Tyler was only partially right in his assessment but missed something vital.
Her beauty is fucking tragic.
If her presence here so much as alters any small part of the ground plan that has to roll out in the next few months, I’ll have no issue doing whatever it takes to erase her from the equation.
Just as the thought crosses my mind, she ends her tirade, intent on having the last word. “You know, you could say it was nice to meet me. You are kicking me out of your party. It’s the polite thing to do.”
“Never been accused of being polite.”
“It’s common decency, arsehole.”
The feel of her fingers wrapped around my forearm begins to gnaw away the last of my patience. Sean reads my rapidly changing demeanor, cursing before scooping her over his shoulder. His eyes linger heavily on my profile for some acknowledgment while mine remain locked on Roman’s daughter.
“And what a pretty arsehole you are,” she slurs out. Laughter spills out around us, cutting through some of the thick tension, and despite myself, I can’t help the slight upturn of my lips in response. That is until she makes her last declaration. “I am trouble, you know . . . just ask your brother.”
Dangling over Sean’s shoulder, she keeps her steady gaze on me as Sean hauls her through the sliding glass door to protect her from getting the worst of me. When she’s out of sight, Tyler sidles up to me, putting voice to the question we both already know the answer to. “What was he thinking?”
“That he’ll get his dick wet while convincing us he’s doing us a solid,” I clip out, staring in the direction Sean fled.
“And no one thought to tell him otherwise?”
“We did,” I glance over at Tyler. “He just wasn’t paying attention.”
Tyler’s wheels begin to turn as I recall a long-ago conversation that took place next to a roaring campfire when we were just teenagers. A night that is—or should be—easily accessible to all of us, verbatim, because it’s the night we truly began.
“We’re going basic with our strategy,” Tobias relays, staring thoughtfully into the flames.
“Meaning?” Tyler asks.
“We’ve got to play this just right. The only way to defeat a man like Roman is to play sleeping giant,” my brother replies in a tone that has us all perking up.
“Think Helen of Troy,” I offer, reading his line of thought and knowing all of us are well-versed in the Greek myth thanks to Mrs. Green’s annual eighth-grade lesson.
In the story, Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Mycenaean Sparta, was seduced and stolen by Paris, Prince of Troy, and remained with him, which sparked a ten-year war. My point in bringing it up has nothing to do with the love story but the tactic used by way of the Trojan Horse. Greek soldiers were able to gain access and take the city of Troy after a fruitless ten-year siege by hiding in a giant horse supposedly left as an offering to the goddess Athena. By using the same type of tactic, we could take methodical, measured steps to get to Roman.
Instead of rehashing that, I put a voice to my less complicated solution. “But it seems like a lot of trouble to go through when we can just eliminate the problem.”
My brother’s reaction is predictable and instant, a rare fear in his eyes as he weighs my words while assessing me. Saying it out loud forces him to acknowledge the side of me he’s been getting glimpses of but fears out of paternal concern. A side of me he’s terrified exists because it means, at one point, it will put me in the line of fire, where I fully intend to be. He speaks his objection a breath later. “I know you’re not fucking suggesting we kill the man in cold—”
“Eye for an eye.” I shrug. “Our parents burned to death. Don’t you think that calls for aggressive action? You, yourself, told Delphine you were sick of all the talk. The meetings are a joke, filled with nothing but pussies who like to bitch while she refills their coffee. Might as well be a book club for all the fucking good it’s doing.”
Taking it a step further, I lay out my simplified plan. “You know, if we boil down enough tobacco and dab the right amount of concentrate on his fucking car door handle, within minutes of it seeping into his skin, it’s game over. Heart attack on the autopsy report. Presented with the right opportunity, it’s a hundred percent untraceable.”
Though shrouded by the woods, there’s just enough firelight to make out the color draining from his face as he speaks in both alarm and warning. “He’s not a smoker, so there’s the first hole in that stupid idea, and that’s not who we are,” he grits out, “and not who we will be, Dom. That’s not what Maman and Papa wanted. There is a better, more diplomatic way to handle this, less merciful than death.” He gives me an adamant shake of his head. “No, what we’re going to do is change things for the better. Once we take Roman down, there’s a hundred like him to take his place. They exploit people like our parents and discard them once they become a liability.” He looks at each one of us pointedly. “What are we going to do about them?”
“Not our problem,” Sean says from where he rocks in his camping chair in his football jersey, beer in hand, high lingering from the pep rally.
“We’re going to make it our problem,” Tobias declares, “that’s the whole point of all of this. It’s not just about our family or this town. Not anymore.”
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he turns and stares in the direction of the newly-erected construction of Roman’s house—a mere length of a football field away from our spot—his voice in a faraway place when he adds, “we’re going to do this in a way that will honor them.”
Sean pops another beer as he puts in his two cents. “This seems ambitious. I mean, come on, man. Look at where we’re at—bumfuck nowhere.”
“That’s exactly the point.” Sean’s focus flits to me because of the amount of bite in my tone. He’s still straddling realms, living in the created world and the one Tobias has envisioned and wants us to help re-create. Despite my warnings that Tobias isn’t going to take us seriously if we don’t step up, Sean’s under the impression we’re already in due to relation. He has no idea just how wrong he is in that respect.
“You want to end up just another line cook at Daddy’s restaurant?” I remind him. “What’s going to happen when they call in that bank loan?”
Sean’s eyes flare, but he remains quiet, picking at his beer label as I turn and fix my gaze on Tyler, whose situation is just as grim. “Are you going to be a career soldier?”
Tyler glares over at me, his father’s fate his own worse fear.
The truth is, none of us wants to trace the footfalls or repeat the fate of our parents. While Tobias and I have suffered greatly, our brothers haven’t been much more fortunate. Tyler’s endured the worst by way of remnants of his father, who left US soil as one man and came back another. Sean’s in the midst of witnessing the toll it’s taking on his parents just to keep their restaurant running and collective heads above water.
Their fear of repeating a similar path is one of the main reasons why Tobias has our attention—but he’s given us plenty of others. He was the first to break the small-town mindset chain and get out. The not-so-subtle changes in him during his trips back are what’s kept their curiosity stoked. I satiated mine by digging into why my brother’s more relaxed demeanor started to disappear over a short time.