Chapter 22

DYLAN

Darren pushesopen the door to his seedy hotel in Thailand with a woman on his arm, a prostitute by the look of her. The astonishment is clear on his face when he sees me.

“Jesus, Dylan,” he says, grabbing his chest. “You scared the shit out of me!” He laughs and shoos the woman off. “I’ll see you another night, sweetheart.”

She giggles but wobbles off in her four-inch plastic heels.

Darren turns back to me, a wide grin on his face. “What the hell are you doing here?” He strides forward and leans down to give me a big hug.

I’m sitting on a stained couch in a hotel room that I’d say has seen better days except that nope, I’m pretty sure this place has always been the roach-infested quarter-star accommodations that I see before me.

I clap him on the back, too.

When Darren pulls away, though, his brows are scrunched together. “Are you all right? The lawyers called and said you were in jail for brawling? I told Jenkins to bail you out immediately and I was flying home later tonight to make sure you were okay.”

He looks so sincere. One hundred percent sincere. If I hadn’t heard it from Chloe’s own mouth, it might even be enough to make me question everything Miranda told me.

But I did hear it from Chloe and so I can only look on my brother and wonder how long I’ve lived with such a sociopath and not known it. Was he always this way or was he at one time genuinely the brother I loved?

“No worries,” I say, holding out a glass of whisky. “We got it all sorted out. And a trip to Thailand sounded like exactly the kind of getaway I needed to escape all that shit back there. But brother, shit, couldn’t you afford nicer digs?”

He takes the glass and laughs. “Right? I saw the place and thought the taxi-driver was shitting me. But then I thought, what the fuck, why not rough it like the locals for a night?”

Then his face goes sober. “But man, I’m sorry about that girl. I know you really liked her. It’s just hard when you’re as high profile and powerful as we are to trust people. Everybody has an angle. Everybody wants something.”

I nod and take a sip of the glass I’ve been nursing for over an hour while I waited for him to come back. “Well now I know better.”

I lift my glass. “To knowing better.”

Darren clinks his glass with mine. “To knowing better.”

We both drink. Darren downs his, laughing and making a face when the glass is empty. “Whooeee, that burns.”

I laugh. “No kidding. You want some more?” I hold up the bottle.

“Hell yes.”

I pour him another.

“Bitches aren’t fucking worth it,” I say, slurring my words. “Bros before hoes.”

Then I raise my glass again. “Bros before hoes!”

He clinks his glass again, laughing at me and shouting, “Bros before hoes!”

We both down our glasses.

“Man I’ve missed this.” He relaxes back in a plastic lounge chair beside me, the least offensive looking piece of furniture in the room. “Us just relaxing and hanging out. Now I sort of wished I hadn’t sent the girl away cause the only thing that would make this better would be her sucking our dicks right now.”

“Bros plus hoes?” I offer.

He laughs and nods.

I just shake my head though. “Women are too complicated. They’re needy and whiny.”

Darren pours himself some more whisky. “True enough.”

He holds out the bottle to me but I raise a hand to decline. “I had half the bottle before you got here. Had to relax after that long ass flight. Remind me again why we made our factory in the middle of fuck all nowhere Asia?”

“Uh, cause the labor is cheap as shit? And the tax breaks are sick.”

“And it doesn’t hurt that you get to come over here once a quarter and do whatever you want to girls in some shithole rat-infested motel and no one’s ever the wiser, huh?”

“What?” Darren looks confused, the smile dimming a notch on his face.

“Like that girl you were bringing back here.” I sit up a little straighter. “You were gonna what? Rape her and beat her within an inch of her life? Cause that’s what you get off on, right?”

Darren sits up in his chair, the smile finally dropping from his face. “What the hell are you talking about. She was a prostitute. You can’t rape a prostitute. Jesus. You of all people should know that.”

It’s a well-aimed barb but it’s not stopping me now that I’m on a role.

“Why else would you be staying in this shithole?” I gesture to the room around us, “instead of one of the nice international hotels? You want a place where no one will care about who comes and goes. And a place where no one will notice the disappearance of just another cheap whore.”

“What the fuck, Dylan?”

Darren’s whole face is red as he jumps to his feet, indignant.

“Her hair was the same color as Chloe’s. Do you find ones that look like our sister on purpose, you sick fuck?”

Darren lunges for me but he stumbles after the first step and falls to his knees. He blinks and shakes his head, looking up at me with unfocused eyes. “Wha— you do to-me?” he asks sluggishly.

“What?” I ask calmly. “I thought you liked to party. Chloe told me this is how you did it to her at the beginning so she couldn’t fight back. She was just fourteen at the time, wasn’t she?”

I calmly stand up, taking with me the little tin box that I bought before getting in the private jet. You really can find anything on the streets of San Francisco.

But before I pull the lid off the tin, I pull the gloves out of my pocket and tug them on. Then I open the tin and fill the needle with the yellow liquid in the vial.

Darren tries to get to his feet but only falls back down again. I didn’t scrimp on the dosage of GHB I put in the whisky bottle.

I kick him in the ribs and he doubles over so I kick him in the back to get him straightened back out.

Then I drop on top of him and yank his arm out, positioning the needle at the fattest vein.

He just starts laughing.

“She always was the best fuck. You’ve never known a tight cunt until you fuck our little sister. You should try it.”

I believed Chloe and Miranda. I did. But still, seeing the true face of my brother for the first time…

“She’d always cry when I snuck in her room at night to fuck her. You would’ve loved it.”

My jaw tightens so hard I swear my teeth are going to crack. I know what he’s doing. Trying to rile me so I won’t inject him, or maybe so I’ll hit him instead and leave some DNA behind so this won’t just look like the tidy overdose I intend.

But I have something that my brother never understood.

Discipline.

So I shove the needle in his arm and root around until I hit the vein. Then I depress the plunger.

“You’re just like me,” he shouts. “You like it when they scream. Nothing makes you harder than when they fight you and you get to hurt them anyway. You love being a god just as much as I do, brother. We’re both our father’s son! We’re both—”

He cuts off mid-sentence and his mouth shuts and then gapes open, shuts and opens as his eyes go distant.

I move off him and sit beside the brother I loved my whole life and watch as the life drains from his eyes.