by Callie Hart
“Do you, Alexander Frederic Bastien, take this woman, Genevieve Louisa Eleanor Kendrick, to be your wife? Do you promise to be true to her, in good times and in bad? In sickness and in health? Do you promise to love and honor her all the days of her life?”
Ah, the irony. Gustavo knows I’m incapable of love. He told my father he thought I was a sociopath when I was just five years old. Asking if I promise to love Genevieve is like asking the sun not to rise. It goes against the laws of physics, of logic, common sense, and any other law you might care to come up with. I know a thing or two about honor, though. “I do,” I say. My voice has a hard, stone-worn edge to it. My agreement to Gustavo’s question is more than that; it’s a threat. Genevieve will be mine forever. There’s no way out for her once this is over. She will belong to me no matter what. She must hear this in my voice. She goes paler and paler by the second as Father Gustavo asks her the same questions he just asked of me.
“…sickness and in health. Do you promise to love and honor him all the days of his life?”
She swallows. Her pupils look blown, so wide and black that for a brief moment her irises look entirely black. “I do,” she whispers.
“Then I now pronounce you man and wife.” Gustavo hesitates for a second, and then adds, “May God have mercy on your soul, young lady.”
The whole ceremony lasts only a few minutes, but the seconds seem to drag out for eternity. I step forward and hold out my hand to West. He places the handle of my knife into my palm, and Genevieve fastens her bottom lip between her teeth, panic finally blossoming on her features. I take hold of her dress by the strap over her left shoulder and I quickly cut the material, slashing through it with ease. I do the same to the other side, and the white silk tumbles from her body, gathering in a pool at her feet. As I demanded of her, she’s not wearing any underwear. She stands with her hands at her sides, fingers twitching reflexively, as if she wants to cover herself. I give her a look that lets her know just how displeased I will be with her if she does this, and something happens: a flash of anger lights up her face. Instead of hiding her embarrassment, Genevieve rolls her shoulders back and lifts her chin, staring me down. Fucking adorable. She thinks she can stand up to me? She thinks she’s brave enough for what’s to come? She has no idea how absolutely messed up and confusing her world is about to get. I’m going to have the time of my fucking life showing her. There will come a time, soon, when she will have to choose between me and her brothers, and she will not be able to turn her back on me. She will beg for their deaths just so long as I continue to allow her into my bed. She’ll turn her back on her blood in order to remain in my good graces. She won’t just give me her heart. She’ll give me her soul and everything else she holds dear, and I will take it all from her with a savage fucking smile on my face.
I begin to unbutton my shirt. “I hope you’re ready. You understand what I require of you?”
She breathes out heavily, then nods. “You tell me what you want, and I obey.”
West bites down on his bottom lip, groaning under his breath. Vaughn remains silent, but I can see the anticipation glittering in his eyes. Genevieve shifts, clearly uncomfortable that my brothers appear to be growing excited. “Are they…are they going to…?”
“They’re witnesses. They have to witness everything. That a problem?” This is how it used to be done back when kings and queens used to get married. A room full of people would stay and watch the newlyweds fuck, just to make sure the marriage was consummated. The Bastien family have also adhered to this tradition for as long as anyone can remember. My mother and father, my grandparents, my great grandparents, on and on, forever. Genevieve’s obviously repelled by the idea of so many people hanging around to watch us in bed. She frowns, deep lines marking her brow.
“It’s not a problem,” she whispers. “Let’s just get it over with.”
She assumes I’m going to screw her until I come and that will be that. She’s sorely mistaken. Tonight won’t be over until I’ve made her come. She needs to surrender to me in every way, and that includes her pleasure.
I strip down until I’m naked. Father Gustavo clears his throat, scratching at the back of his hand and his forearm like a junky craving his next fix. “I think, then, if that’s all, I should be going—”
“You’re not going anywhere,” I snap. “If he tries to leave, cut his fucking balls off.”
“Gladly,” West says.
Gustavo opens his mouth, shocked, but then clearly thinks better of objecting and closes it again. Vaughn laughs very quietly under his breath, and Genevieve jumps at the unexpected sound of amusement.
“On the bed,” I demand. She walks backwards until she reaches the bed, and then climbs up as I’ve instructed. She makes herself small, hugging her knees to her chest, watching me as I approach her like a frightened deer.
“From here on out, there are no safe words,” I tell her. “There’s no backing out. You’re here for me to use. You’re here for me to do whatever the hell we want to you. You’re here for me to own you. Nothing is off-limits. Your body is my playground…and I like to play hard.” I don’t finish up this statement by asking her if this is okay. If it’s not okay, then it’s simply tough luck. She said the words. She relinquished control of her body and her life just now when she said
“I do.” She sold her soul to the devil, and now he’s come to collect.
I climb up onto the bed and I push her roughly back onto the mattress. She stretches out long, but her arms and legs are rigid; I’m sure every part of her is screaming right now, begging her to fight me off, to get up and run, but she must know how futile that would be. If I wasn’t already painfully fucking hard, the sight of her laid out like this would have my dick throbbing in less than a cool second. She’s incredible. Her breasts aren’t huge, maybe a little more than a handful, but they’re fucking amazing. Her nipples—small, a fragile shade of pink—are peaked and so ready for me to take into my mouth. The curve of her hips; the long, lean muscles in her legs; the slope of her collarbone, and the pool of her ink black hair around her head, arranged like a dark halo…every small piece of her on its own is flawless, but combined together she looks like a painting, a work of art that could never be replicated.
She sucks in a deep breath as I lean down, lowering my face toward hers. “I’m going to unlock your secrets,” I growl, deep and low. “I’m going to discover every last one of them. Your body will betray you, and you’ll hate me for it. You’re going to want me, and you’re going to be ashamed of the fact. There’s no point trying to hide from the inevitable, though. There’s no point trying to deny me. You’re no longer Genevieve Kendrick. You’re Genevieve Bastien. Get used to the name. The whole of New Orleans will know it soon…”
CHAPTER ONE
TOMMY
Sex. Sweat. Cigarettes. Salt.
The air is full of all four as I navigate my way through the packed dance floor of Elysium nightclub. Barely dressed bodies heave and writhe against each other to a demented, heavy bass line as I forge a path toward the innocuous, shadowy exit at the rear of the vast room. The knife in my hand is the kind you’d use to skin a buck. It’s fiercely sharp with an evil-looking serrated blade. Maybe people catch flares of bright red and blue light exploding from the polished edge of the weapon as I slip through them, and maybe they don’t.
I’m only twenty-eight. My haircut is on point. The t-shirt I’m wearing cost about three hundred dollars, and my jeans are the perfect balance between skinny and skater. Nothing about me singles me out of this crowd, marking me as out of the ordinary. I could easily be one of the preppy hipster guys grinding up against the heavily perfumed, fake-breasted, botox-injected women that surround me. I am different, though. I’m not here to party. I’m not here to get high or to fuck. I am a salmon swimming upstream against the current, on a mission, focused with purpose. My purpose is simple:
I am here to kill a man.
As I reach the exit, hidden amongst the sha
dows at the far edge of the dance floor, the DJ in the box on the mezzanine level switches up the song and the crowd loses their shit. I don’t know the music. I haven’t been keeping up to date with the latest artists, so I don’t know who the rapper is or what he’s so angry about, but the heavy beat underpinning the lyrics is intoxicating. I haven’t dropped a metric ton of MDMA like everyone else in the place, so I can’t feel the thump of the drums rushing through every molecule of my body the same way they can. But I can imagine…
I hit the flat metal bar on the exit and push it open, ducking out through the doorway before anyone can notice me. Outside, the night air is humid and sticky, just as stifling as it was inside the club. Welcome to Los Angeles in August. My shirt clings to my back as I jog down the narrow metal staircase before me, my boots ringing off the steps, the sound echoing around the high walls of the tapered alleyway. Hurrying toward a series of dumpsters shoved up against the crumbling brickwork at the mouth of the backstreet, I stoop down and move some of the swollen black garbage bags that have been piled on the ground. Trash. Trash. Trash. No black rucksack. Colby said it would be here. He said he’d left it—
My hand stills on something waxed and tough, the touch instantly familiar. Squinting into the darkness, I unearth the bag from its hiding place, wrinkling my nose when trash can juice pours out of one of the garbage bags and chases up my arm. Well, that’s just fucking perfect. Still, when I lift the bag out into the light, I recognize it. It’s mine. The bag I’m looking for. If it was filled with money or coke, Garrett Jonas, owner of the Elysium nightclub, might have posted a watchman to guard it. Make sure it was picked up by me and no one else. Since it’s filled with baby powder and chalk dust, I reckon it’s fairly safe to assume no one has a beady eye on me right now, though. I shoulder the bag, trying not to breathe through my nose—God knows how long it’s been sitting there for, it fucking stinks—and I take up my position at the foot of the stairwell I just came down.
I check the watch on my wrist. Nearly one in the morning. The guy Garrett wants me to string up and make an example out of has eight minutes to show up before he’s late. I fucking hate when people are late. I saw at least three women back on the dance floor I’d like to take a run at and I can’t do that if I’m waylaid out here. I shouldn’t be distracted by pussy. I should be focused on the task at hand. Problem is, I’d rather be anywhere than here. Technically, I could have turned the job down. I could have stayed home and gotten high, watched the UFC, jerked off and gone to sleep. Garrett Jonas isn’t the type of dude you say no to, though, especially when he suggests he might be really disappointed if you don’t help him out.
I watch the minutes tick by painfully slowly. The music from inside the club is still churning and pumping, the crowd still cheering every time the DJ transitions to a new track. Ten minutes past one. Fifteen minutes past one. This guy is more than late. He is officially tardy as fuck. Perhaps he knows Garrett’s mad at him and has arranged to have him murdered. He could have driven by the club and decided tonight was a bad night for a pickup. He might have heard whispers and rumblings of discontent. Either way, it doesn’t look like he’s going to show up.
I decide I’ll give it ten more minutes, then toss the rucksack and the chalk powder in the motherfucking dumpster, go home and eat some pie. I’m pretty stoked on the idea, actually. It’s not my fault Garrett’s mark hasn’t shown. It sure as fuck isn’t my fault that he gets so shitty with people and wants them bumped off so frequently either.
Typically, I’m just about to lose the bag and head back inside when a rusting black sedan rolls up and parks at the mouth of the alleyway and a tall guy with waist-length dreadlocks climbs out of the passenger seat.
I know he’s my guy because he’s wearing shades. Who the fuck actually wears shades at one-thirty in the morning, I hear you ask? Drug dealers, that’s who. The tall guy slams the car door behind him and staggers a little as he steps into the alley.
“You the pizza boy?” he calls out, pointing at me. He laughs, then, high and manic, hysteria cut with what I’m guessing is a fuck load of heroin coursing through his veins. He’s got the faded, washed out look of a junkie about him that makes me dislike him immediately.
“Yeah. I got your delivery,” I answer, tapping my hand against the side of the rucksack. “That’ll be thirty-six thousand dollars, asshole. Plus tip.”
Down on the bayous of Louisiana, a single, solitary figure presides over one of the earliest settlements founded in the United States. Alexander Bastien, the king of New Orleans, is a hard-edged, crazy bastard. He hates drug dealers. Even more than the pushers, he despises the users, though. My former boss would pay his employees a grand to bring him the ear of a fool cooking meth in the French Quarter. Bring him the ear of a meth addict causing shit in the French Quarter, though? That would earn you five grand, easy.
“Like any industry, the narcotics business operates on a supply and demand model. If you remove the demand, who’s going to go to the trouble of supplying? If all the addicts in this beautiful town all dropped down dead overnight, the coke and the heroin dealers would all pack their shit up and move to New York instead. I’m telling you now, Tee. Every eight ball and baggie you come across, you spike with rat poison and formaldehyde. I want them bleeding out of their motherfucking assholes as they die, you hear me? No mercy for the weak.”
No mercy for the weak.
The Bastien family motto is “Bienveillant et Gentil. Règles Sur Tous.” “Benevolent and Kind. Rulers Over All.” Alex didn’t have a benevolent bone in his body, though. “No Mercy for the Weak” suited him down to the fucking ground. I was always surprised he didn’t change the coat of arms hanging over the entranceway to the Bastien mansion. Anyway, Alex’s hatred for drug addicts rubbed off after a while. It was inevitable. Five years working for the bastard and I ended up just as jaded and cruel as he was, even if it was only temporarily.
The guy with the dreads weaves as he walks towards me. I can imagine the look on my face all too well: Disgust. Contempt. Annoyance. The guy slows down even further when he gets close enough to see my expression. “Whoa, Cochise. Who shit in your cornflakes?”
“You’re late,” I snap.
He holds up his hands, laughing in a high-pitched, infuriating way. “Apologies, my man. I had a few things I had to take care of. Garrett not paying you by the hour tonight?”
Garrett is most definitely not paying me by the hour. He’s paying me (very healthily) to get a specific job done, and I want to get it over with so I can pick up my money and get the fuck out of here. I just raise my eyebrows at the fucked-up thirty-something year old standing in front of me. “What’s your name?” I ask.
He cocks his head to one side. “Ain’t no one ever had to ask my name before.”
He’s probably right. Garrett gave me an extensive description of my mark, and this guy matches that description down to a tee. Not many pasty white dudes with stringy circa 1990 ska band dreadlocks kicking around out here in Los Feliz after all. Not that I’ve seen, anyway.
“Just give me your fucking name,” I growl, pushing away from the wall. “I want to know who I’m dealing with.” This is no joke. I’m about to end this guy’s life. He looks like he got reversed over by an eighteen-wheeler and he’s fucked out of his mind, but somewhere out there someone cares about him. They care if he lives or dies, and they’re going to be pissed that I’ve come along and cut his shitty existence short. I need to know what sort of connections he has. I need to know if I’m gonna have to watch my back.
“I’m Lucas,” he drawls, shrugging his shoulders. “Lucas Braddon. Don’t you recognize me, dude?”
I squint at him. “Should I?”
Lucas opens and closes his mouth like a fish out of water. “C’mon, man! Lucas Braddon? I’m a series regular on Las Vegas P.D. Y’know? Oscar Dela Fuentes? The quirky lab dude everyone thought was a serial killer in episode fourteen? They brought me back! I got a twelve-episode contract, motherfucker.
” He holds his right hand up in the air, presumably for me to high-five. I don’t high-five him, though. I give him a look that could sour milk.
“Cold, man.” Lucas lowers his hand. “That’s some really cold shit.”
“What can I say? I don’t get to watch much television.” I’m fucking pissed. Garrett’s sent me out here to stab an F-list celebrity in the carotid? No fucking way. Lucas is an idiot, no doubt about it, but he’s also on some fucking franchised TV series. When dealers are murdered in cold blood, it’s rarely ever reported in the news. A cast member of some shitty TV show, though? That’s bound to get a little attention.
My hand’s been closed around the knife handle in my pocket this whole time. I’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to stab this guy right in the goddamn heart. That plan’s not going to fly now, though. I left New Orleans so I wouldn’t go back to jail. I sure as shit don’t want to end up incarcerated in Los Angeles. From what I’ve heard, Chino’s no picnic. My hand uncurls from around the knife handle.
“All right, man,” Lucas says. “Just because you don’t watch the show doesn’t mean you can’t show a guy a little respect. I wouldn’t come to your place of work and give you attitude, would I?”
“This is my place of work, and you are giving me attitude. I guess we’re even. Thirty-six grand,” I say, holding out my hand.
Lucas shakes his head. “Garrett said twenty-five. I only brought twenty-three with me on account of the fact that I figured he’s a stand-up dude and wouldn’t mind spotting me the rest until Friday.”
