Page 33 of Snake

Silas

”Lorenzo?” Nim says, her nose crinkling up. “Is that his last name?”She rubs at her wrists, giving the ropes we’d bound her up with a dark look. Mason was the one who untied her, but honestly I was done with her whining about how tight the knots were, anyway. Bondage is really only hot when the girl is into it.

Knox blinks at her, frowns. “It’s so easy to forget you’re not from around here,” he says. “No, Lorenzo is his first name.”

“Well that means nothing to me,” Nim says, crossing her arms over her chest. “Is he a First Five or something? What’s so important about him. Why’d you choose him?”

“We didn’t choose him,” Mason said. “He chose us.”

Her face scrunches up with confusion, so I cut in to set her straight. The guys are fucking this up anyway, pussyfooting around things like it’ll make it better somehow.

“Do want to know what Lorenzo would do on any given day?” I say, forcing Nim to focus on me while I speak. We’re still in one of the storage rooms down in Cinderhart Academy’s basement. It’s one of the few places we knew we wouldn’t be bothered. Students used to come down here to get laid, but now everyone sneaks their partners into their dorm rooms instead.

No one would really want to make out near the place where that girl committed suicide anyway, now would they? There’s an urban myth that her ghost haunts these narrow, crumbling brick corridors.

I come down here sometimes to smoke a blunt, especially if I’m not in the mood to be found. I’ve never seen or heard anything. I’d probably come down here more often if I did.

“Well, since I don’t know who Lorenzo is—” Nim begins with a sarcastic tone to her voice that I don’t care for one bit.

“He’d get up out of bed, sometimes fucking his wife, sometimes not. Depends what state she was in. You know, the extent of the bruising.”

The frustration on Nim’s face slowly fades.

“Then he’d head downstairs, where one of his kids had made him breakfast. Because Jesus, if he didn’t get his breakfast, shit was going to get bad. So someone in the house would always make sure he got his bacon and eggs in the morning.”

“He was...abusive?” Nim asks quietly, glancing from me to Mason to Knox. They’re watching me, though, and they pay her no mind.“How do you know? Are you friends with his kids? Did they tell you?”

See, that’s how this should go. We can’t let ourselves get caught up in this girl again. We have an agenda. A fucking mission from God, if I was inclined to become religious at some point in my life. I think the closest I’ve gotten was going to that cult’s hospital, the Divine Radiance Clinic on Gold Drive.

I laugh at Nim’s question. “Not even close.” I rummage in my blazer pocket and take out a joint. Might as well light one up, because we’re all going to need the headspace when we’re done here. Mason is sitting next to Nim on the fuck-mound someone made of old mattresses, and Knox is leaning against a paint-peeling shelf that might have once stood in the library. From this angle, I’m not sure if he’s holding up the shelf, or if it’s the shelf holding him up with how much it’s leaning.

“After breakfast, Lorenzo would go to work. He had a finger in every pie, our Lorenzo. In quite a few pussies, too. Despite his family, despite his wife. He didn’t give a fuck about any of them. They were useful, of course, but in the same way a spade is useful. You don’t love and cherish your spade. You lock it up in the shed when you’re done using it.”

Knox makes an angry sound, but Nim barely glances at him. I send Knox a derogatory stare as I hand him the lit-up joint. He watches me for a second, his chest rising and falling a little too fast, and then snatches it from me and hits it hard.

“So Lorenzo, he’d go to one of his offices. Maybe bend one of his secretaries over the desk or something. Have them suck his cock. That kind of thing. I’m sure some of them did it with a smile...but not all of them. He enjoyed making people do shit. Especially if they didn’t want to do it. I guess it made it all that much sweeter for him. That power. That control.”

“He was an evil man,” Knox cuts in. “And he was getting worse. The shit he was getting up to was affecting hundreds, thousands of people. Not just a handful.” He says this to Nim, but his eyes are on me, like he’s daring me to argue.

Why would I? It’s true.

“But we wouldn’t have known how bad he was until we found out what he was doing at home,” Mason says. For once his voice is quiet, diminutive almost. “And they were so closed-mouthed about what was happening, if we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes, he’d probably still be alive today.”

There’s a beat of silence, and I’m tempted as fuck to fill it, but I know when it’s my turn to speak...and it’s not.

“So you were friends with his family?” Nim says. “How else would you know what he was doing? Did they tell you this? Or did you see him hitting one of them?”

Knox clears his throat, but she cuts in with a firm voice. “Because unless you saw it with your own eyes, you can’t know what was happening. Maybe he was mean to them, yeah, but how would you know if he abused them?”

There’s a moment’s silence before Mason and I turn to look at Knox. His throat moves as he swallows, his face hardening like stone.

“Because I’m one of his kids.”

Nim’s lips part. Her bottom jaw drops. She swallows, lips trembling. “He’s…Lorenzo is your father.”

Knox walks over and hands her the joint. She stares numbly at it before slowly taking it and putting it to her lips.

“He was nothing before he married my mother. I don’t know how she couldn’t see he was just doing it for the money. For the connections. I mean, a Pellegrino marrying a Zara?” Knox says. “Maybe it was her way of getting over her sister’s death. My mother was close with Bianca when she died. Cinderhart has always had a reputation of eating its young.”

---