Page 125 of Brutal Prince

Marcus shakes his head. “Called me. Wants me working this weekend.”

“This close to finals?”

Marcus runs the rim of his beer glass against the bar’s scarred surface. “Doesn’t give a shit about that.”

“He should. Your grades—”

“Mean nothing.” Marcus drags at his cigarette before crushing out the filter in our ashtray. “He told me attorneys won’t make close to what I will, working for him.”

I bark out a laugh, but my face falls when Marcus turns blackly somber eyes on me.

“Dude, what does that even mean? There’s no way you can make—”

“Not the security company,” Marcus says, his eyes and voice dropping simultaneously. He leans in. “Brandon…his money never came from the company.”

I sit back, my eyebrows lifting to my hairline. “Then where?”

Marcus shrugs a little, and then takes out his vape. He offers it to me, but I wave it away — I’m much more interested in what he’s got to say than in getting high.

“My dad’s into some dodgy shit, okay?” Marcus hits his vape again, considers it for a moment, and then slips it back into his pocket. He shakes loose a cigarette, and this time when he offers I accept. I cup my hands around it to light it, and hitch up one foot so it’s on the highest rung of the bar stool. “Dodgy how?”

“Probably best if you don’t know,” Marcus says, his eyes going everywhere except to mine. He seems nervous, but it doesn’t look as if this is news to him.

“You’ve known about this?”

“Yeah,” he says, rolling the tip of his cigarette around in the ashtray until the ash forms a peak. “Helped him before. But…” He swipes at the air with his hand.

What the fuck is he trying to spit out? I do my best to be patient, but I realize I’m drumming my fingers on the table the same time Marcus does.

His spine snaps straight, and he downs the rest of his drink. “Forget it.”

“No, man, don’t—” I grab his shoulder and squeeze. “Just say what you gotta say.”

Marcus shrugs off my hand, but after another pull at his cigarette, his dark eyes dart over to me and fix.

“The first time he asked…” He licks his lips. “He caught me on a good day. Or a bad one, I guess. Made it sound easy. So I did it, but it all went to shit. And then…” He shrugs, and lifts the hand holding his cigarette to stroke his jaw. Smoke obscures his face for a moment before he sits back as if to get out of that toxic cloud.

“I keep going back and forth — hating it, loving it, hating it. What if I stop hating it?”

“What did he ask you to do?”

Marcus’s jaw bunches, and his throat moves as he swallows. But before he can answer, his phone rings.

I hold out my hand, telling him to ignore it, but when he looks at me, I already know he wouldn’t dare to.

He pulls out his phone, and his shoulders sag as soon as he sees who it is.

“Marcus.”

He lifts his gaze, and a rueful smile raises one side of his mouth. “What you gonna do, right? It’s family.”

My skin crawls at the bitterness in his words, but he pulls away when I grab him to keep him from leaving. He weaves his way out of the pub, lifting his phone to his ear as soon as he pushes on the door to go out.

Drumming out a relentless staccato on the wood, I finish the rest of my beer and order us another round. Hopefully, Marcus will feel more talkative after another.

What kind of dodgy shit could his father possibly be into? Money laundering? Drugs? Arms?

Christ, the list is endless, now that I think about it. And it’s starting to make sense; why his father is always out, the random violence when he comes back. I don’t doubt for a minute that you need to have a mean streak to make it big in the criminal underworld.

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