Page 95 of Suck This

CHAPTER 20

Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but bust a beer bottle open and fuck some people up.

-Fox to Con

CONSTANTINE

My daughter was gone. She’d moved on.

I should’ve been happy. Should’ve been excited that she finally felt secure enough in my continued existence to pass.

You finally have someone that’ll watch over you like I did.

Acadia didn’t know that she was the reason that my little girl left me. My constant companion for the last fifty years. The one I went to talk to when nothing was right in my shitty little world.

The one that was no longer there!

I hit the punching bag harder.

I’d been begging Nola to go for a very long time. I’d talked to her. Pleaded with her. Asked her nicely. Nothing had worked, and then Acadia had come into my life, and my entire existence changed.

I shouldn’t be thinking such vicious thoughts, but I couldn’t help it. If Acadia hadn’t entered my life, things would still be the same. I wouldn’t have had to intervene when she was being raped. I wouldn’t have had to save her. Chen wouldn’t be a fucking vampire when I knew he wasn’t ready to leave his old life yet.

I wouldn’t have Acadia.

Shit.

“You want to go a round?” I heard at my back.

I let the punching bag swing and caught it with my two taped fists, hugging it tightly to my body.

Looking over my shoulder, I saw Corbin standing there, watching me.

“You can’t keep up with me,” I told him bluntly.

“Want to prove it?”

I snorted.

Then, as if to prove it to him, I easily lifted the punching bag, which weighed a good three hundred pounds, up off the hook on the ceiling, brought it down, gripped it, and then tore it in half.

Sand fell to the floor like water, coating the entire ring I was standing in with the black granules.

“That was a seven-hundred-dollar bag,” he told me. “I know because I just purchased nearly the same one not even four months ago.”

I shrugged. “Money is immaterial.”

He snorted. “I have debt up to my asshole.”

I found my first smile in over two hours.

“You work for me, take the job that Render offered you, and you’ll have money up to your asshole instead of debt,” I informed him, dropping the pieces of the punching bag to the floor. “What you can’t do is go back to the old job.”

He nodded, pursing his lips. “I figured that.” He expounded, “With my sister being a vampire and all. Although, I bet she could go back to work right now and pass for a human seeing as she has super-duper iron control now. Though, you cut off that avenue for her when you traipsed her undead body in front of the entire country.”

I stepped out of the ring and walked to the thermos of blood that Chen had set there for my consumption once I finished my workout. Something he’d done for me hundreds of times before.

Corbin studied the trail of sand that I’d left out of the ring.

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