Hah. So much attitude. He won’t be sniping at me in a motherfucking minute. He’ll be lucky if he still has all of his fucking teeth. “Ahh, y’know. Spent a lot of time at the cemetery yesterday,” I reply. “We buried my little brother. He was in a car accident. Bled inside his skull until he died. It was a whole thing—”
“Jesus, Alex. I know. I’m sorry! You should have fucking told me the other night. Just…let go!” He wrenches himself free at last, lurching away, holding his hand against his neck. A pair of baleful, dark brown eyes glare at me from across the living room. “I know shit’s been tough, okay. I know you’ve had the worst run of all fucking time. But Christ, dude. No need to break into my place and murder me for it.”
I hold a set of keys aloft, jangling them in the air. “Didn’t break in. I forgot to mention I kept a spare set inside one of the breezeblocks around back.” He catches them when I toss them to him. “As for murdering you, I don’t know yet. I’ll admit, I’ve been thinking about it. See, someone paid me a visit yesterday. Someone I suspect you’re well-acquainted with.”
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, eyebrows arched, top lip curled in confusion. Slowly, he paces to the old couch I left here when I moved out and collapses down onto it. “Spit it out, man. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“My old man. Daddy Dearest. Giacomo Moretti. You might know him as Jack? He waltzed back into my life for a friendly little chat like he’d never even been gone. And d’you know what he was wearing when I set eyes on him for the first time in ten years? Care to hazard a guess?”
Zander’s face blanches white. He isn’t looking too well. Leaning forward, he grabs a can of beer from an open case on top of the coffee table and cracks it open. “Alex. I had no idea your old man was a Dreadnaught. Not until I came out to Raleigh. I’d never even heard his name until he showed up a couple of weeks ago at the club house. I’ve never even spoken to the guy.” He tips the beer back, chugging the liquid, and doesn’t stop until the can’s empty. Wincing, he discards it on the floor, rubbing at his throat. “You really fucked up my shit, dude. You could have broken my neck.”
Ignoring his pussy griping, I grab a beer from the case and sink down into the armchair opposite him, searching his face. “I don’t believe you. You’ve spoken to him plenty. And I’m betting you knew him before, too.” I pop the tab on the beer, holding the rim of the cold metal to my lips. “You know him before juvie, Zander?”
“Look, I just told you—”
“Zander.”
He curses under his breath. “Fine. Yeah. Fine. Jesus. I’ve spoken to Jack. I know him. But I didn’t know he was your old man until we’d already become friends at Denney. I pieced it together based on the stuff you said about him, okay. And it didn’t seem like a smart move to let on that we had ties when you obviously hated the guy so fucking much.”
I swill the beer around the inside of my mouth, hoping it’ll wash away the metallic taste of blood that’s been lingering on my tongue for days now. When I swallow, it’s still all I can taste, though. “You contacted him? Told him I was inside with you?”
“Sure. He already knew though, dude. It wasn’t news to him.”
“He asked you to keep an eye on me?”
Zander laughs, letting his head fall back onto the couch. “He didn’t say much of anything about it. Just grunted on the other end of the line. He didn’t tell me to do shit. I had your back because we were friends, man. For real. That had nothing to do with Jack.”
I don’t know if I can believe him. It all seems a little too coincidental to me. I don’t have the emotional wherewithal to unpack unimportant bullshit friend stuff at the moment, though. I just need to figure out what Jack’s game is and put an immediate stop to it. Because there is some sort of game here. There has to be. “And now? You show up at my place of work? You’re enrolled at the same school as me? This is all because we’re friends and you wanted to come hang out? I don’t buy it.”
“I told you why I came to Raleigh,” Zander replies wearily. “Q owed Monty a favor. He wanted me to register at Raleigh and figure out who’s been taking a chunk out of his coke business ever since that stuck-up Kacey bitch got sent away. That’s it. The end. Jack was never even near this deal. There’s bad blood between him and Monty. As far as I was aware, you couldn’t pay Jack to come to Raleigh, no matter how much you offered him.”
“So then what? He just shows up out of nowhere of his own volition one day? That’s a load of shit.”
“Like you said, man. You buried your little brother yesterday. He was Ben’s fath—”
I hurl the beer can across the room, roaring at the top of my lungs. “I WISH—”
Deep breath. Take a deep breath, mi amore. That’s it. Shhhhh. Breathe….
I pause second, waiting for the tidal wave of anger to subside. “I wish people would stop calling him that. Giacomo was not Ben’s father. He’s not my father, either. He’s a scum sucking piece of trash that uses and abuses things until he breaks them. He never cared about us before. He didn’t give a shit about us when my mom died. He didn’t care about us when we were thrown into the foster care system. There’s no fucking way in hell he showed up yesterday because he was affected by Ben’s death. So, don’t give me that ‘he was Ben’s father’ bullshit. It won’t fucking wash.”
Zander lets out an exasperated sigh. “What the hell do I know, man? I’m just doing what I’m fucking told, trying not to get my ass handed to me by dudes with way more clout than me. My dad kicked it three months before I was even born, so all this,” he says, gesturing angrily at me, “makes no fucking sense to me anyway. I’m sorry about Ben. I know how bad you wanted him to come stay with you. For what it’s worth, I know you’d have taken awesome care of him. But I don’t know anything about Jack coming here. I don’t keep tabs on the man. I was hoping things’d be cool with us if I came here. So long as you don’t try and snap my neck again, I still think that’d be dope. But that is literally all I got for you right now.”
I swallow, regretting that I hurled my beer across the room. Feeling a tiny bit bad that Pabst Blue Ribbon is currently running down my old living room wall.
However, this is all grade-A bullshit.
Zander sounds genuine. I mostly believe what he’s just told me, but even if it is all true, that still means he spent six months in juvie with me, knowing way more about me than he let on. He knew where Giacomo was when I didn’t. I bitched, and I griped, and I told him things about my family that I hadn’t told anybody before, and he didn’t say a fucking word. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have the opportunity. I mean, all we did was hang out all day, lifting weights and sparring, for fuck’s sake.
I twist the tire iron around in my hand, watching it spin as I run my tongue over my teeth. After a second, I stop it abruptly, jumping to my feet. “Fair enough.”
Zander follows me with his eyes as I make my way to the door. “That’s it? Fair enough? Where the fuck are you going, man? I feel like you need a zanny or something.”