Page 1 of Caught Up

1

Junior

The blood was everywhere. Soakedinto my shirt, sprayed onto my pants, and buried beneath my blunted nail bits. This was why I always worehead-to-toeblack. With any other color, the blood would be too obvious, but with black, the wet spots were easier to explain: Someone threw a drink at me, or a passing car hit a puddle, and I got splashed. I’d had to come up with countless excuses over the years.

Thankfully, I wouldn’t need any of them tonight because it was pissing down rain. Lightning arced overhead, painting the distanthigh-risesin silver and white. Thunder chased after it, rattling the windows of nearby buildings. The city looked like Gotham on nights like this. Gritty, dangerous.

I pulled my gaze from the storm. Three figures stood beside me on the river’s edge, all dressed in black because they’d learned the same lesson I had about bloodstains. They were motionless, eyes dead as they stared straight ahead, jackets flapping around them like errant wings. Another bolt of lightning tore through the sky, bathing us in silver. We looked more like a flock of vultures ready to descend on a corpse than a group of brothers who were supposed to be out celebrating.

Four days. It had been raining for four fucking days, and the river was so bloated with runoff that the car we’d just pushed into it was being sucked beneath the surface with alarming ease. Maybe we’d get lucky, and the cops would think its owner had gotten caught in a flash flood and drowned instead of what we’dreallydone to him.

A spark of red flared to life in my periphery. I turned to see my youngest brother, Greg, lift a cigarette to his lips.

“Those things will kill you,” I said.

He blew smoke into the wind. “Not before something else does.”

With that, he turned and strode away, Stefan trailing in his wake.

Alec, the brother closest to me in age, met my eyes across the gap they’d left between us. “We done here?”

I nodded. Yeah, we were done. Tommy Marchetti had been dealt with. Just like Dad ordered.

Alec pulled up the collar of his jacket to keep the rain off his neck as he followed after our younger brothers, leaving me alone to watch the tail end of Tommy’s Beamer disappear into thenight-blackwater. The old bastard was finally gone, finally out of the way, and I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present.

I waited just long enough to make sure the car wasn’t going to inconveniently bob back to the surface, before striding into the warehouse crouched at the river’s edge. The floor was poured concrete, and the clapboard walls were old enough that the wind whistled through the cracks between them with every gust, but at least I wasn’t getting rained on anymore.

My brothers stood beneath the glow of a fluorescent light, their eyes trained on a large red smear at their feet.

Alec pointed at it. “What do you want us to do about this?”

“Bleach,” I said.

He headed toward a back closet.

I eyed Greg. “He bled a lot.”

Greg’s dark eyes rose to mine as he took another pull from his cigarette. “Fresh corpses tend to do that.”

I might have been “Junior,” but out of all of us, Greg resembled Dad the most, especially now that the humor had started to fade from his eyes and the same jaded look the rest of us wore was creeping into his expression.

Alec rejoined us, and we moved back as he upended an entire bottle of bleach over the stain. When he was finished, he tossed the empty bottle toward some other trash gathered in a corner. This place used to belong to a fishmonger before the local industry collapsed. Now it was owned by one of my father’s associates, a man who turned a blind eye to our occasional use of it.

Alec shifted to face me. “You still wanna go out?”

I leveled my gaze at him. “What do you think?”

He shrugged. “I’m down if you are.”

Stefan gave Alec anAre you fucking serious?look he didn’t see. Beside Stefan, Greg watched me, waiting for my decision. As the oldest, I was the de facto leader. The one Dad trusted the most, the one my brothers turned to for guidance. Just once, I wished someone else would make a goddamn decision so I didn’t have to think so fucking much all the time.

I refocused my gaze on Alec. “No, I don’t want to go out. I’m drenched and I’m tired, and by the time we all shower and change, it’ll be two o’clock in the morning and everything will be closing.”

“So you’re gonna spend your last birthday in your twenties sad and alone?” Alec asked. “Sounds pretty fucking depressing.”

I shook my head, starting to get annoyed. “I didn’t spend it alone. We had family dinner, and then the four of us got to come on this fun little field trip.” He opened his mouth to argue but I cut him off. “We’re done here. I don’t care what the fuck the three of you do for the rest of the night, but I’m going to my apartment. Tell Mom and Dad I won’t be back for a few days.”

Without waiting for a response, I left. Maybe it was depressing, but I wanted to be alone. I wanted quiet and the solitude of my own space, and there was no way I’d get that if I went back to our parents’ house with my asshole brothers.

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