Page 21 of Vengeance

“I could have killed you,” Viper says casually. Then he sees me, sits the glass down and the art piece, and asks, “Ready to head out, my love?”

9

Dele

“I

s the deal still on?” I ask Viper when we return back to the hotel room.

He was quiet during the ride back which isn’t particularly out of the norm for him, but the stiff clenching and then unclenching of his right hand told me otherwise.

“Of course, it’s still on,” he says as he roughly gets undressed, snatching his cuffs apart so that the cufflinks go flying about the living area before we even reach the bedroom. “Hudson can spew all that crap about neutrality all he wants, but even he knows it’s a bad look to break a deal after he knows he pissed off the client.”

“What did he say?”

“I’d rather not repeat it.”

“If it was about me, I’d rather know.”

“It wasn’t about you. He doesn’t have the type of intimacy with you to say something so vile.”

“Then who was it about?”

Viper, predictably, doesn’t answer me, leaving me to puzzle out the pieces. Outside of me and the kids, there’s a very short list of people that Viper cares about. And I say care in a very lose sense of the word because for him that means he finds them useful or entertaining enough not to kill. Eileen he probably considers a sister but would never say. Cres too. A little less than Eileen but definitely somewhere in the realm of pseudo sister. Maybe more like annoying, pseudo stepsister who he’s forced to put up with and has grown slightly on him. Wyan… is a mixed bag. At one point I would have considered Phae, but I know for a fact the only reason he didn’t kill her seven months ago is because I asked him not to.

But there’s nothing Hudson could have known or said about any of them that would have provoked such a strong reaction.

I go to what I know about Hudson and Viper’s relationship. Viper knew him long before the Soles found him and long before he met Stephen Pray. But that’s hardly anything to go on because I know nothing about the first ten or so years of Viper’s life. Except for the fact that the Soles found him after he ran away from a foster home when he was nine after he’d been taken away from his…

“He said something about your mother.”

He doesn’t reply, but not the kind of silence when he’s trying to ignore me. It’s that silence anytime something about his past is broached. Especially his mother. The only reason I knew he knew who his mother was is that Wyan casually mentioned it to me. But other than that, henevertalks about her. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he didn’t even have a mother. That Viper was created a monster that not even hell could contain and placed here to see if we could figure out what to do with him.

When he lays down in just in pants, still refusing to say anything, I ask the obvious question even though I doubt it.

“Is Hudson your dad?”

That makes Viper laugh. Not in amusement, though.

“Fuck no. If he was, I would have killed him a long time ago.”

“How did he know your mother then?”

Viper doesn’t answer for a long time, but I don’t pry. Not yet. First, I’m going to give him a chance. I take the time to strip completely naked before lying next to him on my side to face him.

Finally, he says, “The only reason I’m telling you this is because I know you aren’t going to let me have peace if I don’t, and I can’t resort to my normal tactics to shut you up right now.”

“Makes you rethink wanting me pregnant all the time, doesn’t it?”

He huff out a laugh. Then, “Before Pray took all that over, Hudson came to where we used to live to see if he could trail a route through Texas for his weapons. And what better place than some barely on the map small town so insignificant that I can’t remember the name of it anymore. My mother was a high school dropout with no marketable skills and no family to speak of, but I do remember that she loved me. Even when the drug addiction was at its worst, she was a good mom, and she did what she had to do give me what she could in a world where no one would help her.

“Naturally, the one thing she was good at was the one thing that Hudson and his men would be looking for when they passed through town. They saw her at a strip club and just had to have her. She even let her regulars come to our apartment. And it was on one of those apartment visits that I bashed Hudson in the face with a fucking platform shoe, just like I did tonight.”

“Why?”

Viper laughs and this time I hear some amusement.

“I was six and didn’t have a comprehension of what sex was, and I’ll leave it at that. Needless to say, I had a comprehension of what sex was after that, and, luckily, Hudson found the whole thing funny. He saw in me what it took a long time for other people to notice. That I’m not a normal person. That I don’t process things the way other people do. Emotionally, that is. “ Viper sighs. “Regardless, the comment that earned him that bashing tonight was something related to that time. And Hudson knows very well he shouldn’t have said it in front of me. So don’t worry. Our little weapons deal is fine, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

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