23. Twenty-Two

I screamed and banged my fist on the door until my whole arm hurt. “Let me out!”

My chest was tight with panic that I refused to acknowledge. I’d forgotten how much I fucking hated being locked in a tiny room with only a camera for company. I paced the concrete floor like a beast in a cage, glaring at the blinking red light in the corner. When I got out of there—and I would escape—I was going to kill whoever was watching. I’d tear through this place like a rabid dog until I found Boone. I didn’t care how many of them I had to fight.

Boone…I closed my eyes and leaned my sweaty forehead against the cool concrete wall.

When a group of six men breached the bunker, I threw everything I had at them, but it didn’t make a difference. They were pros, just like Boone said, wearing head to toe body armor. No matter how many punches I threw or how many times I tried to bite or scratch, I couldn’t hurt them. They’d wrestled me to the ground, subduing me with painful ease and a radioed, “Target secure.”

Then the fuckers dosed me with a sedative and dragged me out of the bunker. I had vague recollections of a helicopter ride and being escorted through a series of bland hallways before being tossed into this locked room.

I didn’t know if Boone was alive or dead. No, he couldn’t be dead. I refused to believe it. Yet the only way they could’ve gotten to me was if he was. He’d promised.

Suddenly overwhelmed, I sank to the floor. I scooted into the corner and drew my knees up, wrapping my arms around them. The voices started whispering in the back of my head as I stared down the camera.

This is what happens when you let your guard down.

See? I told you the government was coming for you. They were watching you the whole time.

Get out, get out, get out, get out!

I squeezed my eyes closed and covered my ears, even though that didn’t make a difference. The voices were inside my head, not outside.

I was so distracted by the voices I wasn’t aware of the door opening or anyone entering until a pair of polished black dress shoes stopped in front of me. My hands still over my ears, I lifted my head and found myself staring up at a familiar face.

“It’s you,” I said, slowly lowering my hands. “The guy with the Tesla. Lucky.”

Don’t trust him. He’s with them.

My anger boiled to the surface again and I shot to my feet, wrapping a hand around the man’s throat. “This is your fault!”

Someone shifted at the entrance. I turned my head and scowled at a guard armed with a taser.

Lucky raised a hand. “Don’t,” he said, halting the guard.

I squeezed his throat tighter. “Where is Boone? Who are you? What do you want?”

He made a gagging sound. I loosened my hold on him so he could speak but didn’t let him go.

The man gasped in a breath. “My name is Algerone Caisse-Etremont. I’m your father.”

What the fuck did he just say?

I studied the man I was seconds away from choking to death, taking in his dark hair, his eyes, the shape of his face. We’d never pass for twins, but maybe there was a resemblance. “Prove it.”

He held out his hand. A thin man clutching a tablet computer muscled his way past the guard and held the tablet out to me.

I scowled at him. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Maxime St Germain,” he said. “His assistant.”

I snatched the tablet away with my free hand and frowned at the screen. It was a chart of some kind, mostly numbers and decimal points. Too many numbers for me to make sense of. “I don’t know what any of this shit means.”

“They’re the results of a DNA paternity test,” Algerone said. “They prove beyond a doubt that you’re my biological son.”

The man I was about to choke the life out of was my father. But why had he gone through all this to reveal that?

I shook my head. It didn’t matter if he was the second coming. If he’d killed Boone, he was a dead man. “Where is Boone?”

“In… the infirmary.” Algerone lifted his chin and tried to gasp for breath.

“Alive?” I demanded.

Algerone nodded.

I released him and he stumbled back a step. His assistant fussed over him until Algerone shoved him away.

“I see you’ve inherited my temper,” Algerone said, rubbing his neck with a wince.

I briefly wondered what else I’d inherited from the man in front of me. Was he plagued by voices too? I stuffed the thought down. Him being my father changed nothing. I could deal with all that shit later. First, I had to see Boone with my own eyes to make sure he wasn’t lying to me.

“Take me to him.” I handed the tablet back to Maxime.

Algerone lowered his hand from his neck. “In time.”

“Now,” I demanded, throwing as much force behind the word as possible.

Algerone didn’t even flinch. “First, we need to talk. I’m sure you have questions, and so do I. Those questions must be answered before we can both get what we want.”

I folded my arms. “If you’re expecting me to break down into tears and suddenly be grateful to finally meet you, you should’ve tried a phone call, not a fucking bounty.”

He took a step in. We were even in height, but it still felt like he was towering over me. I planted my feet and fought the urge to shrink away.

“Let me be perfectly clear about something, Xion,” he said, his tone icy. “The battle is over, and I have won. We are in the aftermath now, the time in which surrender is negotiated and new alliances forged. You may be my blood, but you are not my equal. Your position within this new order must be negotiated. Until then, you are my captive, which means I hold all the power. If you wish to negotiate, always do so from a position of power. Next time, make your demands before you release your target.” He took a step back, adjusted his jacket and gestured toward the door. “Maxime will escort you to the meeting room.”

I scowled at him. My father. I wasn’t sure I trusted him enough to have him at my back, but what choice did I have? I wanted out of that room, and I needed answers. He was right about one thing; I never should’ve let him go.

I walked past the armed guard, who eyed me warily, and stepped into a white-on-white hallway with fluorescent overhead lights. There wasn’t a window in sight, which made me wonder if we were underground somewhere.

Maxime shouldered past me, giving me a disapproving look up and down as he took the lead alongside the guard, guiding us down the hallway.

Algerone fell into step beside me. It was difficult not to keep looking over at him, questions racing through my mind. In twenty years, why hadn’t he tried to contact us? Why put out bounties on the three of us? Did he know about Xander and Xavier or just me? And what kind of person was he? Someone who clearly knew a lot about warfare and tactics. At least, he sounded like he did based on his little speech earlier.

At the end of the hallway, Maxime slid a badge through a scanner and a keypad with a digital screen popped out. His fingers raced over the keyboard, typing in a password before a pair of elevator doors slid open.

“You said your name was Lucky before,” I said as we slid into the elevator.

“A code name of sorts,” Algerone replied leaning against the back of the elevator next to me. “Not unlike Bloodhound, Church, Happy, et cetera.”

I looked over at him with a frown. “You also said you were in the same industry as Boone.”

He nodded once. “In the same way that a McDonalds line cook is in the same industry as the president’s private chef. The Junkyard Dogs and I both work in consulting, but while they work with a more blue-collar clientele, my clients tend to target more… inaccessible entities.”

“What does that mean?”

Algerone smirked and there was a flicker of excitement behind his previously dull eyes. “Boone and his boys hunt kittens. I hunt tigers.”

The elevator doors slid open. I expected another hallway but was a little shocked when confronted with a large room full of cubicles. Each one contained a worker diligently typing away on their computer or chatting into a headset.

“Our call center floor,” Algerone announced, making a sweeping gesture as we stepped out of the elevator. “The lifeblood of our organization. Here, our employees take calls from the public.”

“I thought you said you didn’t do blue collar work.” I tucked my hands into my pockets and followed him.

He chuckled. “All work begins there. Unfortunately, not every problem is one we’re best suited to solve. Most people with a problem only need to be pointed in the right direction to solve it themselves. Our employees are here simply to take down information and enter it into a database that our analysts study. When a pattern emerges, a data packet is prepared and brought to a supervisor. If the supervisor believes that problem warrants our attention, it gets passed up the chain.”

I slowed my walk, intentionally listening in to some of the calls. Though I could only hear one side of the conversations, they seemed mostly the same. There was lots of apologizing and promises to forward people’s complaints to other departments.

“What sorts of problems do you solve, exactly?” I asked, turning back to Algerone.

He was quiet for a moment, considering how to answer. “Imagine we have two patients: an eight-year-old boy and a fifty-three-year-old man. Both patients need a heart transplant. Who should get it? The answer to that question is decided not by a person, but by a computer algorithm maintained by a government non-profit entity. The algorithm was initially designed to save as many lives as possible. Since only one heart is available, and our fifty-three-year-old patient has other complications, he’s less likely to benefit from the heart. Independently, the algorithm should choose the eight-year-old. Now imagine it doesn’t. Why?”

I shrugged. “Somebody could’ve hacked it or gone in and manually changed it.”

He nodded. “And by the time anyone’s realized what’s happened, it’s too late to save the eight-year-old. His parents are middle class. At best, their lawsuit against the hospital will be tied up in court for years, and even if they win—which they won’t—the money will be a cold comfort. Worse, the hospital wasn’t even at fault. In this case, one of the CEOs of the nonprofit in question accepted a bribe, as he’d done many times before. He became a very wealthy man by letting innocent people die, all while the United States government presented him with multiple humanitarian awards.”

“And how did your people solve this problem?” I asked as we approached a door on the other end of the floor.

Algerone smirked and paused, his hand on the door handle. “Suffice it to say he met with a rather unfortunate accident. Luckily, he was an organ donor.”

I fought off a shudder as he pulled open the door. I knew Boone had killed people but at least when he talked about it, it wasn’t with a smile. Algerone seemed proud of what he did. Maybe he was right though. The world was full of shitty people in positions of power. The average person had no way to fight the rich and powerful, especially when wealthy politicians and lobbyists owned the legal system. Normal people got screwed over every day. Most people accepted that was how it was, but not Algerone. He’d found a way to turn it into a profitable business. How cold hearted did someone have to be to choose that as their profession?

And I was this guy’s son.

I stepped into the meeting room, which was a beige space with white padded chairs at a long table. There was a smartboard up front and a tablet computer at every seat, but the room wasn’t empty.

“Xion!” Xander exclaimed and jumped up from his chair. He ran to me, and I stiffened as he threw his arms around me. “I’m glad you’re okay. This place is crazy, right? Did he show you the Olympic-sized swimming pool? And there’s a fucking spa on the fifth floor. A spa!”

I rolled my eyes. It was going to take a lot more than a pool and a spa to win me over, but of course that was all Xander cared about.

“Hello, Xion,” Xavier said, cool and casual as ever.

I glared at him. “Did you know?”

Xavier’s dark eyes darted to Algerone and back to me. “I didn’t know he planned to hurt anyone, but if Boone had just stuck to the deal—”

“Fuck you!” I pushed Xander away and grabbed Xavier by the collar of his black turtleneck. “You knew who he was all this fucking time?”

“He had no idea who I was,” Algerone said calmly, coming to the front of the room. “Xavier knew only what I allowed him to. He was aware of my existence, or rather Lucky’s existence, and of the work that I do. He was also aware of the bounty.”

“I think there was some miscommunication on everybody’s part,” Xavier said coldly, glaring at me.

“If you boys would take your seats, we could start to clear some of that up.” Algerone picked up a remote and pointed it at the wall. The lights dimmed.

I let go of Xavier, but that didn’t mean I was done with him, something I did my best to communicate through a murderous glare. Xander took Xavier’s hand and the two of them sat on one side of the table while I walked around to sit on the other.

“Let’s start with your questions,” Algerone said. “You know me. You know what I do.”

“Our mother,” Xander said, his voice tight. “Who was she?”

Algerone nodded and clicked a button on the remote. The image of a woman appeared on the screen and my throat was suddenly so tight, I could barely breathe. She was breathtakingly beautiful with long, sandy brown hair, bright honey brown eyes and a warm smile. The picture looked like a professional headshot. Maybe she was a model. She was pretty enough.

“Her name was Imogen Marie Duchaucis,” he said in a somber tone, “but the world knew her as Emily Dutch.”

“Emily Dutch…” Xavier repeated with a thoughtful frown. “Where have I heard that name before?”

“She was an aspiring actress,” Algerone provided. “Her filmography was mostly bit parts, but she did have a few minor roles. In those days, I was still young and new to the game. Still finding my footing. To say we had a relationship would be a stretch of the word. I barely knew her, but a man in my position is expected to be at premiers and parties to make connections. As far as I was concerned, Imogen was a fling. I didn’t know anything about you boys until long after the fact, and by then, it was too late.”

“So you put a bounty out?” I scoffed. “You could’ve just called.”

He frowned. “It wasn’t that simple. Your mother, she had a very public breakdown. She disappeared and was found dead. There was an investigation, but the results were inconclusive. When I heard, I was saddened by the news, but I didn’t know there were children. Not until I quietly began looking into her death and realized the last person to see her alive was Annie Laskin.”

“No,” Xavier said firmly, shaking his head. “If Annie killed our mom, she had to have a good reason. She only took out abusive parents.”

“She was like me, wasn’t she?” I said quietly. All eyes went to me, so I explained, “A paranoid schizophrenic. If she was having delusions and hearing voices, she might’ve tried to hurt us. She certainly couldn’t care for three babies. When I have an episode, I can’t even take care of myself.”

I rubbed an ache in my chest and stared at the woman on the screen. Even though we probably shared an illness, I couldn”t imagine how horrifying it would be to have the voices tell you to hurt your own children. My brothers might not understand how someone who loved us could hurt us, but I did. The side of her that would’ve lashed out wasn’t her at all. She would’ve been as helpless as us to stop it without support. And back in the early aughts when we were born, mental health—especially for new, single moms in the public eye—was a disaster. Even if she had reached out for help, she would’ve lost custody of us. For people like me, asking for help and understanding from neurotypicals was sometimes as dangerous as going it alone.

“There was no official diagnosis for Imogen,” Algerone said just above a whisper. “The details are lost. Only Annie Laskin knows the truth, and making contact with her has proven… difficult.”

Maxime snorted. I’d almost forgotten he was in the room, casually leaning against the wall near the lights. “She killed the hitman you sent to kill her, you mean.”

Algerone sighed. “Once I discovered Imogen had children and did the math, realizing the timeline added up, I spent more than a year trying to establish contact with you boys, only to have Annie thwart me at every turn. Obtaining your DNA to test for a match was damn difficult. Once I had that, I considered legal avenues to get custody, but by then you were already practically adults. I had hoped you would reach out once you turned eighteen, as adopted children often do, but only Xavier made any sort of contact.”

“By accident.” Xavier sank into his chair, arms folded. “Last year, the charity foundation that Pax and Theo founded got a huge donation from Lucky Losers Inc. I went digging to find out who that was. What I found was a trap.”

“An invitation,” Algerone corrected. “If I had handed you information on a silver platter, you wouldn’t have accepted it. I needed to leave breadcrumbs so you could find it out on your own. But to my surprise, it wasn’t Xavier who reached out. It was Shepherd.”

“What was your deal with him anyway?” Xander asked, leaning forward.

“Information in exchange for freeing Xion from the hospital and delivering him to me.”

“What information?” I demanded.

Algerone clenched his jaw. “Private information. Unfortunately, Shepherd decided not to deliver you straight to me as agreed and demanded I give him the information first. I don’t renegotiate deals I’ve already closed.”

A fact Shepherd found out firsthand, no doubt, I thought. I didn’t even want to think about how heated that argument got.

“Shepherd argued that your mental health was fragile,” Algerone continued. “Your stay with Boone was only supposed to last until you were stable. It should’ve been the perfect arrangement. Boone collected four million dollars and my gratitude, Shepherd got the information he wanted, and I got my son to come home.”

“This isn’t home,” I spat. “This is a fucking office building.”

Xander’s brows pinched. “Xion, give him a chance.”

“Why? So he can screw us over?” I stood, planting my hands on the table. “I don’t care if all this is true. It doesn’t justify what happened. It doesn’t excuse twenty years of nothing from you. You left me in the hospital to be raped dozens of times just like the rest of them!”

Tense silence settled over the room. My chest rose and fell with my rapid breaths and unshed tears stung my eyes. This wasn’t my home. My home was a trailer in the middle of a junkyard with a sagging sofa. My home smelled like musty carpet, wet dog, and cigarette smoke. My home was a place where none of the second-hand décor matched, where the TV was always just a little too loud, and the food came out of a microwave in a plastic tray. Yeah, maybe that made it a shithole, but it was my shithole. It was where I lived with Boone and his dogs, where I was happy. I could never be happy in this sterile corporate building or living in some big house with Algerone and his fucking assistant.

“I didn’t know that was happening to you,” Algerone said after a long pause. “You can rest assured, when I find who’s responsible—”

“He’s already dead,” I announced, sinking back into my chair. “I fucking killed him myself.”

Xavier glanced around the room. “Harold wasn’t responsible, Xion. He was just the middleman.”

“Oh, not this again.” I rolled my eyes and waved a hand at him.

Xavier slammed a hand down on the table. “Would you shut the fuck up and listen for once, Xion? Harold was just a cog in a big machine, one that’s probably already been replaced. This is a fucking hydra we’re dealing with, and as long as it’s out there, other kids are going through the same shit you did. And, yes, Lucky fucked up.”

“Algerone,” I corrected.

“Or you could try Dad,” Algerone said with a frown.

I scowled at him. “Don’t push it.”

“Whatever!” Xavier threw his hands up. “I’m tired of all this fighting! It accomplishes nothing! We have all the time in the world to hate each other and argue about who fucked over who, but while we’re doing that, other kids are going through the same shit you went through, Xion. Are you okay with that? Because I’m not. I vote we get back to what we do best. That’s shutting down pedophile rings and killing the fuckers at the top so it doesn’t fucking happen again.”

Xander clapped and nodded. “Hard agree!”

I thought I was going to be sick. Was it that easy for them to just get over everything that’d happened? Maybe it was. They hadn’t been snatched from a secure bunker, hadn’t been torn away from the only person who’d ever proven he gave a damn about them only to be told he was in the fucking hospital recovering from something Algerone probably did to him.

I didn’t want to be part of any job he was involved in. I didn’t want to be a fucking vigilante like the Laskins or connected to international assassins like the Lucky Losers Inc. I just wanted to go home to my trailer and my dogs. I wanted to live my life and fix shitty cars all day. I wanted to go back to kneeling at Boone’s feet with his fingers in my hair, listening to him tell me what a good Pup I was.

“I’m not agreeing to anything until I see Boone,” I said, meeting Algerone’s eyes. And he better be in one piece or I’ll fucking kill you.