Page 11 of Black Sheep

Axel knew it was because his barber didn’t just give him a trim once a month.

“You getting all this, boy?” Finnan barks.

“Yes, Pa,” Troy responds. He pans around, stops at a chair occupied by none other than yours truly. The blood running down my nose is nothing compared to the pain shooting from my ribs.

One of the many brainless minders trained to follow Finnan’s bidding looms above me, eyeing me with snakelike beady eyes.

“Good. Now, tell me again what has you in a snit, son?”

Bolton Rutherford, the comedian of the family, snorts from wherever he’s watching this spectacle unfold. I don’t know when Finnan decided it would be a fantastic idea to start documenting every event of his life. Considering he’s eyeball deep in organized crime, it was one of his spectacularly stupid ideas. But here we are.

“I don’t want to go to West Point,” I gurgle, blood sliding from the corner of my mouth. The pain in my chest and throat is relentless, the hour-long beating having ruptured something I’m one hundred percent sure I don’t want to know about.

“Why not?”

The camera is trained on me, ready to record my every word. I grit my teeth and remain silent.

“Because he’s in love,” Bolton jeers, then pisses himself laughing. My other brothers join in with various degrees of mirth. Troy religiously captures it all.

Including Finnan’s nod to the minder.

The beating starts again.

At some point, I pass out, and I’m left slumped over on the floor, my blood pooling on the expensive Aubusson rug. The camera is set down but left running, whether by design or neglect, I’ll never know. I suspect it’s the former. Finnan Rutherford believes himself too clever to admit neglect. It records him eating lunch, making a few non-incriminating calls, even arranging to have flowers placed on Ma’s grave.

But it’s the next frame that makes me jerk in my seat, high in my present hell above Hell’s Kitchen.

She walks in, dressed in white. An angel with tumbling hair. She barely spares me a glance as she heads straight to Finnan. They embrace.

“Did he agree?” she asks.

My father sneers in my direction. “Of course not. Heaven knows how an ass like that sprung from my loins.”

Blue eyes I’ve looked into more times than I’ve drawn breath flick my way. Completely devoid of expression she regards me dispassionately before she dismisses me like the sack of shit I am. She sighs. “Leave it with me. I’ll work on him.”

He touches her…caresses her cheek. “You’re a godsend, Cleo, my angel. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Her hands slide around his neck, and she presses the body I believed was mine against his. Even though their voices are muffled, I hear her clearly. “You will never have to find out. I promise.”

The clanging sounds jerk my focus downward. The tendons on my arms stand out in my blind battle with the cuffs. The skin on either side of the tight metal braces is oozing blood, and my lungs burn with the need to break free and howl.

The words that will activate the fail-safe and summon the Black Widow claw the back of my throat. I swallow them down. I’m nowhere near done reliving every one of Cleo’s transgressions.

All the screens are lit up, each one playing a different recording of my spiral to sub-humanity.

But one screen remains dark. I’m not ready for that one last video. The faceless one that haunts me alongside hers and projects my suffering to another level. The one that makes me wish I were dead in one moment. Then glad I’m not in the next.

Dead means forgotten.

And I don’t plan on forgetting anytime soon.

Chapter Three

GUNPOWDER AND LEAD

Cleo

For far longer than I care to remember, I’ve held the power of life and death in my hands. Between one breath and the next, the responsibility was thrust on me. A permanent state I have no hope of escaping. Not if I wish to keep the one remaining parent I have, my mother, on life-supporting machines rather than six feet under with my dead father. Machines that stay on or could be turned off in an instant, depending on which move I make in this deadly game of chess that is my life.

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