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Junior

T he blo od was everywhere. Soaked into my shirt, sprayed onto my pants, and buried beneath my blunted nail bits.

This was why I always wore head-to -toe black.

With any other color, the blood would be too obvious, but with black, the wet spots were easier to explain: Someone threw a drink at me, or a passing car hit a puddle, and I got splashed.

I’d had to come up with countless excuses over the years.

Thankfully, I wouldn’t need any of them tonight because it was pissing down rain. Lightning arced overhead, painting the distant high-rises in silver and white. Thunder chased after it, rattling the windows of nearby buildings. The city looked like Gotham on nights like this. Gritty, dangerous.

I pulled my gaze from the storm. Three figures stood beside me on the river’s edge, all dressed in black because they’d learned the same lesson I had about bloodstains.

They were motionless, eyes dead as they stared straight ahead, jackets flapping around them like errant wings.

Another bolt of lightning tore through the sky, bathing us in silver.

We looked more like a flock of vultures ready to descend on a corpse than a group of brothers who were supposed to be out celebrating.

Four days. It had been raining for four fucking days, and the river was so bloated with runoff that the car we’d just pushed into it was being sucked beneath the surface with alarming ease.

Maybe we’d get lucky, and the cops would think its owner had gotten caught in a flash flood and drowned instead of what we’d really done to him.

A spark of red flared to life in my periphery. I turned to see my youngest brother, Greg, lift a cigarette to his lips.

“Those things will kill you,” I said.

He blew smoke into the wind. “Not before something else does.”

With that, he turned and strode away, Stefan trailing in his wake.

Alec, the brother closest to me in age, met my eyes across the gap they’d left between us. “We done here?”

I nodded. Yeah, we were done. Tommy Marchetti had been dealt with. Just like Dad ordered.

Alec pulled up the collar of his jacket to keep the rain off his neck as he followed after our younger brothers, leaving me alone to watch the tail end of Tommy’s Beamer disappear into the night-black water.

The old bastard was finally gone, finally out of the way, and I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present.

I waited just long enough to make sure the car wasn’t going to inconveniently bob back to the surface, before striding into the warehouse crouched at the river’s edge.

The floor was poured concrete, and the clapboard walls were old enough that the wind whistled through the cracks between them with every gust, but at least I wasn’t getting rained on anymore.

My brothers stood beneath the glow of a fluorescent light, their eyes trained on a large red smear at their feet.

Alec pointed at it. “What do you want us to do about this?”

“Bleach,” I said.

He headed toward a back closet.

I eyed Greg. “He bled a lot.”

Greg’s dark eyes rose to mine as he took another pull from his cigarette. “Fresh corpses tend to do that.”

I might have been “Junior,” but out of all of us, Greg resembled Dad the most, especially now that the humor had started to fade from his eyes and the same jaded look the rest of us wore was creeping into his expression.

Alec rejoined us, and we moved back as he upended an entire bottle of bleach over the stain.

When he was finished, he tossed the empty bottle toward some other trash gathered in a corner.

This place used to belong to a fishmonger before the local industry collapsed.

Now it was owned by one of my father’s associates, a man who turned a blind eye to our occasional use of it.

Alec shifted to face me. “You still wanna go out?”

I leveled my gaze at him. “What do you think?”

He shrugged. “I’m down if you are.”

Stefan gave Alec an Are you fucking serious?

look he didn’t see. Beside Stefan, Greg watched me, waiting for my decision.

As the oldest, I was the de facto leader.

The one Dad trusted the most, the one my brothers turned to for guidance.

Just once, I wished someone else would make a goddamn decision so I didn’t have to think so fucking much all the time.

I refocused my gaze on Alec. “No, I don’t want to go out. I’m drenched and I’m tired, and by the time we all shower and change, it’ll be two o’clock in the morning and everything will be closing.”

“So you’re gonna spend your last birthday in your twenties sad and alone?” Alec asked. “Sounds pretty fucking depressing.”

I shook my head, starting to get annoyed.

“I didn’t spend it alone. We had family dinner, and then the four of us got to come on this fun little field trip.

” He opened his mouth to argue but I cut him off.

“We’re done here. I don’t care what the fuck the three of you do for the rest of the night, but I’m going to my apartment.

Tell Mom and Dad I won’t be back for a few days. ”

Without waiting for a response, I left. Maybe it was depressing, but I wanted to be alone. I wanted quiet and the solitude of my own space, and there was no way I’d get that if I went back to our parents’ house with my asshole brothers.

My apartment wasn’t far from the docks, maybe ten minutes on foot, and I was already soaked, so I didn’t give a fuck about getting rained on.

It almost felt good to be a little cold.

The deep heat of summer was descending on the city, and with all the water around us, the air had turned cloying and fetid.

The storm was blowing some of it away, but I knew it was only temporary.

We’d be lucky if we got a day or two of cooler temps before the mercury crept back toward ninety.

People rushed past me on the sidewalk. Most were hunched over like that somehow protected them from the downpour, but I strode through it upright, hoping the rain would wash away the evidence of my sins.

Fuck, I was tired. And not because of what I’d just done.

This was a bone-deep exhaustion that gnawed at me like a rabid wolf.

I wondered if my father ever felt like this.

If our “work” weighed on him in the same way.

Unlike me, Dad hadn’t been born into the mob.

He’d carved out a space among their foot soldiers and slowly fought his way up the ranks.

Now he was the guy the big shots turned to when they needed their messes cleaned up, but since he thought too much of himself to get his hands dirty anymore, he delegated.

A humorless grin tugged at my lips. Of course our work didn’t weigh on Dad.

He wasn’t the one doing it. I was. Well, me and my brothers.

We bore the brunt of everything. The risk of getting caught.

The risk of getting hurt. The risk of never being able to sleep again because every time we closed our eyes, images of the things we’d done swelled to the surface and threatened to drown us in the depths of our own memories.

Or maybe that was just me. Maybe I was being a morose motherfucker, because instead of spending my birthday out on the town, like I’d planned, I’d spent it down at the docks creating more nightmares for myself.

I shook my head and focused on my surroundings.

This part of the city was old, and not in a nice way; old in a forgotten way that had so far escaped the gentrification taking over other neighborhoods.

The brick-and -mortar buildings crowded close to the street were only a few stories high.

Puddles gathered on the sidewalk, reflecting the neon glow of nearby shop signs.

Small groups of people huddled beneath awnings, smoking cigarettes or talking with friends while they waited for the rain to end.

This neighborhood was working class, immigrants mostly, and the streets were teeming with the evidence of it.

It was a good place to get lost, to go unnoticed, and that’s why I rented an apartment here.

Most of the time, Dad liked to keep us close because he was a paranoid old man.

My brothers and I, despite being in our twenties, still spent a lot of time sleeping in our childhood bedrooms. I stayed away on nights like tonight, when I needed to disappear, clear my head for a while before I was fit to be around other people again.

The sights and sounds of the city reminded me that the world kept turning.

That people were out here living their lives, blissfully unaware of the darkness that seethed just beneath the surface.

It gave me hope, reminded me that there was more to life than death and destruction and the constant threat of spending the rest of my days behind bars.

By the time I reached the unobtrusive door tucked between a jeweler and a bakery, I was more than ready to be out of the rain.

Up a narrow flight of stairs, my small studio apartment sat dark and stagnant, with a moldy note in the air that spoke of neglect.

When was the last time I’d been here? A month ago?

Two? This spring had passed in a blur, kicked off by an accidental homicide that my idiot cousin, Aly, and her boyfriend committed.

Their victim had been a serial killer, but he’d also been the spawn of a billion-dollar family, and it had taken all of my family’s time and resources to trick the Feds into thinking Bradley Bluhm was still alive and on the run.

During that time, Dad’s paranoia reached new heights, and he’d barely let any of his children out of his sight.

I’d probably catch hell for staying away, tonight of all nights, but I needed some time to myself.