were serving today. I wasn’t really hungry, for my mind was elsewhere. On Jaz and the news I’d heard. To think, I’d thought my antics on Sunday would be the talk of the school. It was, maybe for five minutes. But now? Now everything was about Jaz, and not in a good way.
She’d won the winter queen crown, and yet that wasn’t the end of it. Now Brittany was dead, and Jaz looked like she did the deed. I had Markus looking into it for me, so I didn’t know the entire lowdown yet, but I would soon enough.
I did know one thing, though: Jaz didn’t do it. I knew she wasn’t like me, and she definitely wasn’t like Dante. What would Jaz do if she knew what I’d done over the weekend? If I told her that I’d taken a trip to the hospital Sunday with Markus?
Before anyone else arrived at the table, I let my mind wander.
Markus wore his usual suit; his favorite color, too. Black, like his soul. With a dark red undershirt and a sleek black tie, he looked like the devil himself. The devil, made flesh, given a face that hardly ever wore emotion—and when it did, it was always terrifying.
Never cross Markus or the family; that had been ingrained into my head since birth. Markus was over ten years my senior, technically only my half-brother, but still. Blood was blood in the family. Blood mattered more than anything.
Except the contracts that kept us going, the money that kept our hearts beating and our estate away from any prying eyes.
I walked beside my older brother, wearing dark clothes myself. If you looked like you blended in, you tended to do just that. Today, Markus’s contacts were told to turn their eyes somewhere else. He would not be doing the deed, but I would. It was technically yet another favor, but I didn’t care. However much I would owe my family, I didn’t care.
I would do anything for Jaz.
Yes, I’d come into the obsession that tended to run rampant through my family. I’d thought it had skipped me, left me behind in the dust, but all it took was Jaz to stumble into Midpark for the obsession to take root.
I might not have had her in the way Dante did, but she was mine all the same.
That…that would be another favor I would have to talk to Markus about, but not right now. Right now I had to take care of business, and that business was the comatose Ryan laying unaware in his hospital bed.
We walked through the hospital with a purpose, already knowing where he was, what floor to go to, what wing of the hospital he was in. Room number, everything. My heart beat steadily in my chest, not the heartbeat you’d assume someone to have when they were mere minutes from ending someone’s life.
It would be the first time, but it wouldn’t be the last.
My family didn’t let children handle matters like this, not usually. I was eighteen, and within a few months I would be working for my family in the basement. Killing would become a normal thing for me.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t confident in my abilities; it wasn’t that my family hadn’t trained me, taught me from birth on how to be, how to act, that following a contract was always the most important thing. It was more like…I wanted to get it over with. My first kill.
Dante was a machine when it came to killing, but he was messy. His kills left a trail; that trail would end once Ryan no longer drew breath, but still. That was a loose end he should’ve taken care of himself.
But no, Ryan was mine. I’d set Dante like an animal onto Ryan and his friends after what they’d nearly done to Jaz at school, what they would’ve done to her at that party if her private investigator hadn’t shown up and saved her.
I was thankful to Jacob for that. I was. I still didn’t like how close they were, but if he could afford her some protection I could not, I would learn to deal. Just like with Dante. I would be the bigger man and learn to deal with all of their dicks sniffing around her.
And more, but I wasn’t going to think about that right now.
We arrived before Ryan’s door within ten minutes. Markus stopped outside of his room, turning to glare at me. He always wore a serious, stern