Page 10 of Angelic Vengeance

His eyes were cruel, harsh and unsympathetic. They carried the scars of his battles, so dark you wouldn’t dare ask him about them. And still, his gaze never strained from a soft yet intense flame when it was on me.

I walked away

“Don’t I get to know your name?” His smooth, deep voice wrapped around me, guarding me from the cold air.

I stopped, looking over my shoulder. “Is that why you defended my honor?”

“Maybe.” He returned, smirking; his voice rough to my ears.

Short. Direct. Honest.

Lying didn’t come naturally to this man. To lie to somebody, you had to be scared of them, and he was at the top of the fucking societal food chain. He didn’t lie. And wasn’t lied to either because people weren’t scared of him – they were fucking terrified.

“Why did you follow me?” I asked one more time. He was up to something;I just couldn’t place it…

When he didn’t answer, I turned to walk away for the last time, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me back so unexpectedly, I was ready to clock him in the jaw and destroy that perfect face of his.

He forcefully placed something small in my palm, then pushed past me in the split of a second.

“Come on, I’ll get you a cab.”

I stared at the gold Bvlgari bracelet in my hand, the clasp broken.

And then I was in the back of another prepaid cab, sitting alone, and staring at a bracelet I hadn’t noticed I lost earlier that night; unaware that by morning Justin would end up at the bottom of the Hudson, and on national news.

CHAPTER 4

Present

THE SUN BURNED HOT IN the late afternoon, the sky slowly starting to turn red with the sunset. We were hiding in the coolness of the garage, at Kali’s place in Jamaica Queens; a detached red-brick house with a small porch and private drive that led to the back, all surrounded by a chain-link fence.

While she worked on her GT3 RS, adding illegal modifications and whatnot, I sat on the wooden workbench, keeping her company.

A fan whirled to my side, as last weekend’s baseball highlights played on a small TV in the corner.Reggaehits flowed through the air, from some neighbour’s open window, along with the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Distant sirens mixed with kids’ laughter as they rode through the neighborhood on their bikes.

It wasn’t the first guess for someone like Kali. She was from a very well-off family of Japanese and Cuban descent. Her father was CEO of the Su Dynasty – at first glance, just another Fortune 500 company.In reality, the family’s multi-billions came from anunderground hacking empire,which also happened to be the main weapons dealer to most criminal organizations around the world.

She was supposed to get a degree in IT at Columbia – like her brother, Trevor – and help rule their parents’ legacy once they stepped down. Instead, she rebelled, got into NYU, and chose…this.

Maybe I didn’t understand because I grew up poor. I hated the streets I raised myself on; so much, I’d been willing to do anything to get out of the gutters – hence the little-to-no resistance in my past profession.

I never wanted to look back. There was only going up; more money, more power.

Part of me envied how she’d had the opportunities of going to college, opening a business, or just having a safety net. One late night last year, when we were hanging out at her family’s cabin Upstate for the holidays, I told her I wished I’d had as many open doors as her; she replied by saying she wished she had my freedom.

Now here we were, in Southside Jamaica Queens, enjoying a warm May afternoon, neither of us where we wanted to be in life.

The Yankees highlights playing on the TV suddenly stopped, replaced by the news soundtrack. “We are interrupting this channel with breaking news. Just minutes ago, the NYPD pulled a body out of the Hudson River. Investigators are saying the murder looks like the work of professional killers: the man had been shot execution-style – twice in the head, once in each eye – before being thrown into the water.”

“For fuck sake.” Kali moved from behind the open hood, wiping grease off her hands with a towel before tossing it. She grabbed her phone, dialing as she walked inside the house. “I told you to bury them in cemeteries–”

My pulse hitched.

She thought Trevor was the one behind it. That’s how the Su family marked their hits: two bullets, one in each eye, to symbolize no dead ends. ??.Blindness. In other words,mind your goddamn business.

“The victim has been identified as Justin Campbell, son of Senator Thomas Campbell. The attack is believed to be a retaliation of Sir Thomas Campbell’s current political campaign…”

A memory hit me – ofhimbeing at the same table as Kali’s brother at the nightclub. Maybe he was involved with the Su’s.