and makes sure that I see him putting it into the cup holder in the door.
“You have Magnus. Where is it that you think I want to go, Tiberius?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t believe in leaving anything up to chance.”
Something stabs into my ass: I feel around, retrieving something that looks like a sawed-up piece of driftwood.
“Antler,” says Tiberius. Before I can throw it out the window, he snatches it from my hand and starts gnawing on it with his back teeth.
“That’s disgusting.”
I start searching around the side of the seat, looking for the lever that will allow me to get a little more leg room. There’s change on the floor. I pop the three quarters and a dime into the cup holder.
“The Alpha says you helped Varya kill my father.”
Buttressing my feet against the floorboard, I plop the last dime in the cup holder while watching Tiberius’s hands in case he reaches for his gun. He didn’t care for August much, but I don’t believe in leaving anything up to chance either.
He does move but only to stretch out his left hand, his thumb hooked around the steering wheel. His ring finger bends crookedly to the side, and there is a star-like scar in the middle of his hand.
I was there when Tiberius tried to kill his father. I was there two days later when a dog spike was pounded into Tiberius’s palm on August’s orders.
“All the rest were mercenaries. My father always said Lucian would turn on him if he was less afraid and someone paid him a quarter more. I told the Alpha to keep an eye on you because you were the one most loyal to him.”
Finding two more coins, I drop them into the cup holder.
“So what changed, Constantine?”
Under the floor liner are three quarters.
“I asked him for one thing. A promise, but he broke it.” One of the quarters turns out to be a Susan B. Anthony dollar.
“What promise?”
The coin falls with a dull metallic clap on top of the change I’ve accumulated. I can’t find anything else.
“I made him promise never to turn Magnus into me.”
Tiberius frowns.
It was the only thing I’d ever asked of August. I hated going to him hat in hand, so I remembered every word. “I don’t know why,” he’d said. “You are so good—so very good—at what you do, but yes, I promise not to turn Magnus into you.”
He held to it until we started losing men to his disastrous obsession with the Great North. Then he didn’t.
“You promised.”
“I promised not to turn Magnus into you,” he’d said coolly. “But he was never going to be you; he will, however, learn to do what you do.
“Oh dear. Constantine has that evil look. You will thank me, Constantine of the Evil Look. In time you, will see it as a blessing. You were never going to let him grow up but now he will. Now, he will earn his fucking living.”
Tiberius chews thoughtfully on his antler, his elbow on the open window frame.
“Do you remember that time in Hamilton?” he finally says.
“Yes.”
“We stopped somewhere. A bakery maybe? I don’t remember exactly. All I know is you said you wanted to get something for Magnus.”
“Hmm-hmm.” I do remember how magnanimous August was in 2014. When he’d destroyed the last of his opposition in the crucial port in Ontario. “Go, go,” he’d said when I said I wanted to pick up something for Magnus. “Here,” he’d added, peeling off a couple of brown-gold bills with Robert Borden on them as he always did to signal his pleasure. I never took the money. In my tortured imagination, the line between being a warrior and being a thug was drawn in cash.
“As soon as you left the car, Atticus asked why Magnus never had to go with us, even though he was older than I was.”
“I noticed you waited until Constantine was out of the car before you asked,” August had apparently said. “Does that mean you are more afraid of him than you are of me?”
Tiberius says Atticus tripped over himself trying to assure August that he was not afraid of me at all.
“You should be,” August said. Or at least this is according to Tiberius. “I know how to control all of you. Wipe that look off your face, Lucian, before I slice it off.
“See? It’s really just a matter of fear, greed, and tits, but not Constantine. I am a dangerous man because I know exactly what I want