3. Alex

Chapter three

Alex

Ryan looked like an entirely different man when he slept. All of the intensity drained from his face. Those shocking blue eyes hooded safely behind his eyelids. Lines of worry smoothed out of his sharply carved features.

Peaceful. Beautiful.

Even snoring, dead drunk, smelling like a fishmonger's wife.

Alex turned his head side to side, studying Ryan's profile, the way his lips parted ever so slightly, letting out rank huffs of booze-soaked air. His fingers hovered just over Ryan's cheekbone, wanting to know the sharp crest of it with the pad of his thumb. Wanting to scrape his fingers over the two days' beard Ryan had coming in, knowing it would feel like sandpaper against his skin.

He caressed the strong column of Ryan's throat with his eyes, vulnerable flesh exposed over the collar of his henley. His eyes wandered over the thick curve of Ryan's shoulder, the way the white shirt stretched over his pecs, muscles swollen from lifting crate after crate of heavy liquor bottles. Alex licked his lips, remembering what it was like to taste the flesh there. To take one of his small, mauve nipples into his mouth and bite down.

His eyes wandered further, over his ribcage, rising and falling like a bellows. Then, with a thrill, to the thick shape of his cock through his trousers. Only half hard and already so large. Just looking at him put such an intense erotic thrill through him that he shivered, vividly reliving the memory of touching it, tasting it, receiving it. It was obscene.

He'd seen Ryan totally naked more times than he could count, out at the swimming hole when they were boys, mostly. But Ryan had only been naked for him once, more than a decade ago. And still the memory clung to him, as vivid as if it were yesterday. Images he revisited over and over so many times that they were stronger than almost any other memory he possessed.

In the two or so years since their paths had crossed again, he'd watched him, fantasized about him, but he had never dared get this close. This intimate. It was like lingering near a sleeping tiger, waiting for it to wake.

He'd always had an unhealthy, prurient interest in Ryan, it was true. He'd admitted this to no one, not even Ryan, certainly not Tommy, and not even Lindsay. He didn't confide in people. Had never felt the urge. And even if he were the sharing type, this particular interest seemed more taboo than any of his others, though he wasn't actually related to Ryan. Had never thought of Ryan as his brother. In fact, he had only ever thought of him as The Other Brother. Tommy's brother. Not his brother. The limerence that had struck him like lightning from the moment he laid eyes on him had forbidden anything otherwise.

And it wasn't as though they were raised as brothers. Ryan didn't appear until he, Alex, was ten years old, dropped out of the sky like a beautiful god fallen to earth. A golden god. Always, his unnaturally blue eyes scanning the trees, the ground, the sky. Light cinnamon brown hair ruffled by the wind. Then, after two years of agonizing bliss, he'd disappeared, taking Tommy with him. A fact that Alex had never forgiven him for, no matter how much he wanted him.

With Tommy dead, that tenuous border holding Alex back from this fascination seemed to be disintegrating at an alarming rate. Now they were not two men who shared a brother. Now they were just two men who had each lost a brother.

He could touch him now. Reach out and touch the fluttering pulse at his throat and Ryan wouldn't wake. He was certain of it. Drunk as he was, he would never feel a thing. Even Alex's fingers trailing over the thick swell of his cock through the wool of his trousers would likely go unnoticed. Alex's hand hovered in the air, practically itching to touch him.

But he closed his fist. He wasn't a voyeur, not typically. As much as he was fascinated by Ryan, touching wouldn't soothe the ache that he had. Wouldn't feed the hunger. He liked his playmates to be awake and conscious of the fact that he was making them suffer. He wanted those blue eyes burning into his while he opened up Ryan's gorgeous flesh and watched his precious blood run in crimson ribbons.

Alex let out a long, slow breath through his nose.

Then he picked up the glass of water sitting on the bedside table next to Ryan and turned it upside down with a flourish.

"FUCK!" Ryan sat up, sputtering. One of his large hands swung reflexively at Alex, closed into an iron fist. Alex just managed to dodge the blow and took several steps back to avoid any further attempts Ryan might make to bludgeon him.

Ryan shook his head like a big, beautiful dog, flinging the water out of his tawny hair. His breaths came out of him in big, angry bursts. Like a bull, preparing to charge.

Alex smiled, a delicious tightness in his stomach.

"What the fuck, Alex?" Ryan shoved his hair out of his face and smoothed it over his skull while he glared at Alex and then looked down at himself, the water soaking his shirt.

"I tried to ask nicely." Which wasn't true at all, of course. "We have business to attend to."

"What business?" Ryan was squinting at him. Probably still a bit drunk. And definitely nursing a hangover. "Can't it fucking wait?" He squinted toward the window. "It's the middle of the goddamn night."

"No," Alex said, simply. "It can't. Come with me. "

"Tell me what this is about." Ryan dragged himself to his feet and swayed a bit. Alex did not miss the grimace and the way his hand reflexively went toward his head, and suppressed the urge to laugh.

"It's a surprise." Alex watched with his tongue tucked under one of his canine teeth while Ryan turned his back and pulled his henley and his undershirt over his head. A shiver nearly went through him, though he mastered the urge. Ryan pulled another undershirt from a small set of drawers and pulled it over his head. He looked over his shoulder, caution flashing through his eyes as it always did when they were in the same room together. Alex realized with a certain thrill that they hadn't been alone until now, not for years.

But he wasn't going to fire a shot preemptively. He had waited for years. He could wait longer. So he peeled his eyes away from Ryan while he moved around the bedroom, pulling a shirt on and buttoning it with deft fingers over his undershirt.

The small room was modest. Meticulously tidy, probably a product of his time in the military. The Army never had such an effect on Tommy. His room was still untidy.

Tommy.

Alex remembered with a jolt that he was dead. Of course he knew that he was dead. Had been dead for two days. This was the business that brought him into Ryan's bedroom at four o'clock in the morning. But the fact kept catching him by surprise. Tommy's absence was perplexing, a puzzle his brain couldn't solve .

It infuriated him. A wound he couldn't stop picking at. It angered him that his mind couldn't seem to accept and settle into the fact that he was gone. It was like being tricked over and over again.

A strange thought: Tommy wasn't in the other room. Tommy was dead.

But Tommy could not be dead because he had always been. Two years out of the womb before Alex was shoved screaming into the world from the ripped cunt of a woman he had both loved and hated so intensely. Tommy had been security. Tommy had been loyalty. Tommy had protected him from the worst of their mother's tempers, and he had taken Alex under his wing and taught him the ways of the world.

Alex was smarter than Tommy had ever been. He was craftier. He was more industrious, more resourceful. Certainly more successful. And he was more practical in all the ways that mattered. But Tommy was also the only other person in the world he was sure he loved. At least the closest thing he thought he was capable of feeling to it.

Until Ryan came along. And even that, perhaps, wasn't love. What he felt for Lindsay, might have also been love in its own way. The pleasure of possessing him. It wasn't normal, he was aware of that. The miserly way he kept his attachments to others. There was something different about the way he felt, even toward the people he was fond of .

"Alex." Ryan's voice, low and clipped with anger, brought him out of his thoughts. His brows were drawn together. Hands loose by his sides but a certain tension in his body hinted at a readiness for violence.

"We have a meeting." Alex sauntered to the door of Ryan's bedroom and looked over his shoulder at him, at the room. "A sharecropper shack is nicer than this shithole."

"I'm not about to take interior decorating advice from you, Marie Antoinette." Ryan grabbed his hat off of a hook at the back of his door and set it over his wet hair, looking distinctly unfriendly. "You're the reason this place looks like a dump."

"I've always wondered about the guillotine," Alex said, stepping ahead of Ryan. "Vicious invention. Chilling to look at. But not very impressive when you consider that it was actually designed to provide as painless and swift a death as possible. Wouldn't it be more ideal if it made death as agonizingly slow as possible? Perhaps if you fit a crank mechanism onto the blade instead of dropping it, and turned it, one circle at a time, and slowly pressed the blade through the victim's neck."

"Alex," Ryan said after a pause. "You are fucking demented."

He smiled. "Everyone has their talents."

"I'll wake Lindsay," Ryan said, rubbing his eye and turning to walk to the other side of the house. His voice darkened. "Unless you already dumped a bucket of water on him, too? "

"Lindsay isn't home." Oh no, he'd had a busy night. He was fast asleep in one of Alex's sumptuous spare rooms where Alex had left him, worn out, used up, bathed and bandaged.

Ryan grunted, not bothering to ask why.

"He isn't invited to this meeting," Alex added.

Ryan didn't respond. It took Alex a moment to realize that he had paused behind him. Alex turned to look, opening his mouth to hasten him on, but he stopped when he realized that Ryan was standing outside the slightly ajar door of Tommy's bedroom. He stood perfectly still, eyes glassy, immersed in whatever private hell was coming at him through that narrow opening in the doorway.

Alex stepped forward and pushed the door open, curious about what it might feel like to see the untidy bedroom with its occupant dead.

Irritating, that was all. Irritating that Tommy was dead.

Ryan made an odd sound, a deep raw noise that flowed out of him on an exhale. Then he turned away, jaw set.

"Let's get on with it." He stepped forward and yanked the door closed, then pivoted on his foot and walked to the front door with purpose. Outside, Alex's driver Ian was waiting in the shiny black Ford Model T, engine chugging in its rhythmic and satisfactory way.

Ian climbed from the driver's seat and opened the back door of the car for the both of them to climb in. Alex gave him a nod as he moved past him. Ryan climbed in after Alex and settled in next to him .

"Does he wipe your ass, too?" he said, shooting Alex a look of disgust.

"None of your business," Alex said, primly. Though, of course Ian did nothing of the kind. Alex kept his personal tasks to himself. Those things did not excite him. And as far as the things that did excite him went, he had a hard and fast rule to stay away from his house staff and his employees in choice of playmates.

"Are you going to tell me where we're going, or am I going to have to strangle it out of you?" Ryan stuck a pre-rolled cigarette between his lips and struck a match on the bottom of his boot. Alex watched his hands moving through the air like deep throbs of music, touching the flame to the tip of the cigarette.

"I told you, it's a surprise," Alex said. "A birthday gift." He reached across the car and took the cigarette out of Ryan's mouth, enjoying the way Ryan flinched. He brought it to his own lips, wishing he could taste Ryan's hooch-sweetened saliva over the bitter, caustic flavor of burnt tobacco. He handed it back, blowing a gentle jet of white smoke toward the closed window of the car.

"My birthday isn't until November," Ryan grumbled.

"An early one, then," Alex said, watching him out of the corner of his eye.

Ryan fell into a sullen silence the rest of the car ride over. As obstinate as he was and as much as grumbled, he still followed where Alex led, a fact that filled Alex with deep pleasure .

When they pulled around the back of The Gentleman's Haberdashery, Ryan turned to look at him with something bordering on disgust. "What are we doing at the Crystal?"

"I told you, we have a meeting." Before Ian could do it, he opened the door, himself, and climbed down out of the car.

"Wild goose chase," Ryan muttered under his breath. He did so love to be the one in control. Alex so longed to show him how freeing it could be to hand the reins over to someone else, to find freedom in submission.

The two men walked toward the building, entering as they always did, through the back door. They slipped through the store front, silent as ghosts, and walked behind the register where Alex activated the secret door. Normally, there wouldn't have been anyone else there, but Joey and Hiloha were still waiting patiently for his return when they descended the stairs and unlocked the front door of the speakeasy.

Hiloha was nursing a blackened eye and Joey's knuckles were wrapped with bloodied linen. In spite of this, they both shared a look of grim satisfaction.

"He's waitin' for you," Joey said, teeth bright as he smiled in the dimness of the lamplight.

"Who is?" Ryan asked.

Alex smiled back, a thrill of anticipation moving through him.

"You can go," Alex said to Joey and Hiloha, reaching into his pocket and drawing out a thick wad of bills. He split it in half and handed each of them a wedge of money. "Lock the door on your way out."

"Aye aye, Captain," Hiloha said.

Alex looked at Ryan and tilted his head toward the corridor.

"This way." He led Ryan to the painting of the duchess and pulled the candlestick next to it, causing the wall to open inward, feeling the same thrill he always did at the marvel of engineering. They stepped into the dark concrete corridor lit by two flaming torches. Several doors lined the hallway and Alex walked to the first one.

It was a storage room that held boxes of their backstock of hooch. The boxes had all been rearranged to make a clearing in the center of the room. In the center of that clearing, a man sat in a chair. One of his eyes was swollen nearly shut, sticky blood oozing from a split eyebrow. A dirty linen tied tightly around his head gagged him, muffling the words he was trying so desperately to shove out of his mouth.

Rope bound him to the chair around his torso, his thighs, and his ankles. His hands were bound behind him with handcuffs.

Sandy Barnes, the fucking traitor.

Just looking at him made Alex smile.

Ryan to look at Alex, amazement lighting his face. "You found him."

"A birthday present," Alex repeated. Not taking his eyes off of Ryan's face, he reached into pocket. Fingers wrapped around his switchblade and brought it out slowly. It was his favorite tool, an extension of himself, and he had never let anyone else touch it. He sent the blade out with a familiar, satisfying click, and extended it to Ryan.

The man in the chair started to struggle like a worm on a hook, his fear hitting the air like a palpable stink. A thrill of anticipation went through Alex.

"I think he has some things he'd like to tell us," Alex said.

Ryan only hesitated a moment, looking at the blade in Alex's hand. Then, something shifted in his expression. A door closed behind his eyes when he raised them to meet Alex's. He took the knife with a steady hand.

"You know, Alex," he said in a soft, dangerous voice that went straight to Alex's cock. "I think you might be right."