream. I could get lost in this place. I could never come out.
There is nothing but silence when I reach the next door. Zach is behind me. Quiet now. We look at each other. Then up. Because there’s one more floor above us. Zach shakes his head. Not up there, that shake says. Then he sucks in a deep breath of air, reaches for the door in front of us, and pulls it open.
Jesse is the first person I see. He looks at me, open-mouthed. Like he has something to say. But before he can, Johnny says, “Take her somewhere far away.” He juts his chin to me. “Get her out of here and never come back. I’ll take care of everything, I promise.”
“What?” Jesse says. “What the fuck are you talking about?” His voice is loud and it’s clear that he’s just as confused as I am.
“I’m talking about who we are, Jesse. What we are. What we do.”
“What do we do?” Zach says.
Johnny looks at him and says, “You don’t have to do anything. None of you do.”
“Then why did you bring me up here?” Jesse asks. “What does this fucking”—he looks around—“office have to do with anything?”
“You don’t remember any of it?” Johnny asks him. “Not even where those lead to?” He motions to the stairs behind Zach and me.
Jess stares at the darkness behind me, squinting his eyes. “The… spire,” he whispers.
I glance at Johnny quick enough to see him nod. “The spire. We were up there once, remember? Dad told us to go up there and watch.” Johnny takes a few steps closer to Jesse and I have a sudden urge to stand between them. There’s something wrong with him. Something deeply disturbing. And what is up with his outfit? He looks like… he looks like a cross between a general and… an evangelist.
“You want to know?” Johnny says. “You really want to know?”
I glance at Jesse as he nods. “Yes,” he says. “Tell me.”
But Johnny shakes his head. “I have to show you.”
“OK,” Zach says, “Maybe he’s right, Jesse. Maybe we should just leave. I mean”—Zach shakes his head—“maybe not knowing is better.”
“You don’t know anything yet,” Johnny says. “You can walk away. Just… be who you are, Jesse. And you too, Zach,” he says, looking at Zach. “But if you go up there, there’s no turning back. Once you know, you can’t un-know.”
Jesse hesitates. Looks at me, then Johnny, then Zach. Then back to me. He reaches for my hand, like we’re gonna leave, but I say, “No,” and take a step backward. “No way.”
All of them look at me. But I’m talking to Johnny now. That’s what Joey said to do. Tell it to the one who bites.
“We’re not running. Fuck that. Do you even know who I am?”
Zach lets out a small laugh.
“I am the goddamned numbers girl for the fifth largest cosmetics company on the planet Earth! That’s the entire planet of Earth! And I have friends, OK? Powerful friends. Bossy friends who aren’t afraid to drug and kidnap for revenge. I drive a motherfucking Lamborghini Huracán in matte black. I am one-fourth owner of the biggest pink jet ever made and… and I have three massive brothers who know how to… fish. You get me?” I say, pointing my finger at them. “This bullshit ends now.”
No one says anything. And Johnny just blinks at me a few times.
So I sigh and give Jesse my full attention. “Look. OK, I will admit that this is all totally weird and I’m pretty sure I don’t understand any of it. But I love you, OK? There. I said it. I love you and I see that this family is ruining you.” I point to Johnny. “You’re the one who sent that footage to the tabloids. And I want answers, motherfucker. All the goddamned answers!”
A slow clap echoes out from the stairwell and we all turn our heads to find Joey. Smug and maybe kinda proud, even though his left eye is totally swollen shut. He says, “I was coming up here to say all that and tell everyone I’m in charge now because Johnny has obviously gone insane, just like our fathers. But fuck it. I think the lady has it handled.”
I straighten my back and raise my chin. Look directly at Johnny and say, “What is going on?”
He looks at Jesse, then Joey, then Zach, then me. And says, “Go upstairs. Be very quiet. And don’t let anyone see you. I’ll meet you back down here when it’s over.”
“When what’s over?” Jesse asks. “Who’s up there?”
But Johnny is already walking away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - JESSE
“Fuck it,” I say, after watching Johnny walk away. I look at Joey. Then Zach. Then finally, Emma. “Are we doing this or what?”
“We’re doing it,” Joey says. “I’m fucking sick of this shit. I don’t care what’s waiting for us up there. I’m getting answers.”
Joey turns back to the stairs and starts climbing.
“Zach?” I say, looking at him.
He shrugs. “Up to you, man. You’re the boss.”
“Emma?” I say, turning to her next. “You can leave. This has nothing to do with you.”
She scowls at me. Points her finger
in my face. “Did you just not hear me? I love you. I have always loved you. Since the first time I laid eyes on you. I was in then and I’m in now. You’ll have to drag me out of here kicking and screaming to make me leave now.”
“OK.” I sigh. “Then follow me.”
We quietly enter the stairwell and climb. I stop at the door, looking back over my shoulder at Zach and Emma like, Last chance.
But Emma pushes me on the shoulder and whispers, “Open it.”
So I do. There’s an immediate murmur. Like somewhere ahead there’s a large crowd of people.
But I’m distracted when I glance up and see the glass spire above us.
This is the top of the building. We are seventy-five stories above the city right now.
And I feel every bit of that distance. I feel like I just walked into another world.
“Over here,” Joey whispers, peeking his head out from the edge of a hallway. “They’re down there.”
The three of us walk towards him like a team and I have a flash of memory.
I have been up here before.
Once.
Joey and Johnny were there too. I don’t know how old I was. Very young. And now that I think back this might even be my first memory.
This spire. My brothers. The murmur of a crowd down below us.
And once we turn the corner it becomes very clear that this spire isn’t a floor like the rest of them. It’s more like a catwalk around the interior of the penthouse below us. Like a choir loft in a church.
Floor-to-ceiling beams are evenly spaced around the catwalk. Joey gets down on his hands and knees and crawls across the catwalk, stopping behind each beam to peek down below, then continues on until he finally stops at the fourth beam and motions for us to follow him.
Emma drops to her knees and immediately begins to crawl. I follow, then Zach follows me.
She stops to hide behind the beam closest to Joey, I continue forward and join her, and Zach ends up at the beam behind me.
Down below is a fancy dining room. Like you’d see in a banquet hall. Maybe three dozen tables. I count the place settings at each table and do a quick count. A little over two hundred men and women below us. All dressed up in black suits and white ties, like Johnny. But unlike Johnny, these men do not have the white epaulettes on the shoulders.
The women are all wearing white dresses and small white hats with a short veil that covers their faces.
For a second I think it looks like a wedding.
But there’s too much… wrongness here, for it to be a wedding.
“What the fuck?” Zach whispers.
No one answers him. We have no answers. Only more questions.
Then suddenly everyone down below goes quiet. The hushed murmurs stop and everyone stands.
Johnny appears at the head of the room and the people clap. Not like… applause, exactly. But polite clapping.
Johnny stands at the top of the room under a spotlight that coats him in an eerie white haze.
Then, without anyone speaking a word, a woman at the top of the room stands and walks forward towards him.
I realize that whatever this dinner is, it’s over. Everyone has already eaten.
The woman approaches Johnny, stops in front of him, then does a little bow, and hands him a white envelope.
“What the fuck?” I mumble.
Joey shushes me and when I look over at Zach, he’s just shrugging.
A man is now standing next to Johnny. He takes the envelope when Johnny offers it, and places it in a large metal box on wheels. While all that was happening a line has formed along the side of the banquet hall. And the whole thing repeats itself.
They approach Johnny, bow, hand him the envelope, and Johnny hands it off to be placed in the box.
It takes me several minutes to realize that people are leaving. That the room is emptying out. One by one, as they hand over whatever is in that envelope, they exit through doors directly below us.
We watch as every single person in the room hands him an envelope. And by the time it’s done my legs are cramping and everyone is getting restless.
But we stay. Because surely Johnny will say something, right?
He has not said a word this whole time.
But when the last person hands over their envelope Johnny places it inside the box himself, flips the large trunk lid closed, and turns to leave, pulling the box behind him.
No comment at all.
And that makes sense. Because there’s no one left to talk to.
Joey crawls over to us, still being quiet and stealthy, even though there’s no one left down below to hide from. “Let’s go,” he says.
We all crawl back the way we came, then stand, walk down the hallway in silence, and then enter the stairs and descend back to Johnny’s floor.
He’s waiting for us in the office. The box beside him. He opens it up to reveal more than two hundred white envelopes.
“Dude,” I say. “What the fuck was that?”
He just hands me an envelope and says, “Open it and see.”
I take the envelope. It’s sealed with black wax. And imprinted in the wax is a monogram with the initials WAY. I shoot Johnny a questioning look, but he just says, “Open it.”
I crack the wax and pull the flap up. Inside is… “A card?” I say, once again looking at Johnny for some kind of explanation. He says nothing.
The card says:
Promissory note in the amount of one hundred million dollars for The Way from Member Number Two Hundred Nine.
“Who the fuck is The Way?” I ask, just as Joey comes over and takes the check from me.
“Apparently,” Johnny says, “I am.”
“What?” Zach says, taking the card from Joey. “A hundred million dollars? Jesus.”
“Every one of those cards promises the same amount,” Johnny says.
“Why?” Emma asks.
Johnny looks at her, then Zach, then Joey, then me. “Because… I’m the boss?” He says it like a question.
“You’re the boss?” I say.
“I’m the boss.”
“Of what?” Joey says.
He laughs. “I have no fucking clue.”
“What do you mean?” Joey asks. “How could you be the boss of something like…” He looks back at the stairwell, then points to Johnny’s suit coat. “Something like that… shit show… and not even know what it is?”
Johnny takes off the suit coat, places it reverently back on the valet stand, then walks around to the other side of the large desk and takes a seat. He leans back in his chair and smiles. “I have looked through every fucking file in the upper-floor vaults.”
“Wait,” I say. “What vaults?”
Johnny sighs. Like he doesn’t want to talk about any of this and now that he started, he realizes there’s even more to explain than he realized. “All our floors have an inner vault filled with documents that chronicle the… business, I guess you’d call it. The Way. But it’s just accounting. All those files down on my floor. That’s five years of searching for answers. And I have none, you guys.”
“So wait,” Emma says, holding up a hand. “You don’t kill people for a living?”
“What?” He laughs and leans forward.
“All those fucking guns,” Zach says.
“Well. Call me paranoid. But if you were me and every month you went out into that banquet hall and collected twenty billion dollars and you had no idea why, you’d collect guns too.”
Truth.
“Where does the money go?” Joey asks.
We all look at Johnny. He shakes his head and lets out a long, tired breath.
Then he says, “Us. It all goes to us.”
There’s a long moment of silence as we all think about that statement.
“Wait,” Joey says. “I don’t understand.”
Johnny swivels his chair to the right to face Joey and says, “I don’t either, Joe. Dad came to me after Uncle Chuck died and he made me watch, jus
t like I made you. We’ve been up there before. Do you remember?”
“I do,” I say. “Barely, but I do.”
“It was after Mom disappeared,” Joey says.
“He told me that day too, but I was what? Four?” Johnny shakes his head. “It didn’t make any sense. I knew the ceremonies happened every month because he made sure I knew. But I didn’t do anything other than sit up in the loft where you guys were and watch until Dad died.”
“And then what happened?” Zach asks. “Did someone come and tell you to take his place?”
“No,” Johnny says. “I just… put the fucking suit on and carried on.”
“Why?” Joey asks. “Why the fuck would you do that?”
Johnny looks at Joey and makes a face of don’t-be-an-asshole. “You know why, Joe.”
“Wait, hold on,” Emma says. “I don’t know why. Fill me in!”
“Why are you here?” Johnny snaps at her.
“I don’t know either,” I say. Not because I want to know. I have decided maybe I don’t need to know this shit. I say it because I don’t want Johnny looking too close at Emma. She’s the one who started this night. She’s the one who opened the can of worms. She’s the reason…
“Hey,” I say. Narrowing my eyes at Johnny. “What the fuck is up with you and me? Do you fuckin’ hate me or something?”
“Yeah,” Emma says. “Whatever with your creepy money ritual. You’re the reason why the tabloids are talking about us right now. You gave them that footage.”
“I had to,” Johnny says. “I needed…” He pauses to take a deep breath and look me in the eyes. “I needed the cover.”
“Cover for what?” Zach asks.
Johnny swivels his chair around, gets up, and starts walking away. I grab him by the arm and grip it tight. “Where the fuck are you going?”
“Yeah, answer the question,” Joey says. “Cover for what?”
He glares at Joey. Joey glares back. His eye almost swollen shut. And it hits me that for a moment there, I forgot who Johnny is. I only saw him for who he was.
But he had a gun to my brother’s head when I walked in.
Was he going to kill him? Or was it just a threat?
