Page 2 of The Sinner's Bargain

“Thoran?”

The two men at my desk bounced to their feet as if springs had ejected them from their seats. They spun to face me, their expressions comically contradicting each other.

“Did you kill him?” my mother’s younger brother fretted anxiously. Eyes the color of murky lake water dropped from me to the gun still hanging at my side and his shoulders drooped. “Oh, Thoran.”

I ignored Oliver’s disappointment. It wasn’t my job to comfort a grown man. I closed the door to my office and moved to join the pair.

Metal scraped against wood as I set my weapon down next to the papers we’d been going over before the alarms had sounded.

“Where were we?”

Vance immediately sprung to action. Long, dark fingers drifted over the contract before me, outlining the stipulations, but I could feel Oliver’s outrage with the intensity of a hot sun burning into the side of my face. The intertwining scars puckering the skin on my left side prickled the way they tended to do when I came too close to heat.

“Do you have something to say, Oliver?” I prompted, never taking my eyes off the bottom line of the contract I was about to sign.

I knew my uncle well enough to expect the tirade. He had my mother’s soft heart. A useless family trait. The only reason I put up with his ridiculous moral compass was because of my mother; she would have wanted me to watch over her little brother. To keep him safe from himself because Oliver was weak. He believed people were inherently good.

Kind. Decent.

Without my protection, he would already be dead and I didn’t need that on my conscious.

“You can’t just kill people who—”

“Break into my home and destroy my property?” I cut in, scratching my signature across the bottom line, and flipping the page.

“You are being reckless. Who knows who he told he would be here. The authorities—”

“Are well paid to shut their mouths and mind their business,” I reminded him, carving my initials into the next page. “Maybe if I kill enough of them, they will learn to stay off my fucking property.”

I didn’t see his huff of indignation, but I felt the silent puff of air agitate what was left of my patience.

“That man could have had family,” Oliver shot back.

“He did.” I slapped my name on the final document and piled everything into a stack with three sharp raps on the desk to align everything before meeting my uncle’s furious glower. “A wife and kids. He stated as much.”

It would have been amusing, the outraged sputtering, the silent flapping of his jaw, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“He should have thought of them before putting his life in my hands.” I held out the papers to Vance who had yet to comment on the situation, nor would he because Vance was smart. He understood the rules. “He was a thief. He thought it was a good idea to climb a seven-foot wall, cross a goddamn swamp, and steal from me. Actions have consequences.”

A new manila folder was placed in front of me and opened. Vance started the process of explaining the pages, but Oliver wasn’t finished.

“Forgiveness, Thoran!” he snapped, hands meaty fists at his sides.

In a different lifetime, Oliver could have had a thriving career as a bouncer. With shoulders that could barely fit through a doorway straight on and a dominating height of almost seven feet, Oliver was a hulk of a man. Genes that were passed to me, but where he approached everything with rose-colored glasses, I saw the world for what it was — trash. It was cold and bleak and full of monsters.

“No.”

I could practically hear his molars grinding, but I didn’t give a shit. It was my home. My call. How many of those fuckers was I supposed to forgive? How many times was I supposed to stop them from stealing my roses? How high did my walls need to be and how deep was I supposed to dig my swamp before people got the message?

Well, I built the wall.

I deepened the swamp.

I put up the fucking signs.

I did everything possible to be left alone and people continued to test me. They seemed to forget I was a killer, not a saint.

Oliver relented, at least for the moment. He dropped into his abandoned chair and sat in silence as Vance resumed without a shred of insight into the matter. It wasn’t his place to dictate my behavior, a sense Oliver didn’t seem to have. Vance knew he was there to keep the wheels turning and the lights on. He gave advice, but only regarding the business — legal or otherwise. That was what my father had paid him for and what I paid him for. Vance understood that.

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