Page 64 of Death's Deal

We’d sold our loyalty.

Chapter 35

Her voice still battersmy mind, beating around in my head like a billiard ball missing all of the pockets. Damaging, dangerous, and plagued. I agreed to what the government wanted. I had given in. Even though I’d made that call, the one that would help J, it still left us in the lurch. Not to mention, they have the book.

The Queen’s fucking book!

Piper’s legend is tucked inside it, along with the phone number for my guardian angel and the contestable truth about my parentage.

Fuck. I’m going to hell for this. He better know I’ll gladly drag Johnson along with me as I fall down into the pit.

Walking in a stupor, drunk on my own self-hatred, I take a seat at the bar. Elbows on the worn wooden top, I lay my head in my hands.

Storming through the front door, his wild hair untied and unkempt from a ride, Tlaloc strides through the space with an anger I’ve never seen from him. “You did it! You all fucking did it.”

“We don’t need this shit right now, kid—” Busta starts before Poc interjects.

“Don’t fucking start with me. You sold her out, just as bad as my own brother did, all for your lives to continue aslawlessas it ever was. Fucking pussies.”

Grasping the chair I was going to sit in, it flies across the space, crashing into the dancers’ stage. The violent outburst causes a silence to rest over the crew. Booming into the vacant space of the empty club. “Tlaloc! You do not get a vote yet in the club and they decided it. As family, your vote and mine were just that. Ours. We may not like this, want this, or wish it to go this way, but we had no other options. Unless you have a way to house over a hundred people and their families in your trailer.”

Grabbing a second chair, I sit down still on edge and spoiling for someone to fight me. Someone other than my baby brother.

As he cools his own temper, if slightly. “Death, this is not the way it should go down. There had to be another option.”

“Kid, you gotta know none of us wanted this to happen,” Busta interjects as I try to calm my already frayed nerves. “The last thing anyone wanted was for her to be handed to our enemy. It’s a shit deal, no matter how we did it, but it had to be done.”

Taking a seat on the right of me, grasping two highballs from below the bar, gripping the neck of a whiskey bottle, Busta pours us both a glass full to overflowing. The amber liquid pools on the bar where it spilled over. “You’re a shit brother, Death, and I’m going to hell forever. Obi would shoot me in the balls for this if she were alive,” he says while upending his glassful.

Staring at the glass, knowing I don’t deserve to be celebrating or wallowing, I agree with him, “I know.”

The only thing I deserve is her hatred.

Pouring himself a second and not saying anything further, the others appear beside us at the bar.

Each reflects the same expression I possess.

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