Page 16 of Gamma

Duke settles his head back against the seat. “Well…that makes this easier.”

I frown at him. “How so?”

“Means I don’t have to be polite about going after him.”

“Duke, we’re not going after Spaulding, we’re here to get Apollo and Yelena to safety.”

Duke’s eyes slide slowly open and fix on me. Normally, Uncle Duke is the nicest, funniest, most genial and playful man you’ll ever meet. Now, that man is gone.

In his place?

Someone I’ve never seen before. Dark, cold, and violent.

“Then you hitched your horse to the wrong fuckin’ wagon, sweetheart.” He closes his eyes. “We’ll get them back. And we’ll take down Spaulding in the process. And we won’t be polite about it.”

I look to Anselm, but his eyes are hooded, almost blank. “Don’t look to me, Corinna. I, too, will not tolerate the presence on this earth a man like Spaulding. Not for a moment longer than I must. I shall endeavor to end him, be it with a bullet or a blade, or my bare hands.” He returns to his computer. “The fact that he brought himself to our attention by kidnapping Yelena and now Apollo has merely hastened his death.”

I find myself wondering what exactly I’ve gotten myself into.

It doesn’t matter, though. I’ll do whatever it takes.

Stay alive, Apollo. We’re coming.

5

The Bad Man

Once they spirit me out of the warehouse, a hood is put over my head, occluding my vision. I know better than to yell or cause a ruckus; I’m worth more alive than dead, clearly, but they will not hesitate to beat me senseless, as to do so wouldn’t negate my value. Also, to struggle now is pointless.

What follows is hours of something worse than boredom. Torture, where the instrument of pain is time. I cannot see, can barely hear past the hood. My hands are bound behind my back with thick, police-grade zip ties. The first section of my journey is in a vehicle. I know no more than that—long straight stretches at what feels like highway speeds, an exit, a turn, more highway. Hours of it. A stop, wherein I am helped roughly from the vehicle, allowed to stretch my legs—they untie me and allow me to urinate. Some unknown sense makes me feel like we’re outside. No sounds—no traffic, no animals. An empty stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere, perhaps. I’m bound again and prodded aboard a vehicle again—a different one; the engine sounds different. My sense of spatial awareness tells me it’s a different vehicle. No one speaks.

I can only sit and let my mind wander.

My childhood. My mother.

Her infrequent presence. I would wake up one morning, and there she would be. Dressed in a slinky dress that barely covered her ass, tall heels propping her inches off the ground, her massive tits nearly falling out of the skimpy, low-cut dresses she wore to the clubs. As a child, it was all I knew, her like that, the way she dressed. The way she seemed to always be unsteady on her feet. The way she smelled funny—sour.

She was coming from the clubs, I realize now, with the hindsight of an adult. I believe she owned one, or several. The nightclubs were a common front for my grandfather’s and mother’s operations—logically enough. A ton of cash flowed through them each day, allowing them to launder massive amounts of money. The locations provided easy access to storage for drugs and shipments of arms, and the employee turnover allowed them to push prostitutes and sex slaves through them—yes, in digging into the inner workings of the criminal empire that is my legacy, I did discover that my grandfather was a trafficker.

Makes me sick to my stomach, to think about. I wonder if my mother knew. I think it impossible that she didn’t. But as a woman, how could she condone it? I cannot fathom.

Mother, though.

I wonder at her. There were times—few, albeit, and usually alcohol-induced—where she would show something like maternal affection. She’d return late at night or the small hours of the morning, wobbling, kick off her shoes. I could always hear her coming—the elevator which ran up to our penthouse had a distinctive rattle when it stopped at our floor, and it would always wake me up. I’d scurry out of my room, onto the couch, and turn on the TV; it never seemed to occur to her that a four or six or eight or ten-year-old should not be up watching television alone at four in the morning. She would collapse next to me on the couch, fumble in her little leather clutch purse—expensive ones, I now realize, Balenciaga, Valentino, Chanel, Birkin—and fish out a slim platinum case full of cigarettes, and a gold-plated Zippo with her initials in diamonds. She’d light it. Puff twice. Always twice—and then exhale a thick curl of smoke from her mouth and inhale it through her nose before spewing it back out between pursed lips.

She would just watch TV with me. Her non-cigarette hand would drape across my neck, and she would idly play with the hair on the back of my head.

When some amount of time had passed—an hour, perhaps forty-five minutes—she would kiss my temple, rise unsteadily to her feet, and head to her bed. Rarely would she say a word.

That was it.

That was her mothering me.

But it was my favorite time of the day—of the week: it was the only time I ever got with my mother. Sober, she was cold, distant, and even cruel. She would mock me for my speech, my stammering—she made me nervous, because I was never sure what she would say, how she would treat me, and so I would stammer when addressing her. Which only drew her mockery all the more, of course.

I worked with Koslov, my tutor, until I no longer stammered—this consisted of Koslov berating me, swatting me with sticks, and cursing at me in Russian while I recited poetry and read from classic Greek authors and Enlightenment thinkers until I could carry on my train of thought no matter the distraction.

Those late nights and early mornings with Mother—they were all I had of her, of having a real mother. The rest of the time she was…a presence. And a largely unpleasant one at that. But those moments watching American cartoons with my drunk mother…it was as close to love as I have ever gotten.