That last month, though… I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Not even Basil fucking Berkshire.
I chewed on another strand of hair, wondering how to ask this without sounding ridiculous. I spit it out, “Please, don’t tell Nash.”
“Keep a secret from my brother? Easily.”
No hesitation.
Nothing.
Reed liked people. Whereas I had gone full-on hermit in college, Reed joined a frat, went to parties, and made more friends than Facebook allowed. But for the past seven years, he liked everyone except his brother.
“What’s with you two? You used to be close.”
I’d broken the unspoken rule. Asked the question I’d known I instinctively shouldn’t have asked.
“Nothing.”
Flat.
Emotionless.
Not Reed, yet somehow Reed.
Some rustling on his end filled my ears, and instinct told me he was done with this phone call.
“Look, I have to go. I’ll talk to Delilah. This is the right decision,” Reed assured me before he hung up.
I knew he was right. There wasn’t a market for inexperienced twenty-two-year-olds with degrees in design in Clifton, Alabama, and there was nothing for me back in Eastridge, North Carolina. An internship at Prescott Hotels would afford me a head start I would be stupid to give up.
But the idea of seeing Nash again, of working for him…
I buried my face in my pillow and screamed before glaring at myself in the mirror. Desperation clashed with my pitch-black hair.
My phone pinged. Ben. The one person I could talk to about the Nash Prescott fiasco, but it felt weird to use Nash’s app to discuss accidentally having sex with Nash.
Benkinersophobia: I didn’t change it, because it reminds me of a girl I used to know.
My fingers twitched with the urge to ask him more, but I held back. I was better off not knowing.
Durga: If you had to change your username, what would you change it to?
I waited an hour for him to respond, and as soon as he did, the green active dot beside his name turned red.
Benkinersophobia: Sisyphus.
Sisyphus.
A fallen king.
A liar.
A cheat.
I could relate.
The one-word name should have been the first indicator I couldn’t trust Fika.
His name reminded me of Emery Winthrop and her penchant for obscure words, which should have been the second indicator.
Fika is Swedish for a moment to slow down and appreciate the good things in life, and that should have been the third sign.
For starters, there were no good things in life.
And Fika wasn’t even Swedish.
He was a Wonder Bread white, North Carolinian, Keith Mars wannabe, a disgraced Eastridge sheriff ousted almost two decades ago, around the time I’d touched my first boob.
“I think you should stop this crusade of yours.” A curtain of bangs swept hair over one eye until he brushed them to the side. He resembled the Jonas Brothers before they’d realized straightening hair was for pussies. The leather chair squished under his weight as he leaned forward and placed two elbows on my office desk, close enough I could see my reflection in his eyes. “It’s destroying you. There’s no light in your eyes. I didn’t think it’s possible, but each time I see you, it’s worse, Nash.”
Fika patted his pockets as if searching for the cancer sticks that had fucked up his lungs in the first place. When he didn’t find them, he snapped at the litany of rubber bands that formed a colony up and down the length of his forearms.
“I didn’t invite you inside my home at four in the morning for your opinion of me. I hired you for a job.” Tracing my fingers along the stack of hundreds in front of me, I watched Fika’s eyes follow their path across Benjamin Franklin’s pasty, sunken-eyed face. “I tell you what to do. You get paid. That’s how this works.”
Thumbing the currency strap, I lifted the bills and fanned them, my fingers brushing against each hundred (and there were many). I should have shown mercy, but all I could feel at the mention of a Winthrop was rage.
The medical examiner had ruled my dad’s death a heart attack, but he’d left out the three jobs he’d taken that led to it. If he and Ma hadn’t lost their home, jobs, and savings, Dad would be alive and I wouldn’t catch Ma staring at an empty dinner setting with misty eyes every time I visited.
As far as I was concerned, the Winthrops killed Hank Prescott.
Case closed.
Vengeance pending.
Fika’s jaw ticked when I pulled out my desk’s drawer, dropped the bills inside, and slammed it shut with an audible thud.
I believed in power over mercy. People possessed needs, and when you determined someone’s needs, you ruled him.
Fika’s need was money. His second cancer diagnosis arrived eighteen months ago. It sucked away the fat on his cheeks until he resembled something more like a ghoul than a man. Since his remission, he’d gained back some of his weight, along with medical debt that could fund a third-world coup d’état.
To be fair, I’d never had to pull the money card in the past. I’d done some less-than-legal things to become the C.E.O. and founder of a company Forbes valued at over a billion dollars last year, and Fika had done a stellar job of covering my tracks for me.
I’d stayed out of jail this long, a phenomenon in itself.
I asked him to do something. He did it. That was how transactions worked.
Until now.
“Did you swallow a bad batch of chemo?” I lifted a second stack of hundreds and tore at the edges of one bill because I could—and it left Fika on edge, a near miracle with the hippy bullshit he’d turned to after he’d beaten cancer the first time. “Have you forgotten the English dictionary? Transactions require an exchange, and for you to get this”—I rattled the stack of bills—“you have to give me what I asked for.”
“Look, man…” He eyed the money before shaking his head. “I get it. You’ve got a thing against the Winthrops, for good reason, but nothin’ good will come out of finding Gideon Winthrop. Trust me.”
I trusted no one, another reason Gideon needed to go. I didn’t mean die. Death was an easy route; long, drawn-out suffering pleased me more.
Movies like Taken and John Wick skewed the general public’s conceptions of revenge. It didn’t happen in a day. Like all things worth doing, revenge—true revenge, the type meant to annihilate its target—took time.
The Space Race, for instance, began in 1955. The Apollo 11 didn’t reach the moon until 1969. It took over fourteen years to land on the moon. Fourteen years. More than the average lifespan of a dog.
My revenge, on the other hand, had been in the making for a mere four years.
“I’m not looking for an ethics lecture, Fika.” His hands shook as I spoke, but I spared him no mercy. “You found Gideon.”
“I did.” He worried his bottom lip and swiped at the Jonas Brothers wig again until it sat slightly crooked on his head. “Sometimes people do bad things for good reasons.”
The argument of someone who’d taken bribes during his tenure as sheriff to pay for his cancer treatments.
How much evidence had he stolen? How many wealthy Eastridgers had he given a free pass? If Gideon had approached him, would he have brushed those crimes under a rug, too?