by Lake, Keri
Setting a hand on each of our shoulders, Maria stood between us. “Well, I can’t exactly get away with making you boys a hot chocolate and some popcorn these days, so I got the next best thing.” She shuffled to the oven and, after swinging back the door, donned a pair of hot mitts and set a steaming dish of lasagna onto the burners.
Saliva pooled in my mouth at the same time my stomach growled. I stood to grab a dish from the adjacent countertop, but she spun around, waving her hands. “I got this. Sit. Sit.”
I slumped back into my chair. “You don’t have to wait on us. I’m twenty-five, for Christ’s sake.”
“And you don’t have to hang out with an old lady on Devil’s Night, but that’s just how we roll.” Her wink brought a smile to my face, and no more than a minute later, she'd sat a piled high dish of lasagna and homemade bread in front of us.
* * *
An hour passed, and Reed had already crashed out on the couch, while I washed dishes with Maria.
“When are you gonna settle down with a girl, cuore mio?” She'd used to call me that as a boy so often, it was like a second name for me. “I want babies to hold.”
Babies? I hissed and shook my head, handing her the glass dish to dry. “I don’t know about that.” At the disappointment in her eyes, I added, “I’m not exactly dad material.”
“Why?”
“Can’t raise a family working at a garage, the rest of my life.” I’d lied a long time ago, telling her I worked as a mechanic. At the time, I'd been stripping cars, so it wasn’t entirely false. I’d since gotten out of the car stripping gig and roughing up delinquents for Bojanskis, after Reed, my good friend, Dax, and I had made a pretty good living selling drugs and shit we’d stolen on a commerce site in the darknet.
Not exactly the direction she’d envisioned for us, but at least we could stay anonymous and pursue other gigs. She’d shit herself if she ever found out some of the things Reed and I had gotten into, particularly the dangerous stuff like extreme urban exploring, or urbex. A group of camera enthusiasts, we ventured into some dark and dangerous places. Adrenaline junkies. Edge surfers. Lunatics. We’d climb to the top of the highest buildings in the city—Penobscot, Book Tower, Comerica Tower, RenCen—and film shit that’d make people sick, before posting all our shots on a social media site called Aperture. Located on the darknet, it was the sinister doppelganger of Instagram, where users posted images of dangerous exploration and trespassing.
“You’d be surprised what you can raise a family on.” She toweled the dish and put it away. As I drained the water in the sink, her fingers guided my face toward her. “Jase, my sweet boy, I’m not getting any younger. I have to know you’re happy. You’re destined for great things, you know.”
“Like my father?” I regretted the words the moment they'd tumbled from my mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“No. You’re right. Tony was … troubled.” She glanced toward the couch. “Reed reminds me so much of him. I often didn’t know what to do, or what he needed.” Shaking her head, she lifted her gaze to mine. “Sometimes all you can do is love a person.” Her lips curved up, lightening the somber mood. “Do you remember the story I told you? Of Soleluna?”
Smirking, I nodded. She’d told me the story a long time ago, when I was six, young enough to be fooled into thinking it’d been about my mom and dad.
“I’m still holding hope, cuore mio.” She gave a light slap to my cheek, followed by a kiss.
A crashing sound snapped my attention toward the back of the house, and I nabbed a knife from the block on the counter, wishing I’d brought a gun. I’d never had to use a gun while staying with her, as most vandals passed up her house. Besides that, Maria probably would’ve gone apeshit at the sight of it.
“And so it begins. Gotta love Devil’s Night,” she said, stepping toward the sound.
I threw my arm out, leveling my gaze at her, and strode quietly toward where the noise had come from. Past the mudroom, and through the small laundry room, until I reached a door that stood adjacent to the driveway, where I peered through the window. Seeing no one, I flipped on the floodlight, eyeing a broken bottle that lay scattered in chunks of glass.
Another crash came from behind, and I spun around at the same time that Maria’s scream hit my ears.
Jogging back through the kitchen, I flipped the blade to a stabbing position, but slammed to a halt at the scene.
Four men, all in black clothes, stood in my grandmother’s living room. A black man held a gun to Maria’s head, while beyond them, Reed stood off to the side, palms up in surrender.
“Which one of you cocksuckers is Friendly Fire?” The short, stocky white guy in front spoke around lighting a cigarillo.
My eyes darted toward Reed, who kept his gaze locked on the men. Friendly Fire was his screenname for Aperture. Most users on the site went by anonymous names—the smart ones, anyway. Dax was Fugazi, and my screenname was Warhawk.
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked.
Instead of answering, the man smirked, and the much larger white guy in the back of the group grabbed hold of my brother. Reed managed to thump him in the nose, but my stomach twisted when the asshole pinned my brother to the wall by his neck.
I lurched forward, gritting my teeth, but paused at the click of a gun, the barrel of which aimed at my face.
“What the fuck do you want?” My gaze bounced between my brother and grandmother.
“What do I want?” The stocky guy tapped the gun to his head. “Let’s see … Oh, yeah. Who. Is. Friendly Fire?”
What did they want with Reed?
As fast as my mind asked the question, it came up with another thought. Two weeks back, our trio had stolen a shipment of guns from the underground crime lord Jozef Tesarik. Dax had gotten word that the guns, which had originally been stolen from an Army Reserve Center, would be offloaded to a warehouse along the river. Not that we'd intended to return the guns. Reed had set up a storefront for guns, drugs, any shit we managed to hock locally. We operated out of a rundown storage unit on the east side, and even that was kept anonymous, thanks to Joe, who owned the property.
We were virtually untouchable.
All of us had taken part in that gig, though, so why were they looking for Reed specifically? Keeping my gaze on my family, I quickly scoured my memories of that night.
A man kneels in front of me, his hands clasped in prayer as I hold the pistol to his head, while Dax and Reed load guns onto the truck.
“Who is it, tough guy?” The stocky man’s lips curved up into a grin, his question echoing the one dancing through my head. “I ain’t got all night.”
Who was it? Who ratted us out that night?
A flash catches my eye, and I slice my gaze to the right. Beyond the window, a dark figure stands, and in their hands is a camera. Aimed right at us.
It had to be the dark figure. The one who’d taken the pictures. The one who went by the user name of Black Sparrow on Aperture, who’d followed me around for months.
The other question spinning around in my mind was, how the fuck would they have found us at our grandmothers?
In front of me, the stocky man straightened his back and kicked his head left then right, cracking his neck. “I’m losing my fucking patience with you cocksuckers.” Lifting his gun into the air, he paced in front of me. “I’m going to give you to the count of three, and then I’m just gonna start killing motherfuckers.”
“I’m Friendly Fire,” I lied.
“Jase! No.” Reed elbowed his attacker in the stomach, but the man just shook him like a ragdoll and threw my brother to the ground.
“Motherfucker!” I rushed toward him, but a sharp blow to my stomach knocked me back.
Another doubled me over, and a third dropped me to the floor. Maria’s muffled scream hardly carried over the blood pounding through my ears.
One of the men stood over me, while the stocky man crouched in front of my face, the other two still holding Maria and Reed captive. “K
now what I think? I think big brother is looking out for little brother.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Strap them to a chair.”
“It was me.” I coughed, sucking in a breath through my nose as the pain vibrated along the edges of my ribcage. “I stole … the guns. I … did it. Please. Let them go.”
A wicked smile danced across his face. “And just who did you steal from?”
I hesitated. Why would he ask?
“I asked you a question, boy.” The stocky man tipped his head. “I don’t intend to ask again.”
My grandmother let out a gasp, as the bastard holding her grasped her throat.
“Jozef. Tesarik,” I gritted past clenched teeth. “I stole the guns … from Tesarik.”
Smiling, he glanced back toward the black guy standing behind him, before his gaze snapped back to me. “Well, looks like we’ve scored ourselves a little bonus. From what I hear, Tesarik’s been looking for you, asshole.”
4
Jase
Present day …
The rich scent of leather filled my nose and the penetrating rays of sunlight warmed my skin.
Sunlight. I must’ve been dead, because I hadn’t felt the warmth of the sun on my face in nearly a year—a year that I’d been trapped in eternal darkness and the kind of cold that didn’t just freeze the skin, but penetrated the muscles and bones with an unrelenting ache. Twelve hundred feet below the surface, where the air was thin enough to feel like being buried alive, sat the tomb I'd been taken from, a modern day labor camp, located in the salt mines beneath the city of Detroit.
My throat bobbed with a dry gulp, like thick cotton on sandpaper, and what little saliva I could muster expelled from my mouth on a hacking cough. Salt still clung to the inside of my nose, my mouth, my lungs. I could taste it just beneath the bitter metallic zing that coated my tongue.
A haze of confusion gripped onto the fringes of my consciousness, punctuated by brief visuals of unrelenting fucking pain. A cattle prod. Chains. The scent of cigarette smoke and burning flesh. The slick surface of cement beneath my feet as I hang from chains.
Laughter.
My punishment for attacking one of the guards.
I opened my eyes.
A man in a suit sat staring at me, his face stoic and unreadable, wrinkled, with a sharp edge of cruelty in his stern brows and scars. Must’ve been mid-sixties, if I had to guess, by the gray in his hair and beard.
Lifting my head, I took in the surrounding office. A rich cherry-wood desk separated the two of us. Tall bookcases stood either side of a large picture window behind the man, through which sunlight beamed across the room, to where I sat, on a leather couch butted against the wall.
My arms had been drawn back, my wrists bound by stiff bands of metal that rubbed against sores already etched into my skin, from the chains used to string me up during my torture in the mines. The chain that’d held me to the wall in my prison rested heavy and cold against my spine. I sat up in the seat and lurched, but halted at the sight of a gun barrel pointed at my face.
“Stay put,” the old man said. His thick accent matched that of the prison guards in the mines.
“Who the fuck are you?” My voice arrived on a rasp, dry from lack of food and water.
The cocksuckers had tried to starve me. Thought they’d weaken me before torturing.
Curling my fingers over the metal bracelets, I worked their lock behind my back.
“I work for Jozef Tesarik.” The man set the gun down on the desktop and rested his elbows at either side, steepling his fingers. “It seems you fucked with the wrong man.”
Eleven months back, I’d been taken prisoner by Jozef Tesarik, leader of what was essentially a Slovakian mafia, based in Detroit. His power had grown substantially in just a few years—becoming a force that rivaled the most ruthless gangs in the city, and I made his shit list by swiping a shipment of stolen guns. Stupid bastard that I was, I’d gone and pissed off the most revered crime lord in the city, who was somehow linked to members of the Seven Mile Crew—the same crew who’d invaded my house, murdered my younger brother, Reed, and my grandmother, and handed my ass over to Tesarik.
I growled at his words, tightening my wrists with all the strength I had left to break the fucking cuffs. A voice inside warned me to be patient, though. Keep my cool. Don’t be hasty and miss the opportunity. I’d gone eleven long months, without a single shred of hope that I’d be presented with a chance to avenge what they, he, had done. Even if the man sitting before me hadn’t laid so much as a hand on them, I’d start with him and not stop until Jozef Tesarik was as dead as my family.
“Easy.” He quirked a smile and lifted a cigar to his lips, parking it between his teeth. “I’d like to offer you an opportunity. Of life. Of vengeance. Unmitigated retribution for all you’ve suffered.” He spoke around the cigar as he lit it, and puffs of white smoke drifted up from his mouth.
Eleven months, I’d endured imprisonment. Tortures. Rigorous labor. White crystal caverns, with cells so dark my mind had blackened in those moments of solitary confinement, letting the memories of what happened to my family replay on a continuous loop inside my head. I’d close my eyes, and still the night would swallow me, like a never-ending nightmare, from which I couldn’t wake.
The knife glides across my grandmother’s throat, spilling blood onto the Catholic saints that dangle from delicate chains around her neck.
Revenge burned hot in the darkest pit of my soul, a glow that kept me warm while the rest of me had gone cold and numb from the torment. I’d promised myself, if I survived the hell I’d been sentenced to, I would make them pay for what they’d stolen from me. I’d kill every one of the bastards who’d laid a hand on my family.
I wanted blood. Their punishment. My revenge.
I studied the man for a moment. Across his cheek stretched two long, white scars, like he’d been slashed, and a scar at his neck looked as if someone had tried to sever his head once. “Who are you?”
“Some call me The Architect. You can call me Roman.”
The Architect. Just about every criminal in the city knew the man who had a reputation for constructing the most elaborate acts of retribution, a hitman for hire. No one had ever seen his face, though his methods were known as being brutal, thorough and meticulous. According to rumors, he was a notorious consigliere for the Slovak mafia, and a confidante to Jozef Tesarik.
“You still doing assassinations?”
“Not exactly. I’m retired, for the most part. More of an advisor these days.”
I peered out of the window beyond him, where only treetops could be seen past the wide expanse of yard. It’d been months since I’d actually looked at a tree. “How long was I out?”
“Ten minutes, after you were clocked with a gun by Imrich.” He jerked up his chin, and, twisting, I caught sight of a man, slightly bigger than me, with jet black hair and cold, almost lifeless eyes, standing guard by the door. “When you came to, I sedated you with a chemical cocktail. I’d say about an hour after that.” His body hardly moved as he talked, never shifted with discomfort, nor did he divert his gaze from mine. He exuded a sense of calm power—like a man who'd faced off a number of criminals far more intimidating than me.
Sliding my tongue across the back of my teeth, I eyed him warily, contemplating my role in whatever scheme had prompted him to release me from my prison sentence. “What do you want from me?”
“To the point. I appreciate that.” He drummed his finger against the desktop. “I want you to track down and retrieve a file.”
“Fuck you. I haven’t spent eleven months in hell to perform favors for my enemies.”
His scar twitched with the shifting of his jaw. “I understand your anger toward my employer, but your choices are limited at this point, so I’ll get to the details. A week ago, eight-point-five million dollars was stolen from a digital currency exchange known as DigiLab. The largest hit was on an account known as Seventh Circle Productions. This seemingly harmless p
orn production company owns Wonderland on the darknet.”
“The fuck is Wonderland?”
“It’s something of a dark peepshow, where users upload the vilest and most depraved videos you’ll ever find on the 'net. Snuff. Torture. It’s all there. The fact that it’s still live and active, means the feds haven’t even figured out it exists.”
“What’s this shit have to do with me?”
He sat quiet, but only for a moment. “Perhaps you’re unaware of how we got to this point, Mr. Hawkins. Allow me to elaborate. The men who broke into your home were—”
“Seven Mile Crew. No shit.”
“Yes. Two of them were members of the Seven Mile Crew. And if you interrupt me again, I’ll have your starving ass dumped back inside that shithole to rot. Do you know why they broke into your home?”
“Because your boss paid the fuckers. You slaughtered my innocent family for a bunch of stolen guns.”
“My boss had nothing to do with the murder of your family. I would know. I’ve arranged all of Tesarik’s hits, and I knew nothing of your family’s murder until I read your files.” Smoke clouded his face as he puffed his cigar. “You were sold to Tesarik. Given away for a bounty that was on your head long before your unfortunate tragedy.”
I ground my teeth, deciding whether to snap the fucker’s neck, or pop all his teeth out of his skull.
I had a good idea who’d ratted me out for that bounty. An account on Aperture, who’d stalked my posts and went by the name of Black Sparrow. Particularly as she'd caught us the night we stole the guns. She’d taken pictures and gotten away before I could catch her. Anyone who’d had the balls to watch me and call me out made my watch list in return.
“Your brother was killed for an entirely different reason.” Roman’s voice snapped me out of my brief musings. “In the six-year history of its existence, Wonderland has been hacked once, and only once. Its security measures were considered impenetrable, but about a month prior to the attack on your grandmother’s house, your brother managed to gain access to the site and get his hands on something that cost him his life.”
