Tease Me Once by W. Winters
Declan
She’s touched her lips three times already tonight. As I stare at the screen, watching Braelynn gripping the end of the bar and absently staring at the lined glass bottles accentuated by the bar’s dim light, apprehension consumes me. Until those slim fingers lift up and she does it again.
Every time she stops at the bar, when time waits quietly and she’s still, her thumb brushes her lower lip as she stares at the marble bar top. If that wasn’t enough of an indication she’s thinking of me, her gaze shifts to where I stood beside her a few nights ago. Throughout the evening, every time she’s stopped moving, I’m almost certain she’s thought of me. She wants this, maybe as much as I do.
There are a million reasons I shouldn’t have kissed her. Zero reasons I should have. Except for the fact that I wanted to.
My blood chills as I lean back in the chair and she leaves the bar, the tray filled with martini glasses. If she’s undercover, if she’s working for the feds, or even just an informant … what I’m about to do could not only destroy me, but also my brothers. Thoughts of my nieces and nephews I’ve barely seen flicker through my mind. My entire family could go down if I don’t figure out who’s been passing the feds information.
With a grim outlook my gaze turns from the screen, just in time for an email to come through. It’s from a throwaway address.
There’s nothing that says she should be the one who’s undercover.
The single subject line doesn’t hold any text in the body of the email. But there is an attachment. I filter through the background check and other documents he discovered, most of which I’ve come to learn this past week.
There’s nothing that hints at her being involved, but she is friends with Scarlet. Given that her father passed and Scarlet was there for her, they’re closer than I first anticipated.
The knock at my door precedes it opening and I don’t have to look to know it’s my brother.
“You might want to get in on this,” he says. Jase’s tone is somber and it captures my attention. He nods slightly when my questioning gaze meets his.
“Scarlet is only one of them.”
Pushing the chair back from my desk, I stand up, buttoning my suit jacket as if it has any place in what’s about to happen. My pace is swift and Jase follows behind me as I stride out of my office. The door closes and I lock it before heading down the hall. All the while my body slowly numbs.
She’s only one of them. There are more for certain.
Swallowing thickly, I ready myself. This isn’t the first time or even the hundredth I’ve done this and yet each time, there’s a heaviness that weighs down every step.
My heart seems to slow, as does time.
“What else did he say?” I question just beneath my breath as my brother leads me to the back room.
The music from upstairs is loud tonight, and that’s by design. The door opens with an eerie groan and I’m quick to close it and lock it behind me before I follow Jase around to the back where a shelf is moved aside. A hidden door leading to a soundproof chamber opens with a gentle push on a disguised lock.
My pulse races, fresh adrenaline coursing through my blood. The stench of piss is the first thing to hit me under the fluorescent lights. The man’s jaw cracks as Seth’s fist slams against it and blood sprays from his lip.
The man’s head sways, his hands bound behind his back in the bolted-down chair.
Many men have rushed secrets out of busted mouths in this room.
As Jase pulls a chair closer to him, to continue his interrogation, Seth steps back. His shirt is stained with blood, as are his worn jeans.
“How long has it been?” I ask him. Other than my brothers, he’s the closest approximation to a friend I have.
“Going on three,” he answers, his voice even and the man of the hour wouldn’t know it, but behind Seth’s gaze is a tiredness as well as concern.
“I’m telling you,” the man starts, before spitting up blood, “I don’t know who.” He heaves in a breath, his head still dangling. Jase lifts the man’s chin up to look in his eyes. Both are swollen, while one brow sports a gash, and the other is swollen shut.
“I’m sure there’s something you can tell us,” Jase suggests, tilting his head and urging the man to give up a name or any information that could help us uncover the rat in our midst.
A heat rushes through me as the man heaves in a sob. He knows damn well he’ll die here, if not tonight, then early morning. It’s pathetic and it speaks to a side of me I long thought was dead.
“I don’t know, I swear,” he says and with Jase’s hand dropping, he leans back as Seth moves in. The man’s cheekbone crushes beneath Seth’s fist, and his head whips to the side with a vicious crack. For a moment I wonder if Seth broke his neck.
The agony in the man’s strangled cry promises me he’s still alive. He wails and his pain ricochets off the walls of this concrete chamber. Other than three simple steel chairs, one bolted to the floor in the center of the room, there’s nothing else here in the hidden back room.
“I don’t know.” The man’s inhale is harsh and sudden. The clot of blood he coughs up forces Seth and Jase to exchange a glance. It won’t be long. This informant won’t last another hour. “They didn’t share the names,” he confesses, his eyes closed, his head hung heavy.
I move in, gripping his chin and staring down into his very soul.
“How many?” I question.
“Two.” His answer is immediate.
“Both here?” He nods, a useless, weak nod I barely feel against my hand.
“How long?” I ask and he answers, “For years.”
It’s my only consolation as I back away, wiping the blood from my palm on the man’s jeans.
In a white shirt with a nondescript logo, faded jeans and brown boots, I imagine this isn’t what he wanted to die in.
“How did you find him?” I ask Jase, although I don’t turn to my brother. I keep my focus on the man we’re minutes from murdering.
As my brother tells me, his answer fades into the background. Everything in this moment takes me back to years ago. Back to when I first knew our lives weren’t like everyone else’s. There was something wrong with us, but we would survive if we had each other.
Braelynn was there, in this memory. As Seth resumes his onslaught, as Jase screams for answers and barters lies for truth, I remember a moment with her as I left school. I knew whatever I was leaving for was something that would haunt me. I stayed after school to watch the football team practice. I’d been thinking of trying out. Really, though, I stayed to watch Braelynn working with the athletic trainers. But Jase texted me he was there; that they needed me.
As I walked down the front steps, I felt her eyes on me. It was like she knew. Like she wanted to stop me. She didn’t, though. No one ever did.
Carter was in the back of Jase’s car, his face much like the man’s tonight. The smell of alcohol was apparent, but I knew it didn’t come from my brother. My father was the only one Carter would allow to beat him like that.
I remember how loud it was when I swallowed. How Jase had to grip my shoulders to get my attention and keep me from staring at Carter.
“Everything’s all right, I just … I need you to drive.” He was nodding his head before I could answer. “Can you do that?”
“Where are we going?”
“To the water,” Carter answered, his tone dull, but he patted the back of the driver’s seat with a welcoming gesture. It was a rare day where I felt genuinely needed. For most of my life, I’d been the kid crying, the kid who was in the way. “Get in.”
When we were halfway there, Jase and Carter discussed how long it would take to dig. There was a hill at the dock; it led up to thick woods on the left and a dense field on the right. “We’ll bury him by the field. It’ll be spring before they even find his body.”
That was the first moment I heard them say it out loud. There were so many things we never said out loud. We didn’t talk about how we missed our mother. We didn’t talk about how hungry we were or how fucked the house was with all the repairs it needed. We didn’t talk about how Dad was killing himself with alcohol. And how he took out his anger on my oldest two brothers.
We sure as hell didn’t talk about the drugs. Or the rumors that Carter had killed people. They were bad men. That’s what I told myself. But as I drove the two hours to the docks, and the night got darker, they talked about burying the man in the trunk.
I remember watching them as the sun nestled behind the woods, their shadows took over the night and the thudding sounds of the violated dirt buried their way into my memory.
I’ll never forget that evening.
“Why did you need me to drive?” I asked Jase as Carter finished up in the distance.
“Adrenaline is …” Jase trailed off and sniffled, the cold of the night turning his nose a dark pink. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Adrenaline was high.”
I knew it was a lie and took a stab at the truth, saying, “You didn’t want me to go home to him.” We’d never said a number of things out loud before that night, but after it was over, there were no more secrets to keep.
“That too.” Jase’s eyes were clouded with sorrow.
“You can tell him.” Carter spoke up from behind me before swinging the shovel into the rear of the hatchback.
“Someone started something and—” Jase began and I cut him off.
“That’s real specific.”
“He said he was going to kill the Cross brothers.”
Carter added, “All of us,” before shutting the trunk with a loud clank. The car jostled with the harsh shove.
“Life might be fucked,” Jase said and met my gaze. “But we’ll never leave you behind. All right?”
“I’m going to take care of it. I’ll fix it,” Carter said and gripped my shoulder, squeezing it as his voice got tight with emotion. He was barely twenty-five and we’d just lost Tyler. “I’m going to fix it.”
“When’s Daniel coming home?” I asked them because at that moment, I swore I’d lose them one by one. I felt it in my bones. We were all going to die. I just didn’t realize the kind of deaths men like us have.
Carter answered, “I told him to stay away for now.”
Jase added, “He’ll be home after getting something. We’re waiting to hear back from a man named Marcus.”
The last bit of the kid I was died that night when I asked, “Are we going to be okay?”
“Always. It doesn’t matter what happens, all right? I told you, I’ll take care of it and you’ll be all right. I’ll kill every last one of them before anyone hurts you.”
