Page 35 of The Carver

“Why do you need him when you have me?” Godric asked. “I’m your firstborn son.”

“Godric.” He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone showed how short his fuse was. “Trust takes months to earn among friends, years among strangers. It takes nothing among brothers. Don’t ever forget that.”

I crossed the room and joined them in the entryway, and Godric was red in the face. Red like he wanted to scream and accept the beating that it would cost him. But he found the restraint, and then his eyes shifted to me.

He hated me.

Father pulled on his coat and opened the door to step into the night. “Let’s go, boys.” The line of blacked-out SUVs was already parked outside the gate to take us wherever we needed to go. Agust of ice-cold air entered the warm home and struck me in the face.

Godric maintained his angry stare.

I approached him, mirroring the hate he felt for me. There were so many things I wanted to say to him, that I didn’t trust him not to stab me in the back on Christmas morning. But it was a relationship that had already been burned at the stake. Ashes couldn’t harden back into bones. We would never rebuild what we’d lost, and we both knew it.

So I wouldn’t waste my breath.

“Don’t do it.”

I walked past him and shoved him so hard in the shoulder he stumbled back into the wall. “Fuck off.” I stepped into the night, down the steps, and past the gate.

My father rolled down the window. “Get in.”

I opened the back door and got into the seat next to the window.

Godric came out seconds later and approached the car.

“In the back,” Father said. Then he hit the button on his side and rolled up the window.

Godric halted on the spot, snow falling down around him, staring at the window even though all he could see was his own reflection. His face contorted into boiling anger, but he didn’t act on it and headed to the SUV parked behind us.

We took off, a line of cars moving through the quiet streets of Paris.

I still didn’t know where we were going, but I wouldn’t ask a second time.

The first few minutes were spent in silence. My father was on his phone, texting and doing emails, oblivious to me beside him in the backseat. He finally placed the phone in the inside pocket of his coat. “You’re fifteen now, Bastien. Our society still thinks of you as a boy, but for a Dupont, you’re a man. It’s time you learn the business.”

My parents never mentioned the business around us. It was an open secret, my father’s criminal enterprise. But from the conversations I overheard and the information I’d inadvertently gathered, my father was one of the biggest drug dealers in France. He moved his product from the city to the port and distributed it elsewhere. My father was powerful and terrifying, judging by the way he screamed on the phone in the middle of the night and jerked me awake. It explained why Godric had changed so much. Once he was part of the business, he became as cold and cruel as our father.

“What if I don’t want to learn the business?”

My father slowly turned to regard me, his eyes filled with anger and disappointment. “This business is your bloodline. You’re the third generation to be a part of it. I would share it with my brother if he were still alive.”

“Doesn’t seem like Godric wants me to be part of it.”

“He’ll feel differently once I’m gone.” He looked out the window once again and watched the snow fall.

I stared at the side of his face, equally afraid and desperate for his approval. My father had been a constant figure in my life, but I still felt like I didn’t know him. Sometimes I saw him with mymother—and sometimes I saw him with other women. My father never told me to keep my mouth shut, but I knew there would be a punishment if I didn’t. “What do you want me to do?”

“You’ll see.”

We spent the rest of the drive in silence, traveling through the quiet streets until we arrived at the outskirts of the city. Instead of the beautiful spires of the churches and the lights of the Eiffel Tower, we entered the slums, graffiti on the walls, barbed wire around buildings, and turned into a compound behind a solid gate and concrete wall.

We pulled into the large complex with multiple warehouses, guards on duty carrying rifles, snow on the ground and on the roofs of buildings. We hopped out of the car, and the guards said nothing to my father, barely acknowledged him.

Godric left the car and caught up to us.

My father ignored him. “Come with me, Bastien.”

I kept a straight face, but I was nervous. Nervous for what, I wasn’t sure.

---