Page 3 of Along for the Ride

I lean on him as we walk toward the parking lot. He pulls his keys from his pocket when we reach a black Mercedes, and my eyes go wide. This car, with its black leather interior and the perfume of opulence, is the most expensive thing I’ve ever touched. It’s about to be the most expensive place I’ve ever fucked, because he opens the back door and lets me get inside. When he follows me, I abandon what little dignity I have left as he takes the pill out and puts it into his mouth. He leans in and kisses me, slipping it onto my tongue. The moment I swallow, his hand loops behind my head, fists my hair, and pulls me down to his lap.

“Maybe I’ll take you off these streets, baby,” he says through a frustrated groan. “Make you my pretty little project. But first, show me what you can do with your mouth.”

Maybe New York won’t be so bad after all.

ChapterOne

Six Years Later

Gentry

I’ve been a free man for one week, but I thought about my brother every day during my prison stay. It wasn’t my wife’s murder that put me away. We called in a favor from George, our handler, and he had his clean-up crew take care of the mess. With no one to miss her—aside from the men who’d been dicking her down—we got away clean. What landed me in prison was a case of bad timing and empty pockets.

Hitmen are usually paid well for their services, but my brother and I weren’t typical hitmen. Instead of working for a large payout, we worked for a gamble. The buyer paid George, George gave us the details, and we got to take whatever we wanted from the scene. Leaving out the bank transfers meant no paper trail, and George had a team that scrubbed scenes for us, so it usually felt like a fair trade. We got to kill—which we thoroughly enjoyed—and didn’t have to worry about what happened later. This arrangement didn’t always work in our favor, though. Our last two hits had been cash poor, which meant we were cash poor as well. We needed money, so Karson and I thought we’d harken back to our teenage years and do a quick robbery.

That quick robbery turned into six long years in a cell for me.

I can still hear the sound of Karson’s voice as he sat in a wooden box and sang like a canary to cover his own ass. I encouraged him to do it, but it still fucking sucked. He’s never been right in the head, and serving time in a cage would have resulted in an implosion of his mind. I still hadn’t forgiven him for fucking my wife, but I had to protect him.

We’d been killing together long before it became a job, when it was just for sport and didn’t matter who got caught in the crossfire. We were called the “Kursed” brothers. It was a play on our last name—Kursicki—coupled with the fact that the people around us always seemed to disappear.

We used to actually enjoy each other’s company.

Before.

Before I walked in on him fucking my wife and we split our business. I didn’t trust him, and trust was imperative in a business such as ours. I never thought there’d be a day when we had to go on separate paths. Or a day when I began to hate the work I was born to do.Everythingbegan to piss me off, and it all centered on Karson and his shit behavior. He’d drag anyone to hell with him as long as he had someone to keep him company. That’s why we no longer spoke, and I planned to keep it that way.

Most men in our business lived lonely lives, anyway. A duo was unheard of. Like grizzlies in the forest, we make contact to get laid or make a kill. You don’t see us until it’s too late.

Our way of thinking is unique, and I’ve only met one man whose brain worked like mine and Karson’s. He was my brief cellmate, Lexington Rowe. Big, but not quite as wide as me, with prison tattoos covering his body. Ten tally marks in his flesh counted every year he was inside, but he’d have a lot more by the time he was done serving his lifetimes in prison. The first night I bunked with him, he broke my hand for touching his bed, and I went out of my way to break his nose in retaliation. We werealmostfriends after that, or as close to friends as people with our mindset can get. I remember when he came back to the cell after he committed an inter-prison homicide.

“What’d you do, Lex?” I asked when he returned from solitary.

“Good old-fashioned payback,” he said.

“Violence isn’t the answer.”

He dropped onto the mattress beneath my bunk and grunted. “Violence is always the answer.”

I’ve never felt such a close understanding like that with anyone besides my brother. Someone who understood that murder is as mundane as brushing your teeth in the morning. It’s just something you did.

Then he escaped, and I had to serve the rest of my time with people who had mild homicidal tendencies, not a constant propensity for it. That’s why it hurts that Karson and I are so estranged. Because no one knows evil like someone possessed by the same devil. But someone that close can hurt you more than anyone else, and I won’t give him the opportunity to shit on me again.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out and see a familiar name on the screen.

“Hello?”

“Gentry, you ready for a job, or are you still settling in?” George asks.

I’ve been living on stashed cash since I got out, and the small stack has dwindled to nearly nothing. Work sounds pretty good right about now. “I’m ready,” I say, “but I need a guaranteed payout.”

“How about several?”

I run my hand through my beard and consider this. Multiple close-to-home hits right after getting out of jail? Doesn’t seem smart. “I can do one, but not several. I don’t think it’s a good idea to work too close to home right now.”

“I don’t pay you to think,” George says with a dry laugh. He should lay off the cigarettes.

“You don’t pay me at all,” I say.

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