Page 9 of Heartless Heathens

Either way, we’d get nothing until we fulfilled his little errand.

More than anything, he feared what kind of damage we could do with access to that much money. As for his share, I sometimes wondered if he’d see it buried with him before he’d let us disturb the balance and distribute it into the world. Money was for power, for control. If everyone had it, then nobody held the power.

I didn’t disagree with the sentiment, but he didn’t understand that control had already been lost. All of the richest families pledged their money to the church, and once the Pope died, Frollo was elected archbishop. A new Pope was never chosen. Frollo promised the fat cats their cushy lives would stay cushy and that was all that was needed.

The cycle of poverty that crushed the majority of the public spun endlessly. An infallible system that couldn’t be broken.

“This shit’s dull as hell, let me have fun Sonny. You won’t like it if I get bored.” He curled half his lip in a smirk like a warning before flipping me off and jogging towards the kitchen. Felix Escura was the kind of person who would go mad if he didn’t have something to obsess over. Something to focus all of his energy into.

Too bad he didn’t decide to take an interest in getting the rest of this damned chapel set up to our comfort level. The rest of the furniture had come at some point today, and Corvin had already done a majority of the set up.

The place was still trash.

But knowing how much it got under Frollo’s skin, that we were here, in his sacred space, breathing the same air as his holy righteousness.

It was delicious, the flavor of his misery.

Weak men were like that, their failures became a tangible thing you could roll into the palm of your hand and mold like ammunition against them.

“Did you eat my ice cream?” The perkier of the two Escura’s shouted.

“When’s the last time you’ve seen me eat ice cream?” I asked in a flat tone.

“CORVIN!” Felix shouted, condemning his twin to suffer his wrath over the frozen treat.

“He’s in class.” I reminded him and he slammed the freezer shut, huffing and puffing and mumbling something about that being the second pint he didn’t get to finish since we’d moved in.

A flash caught my peripheral and I looked over just in time to see someone snapping photos on their phone through one of the stained-glass windows.

Desperate.

They all were.

They were scared of us, because of the whole Satanic Shrine thing.

But they were enraptured by our presence.

By human nature, they desired our attention. They needed to know what it meant to be close to the Devil because they were too afraid to find out for themselves.

I stepped towards the window slowly, the shuffling of the bushes outside was barely audible but it was the mouse-like squeak of a blonde standing outside our new home that won my attention. She gasped, dropping her phone before turning back and running in the opposite direction.

I could go get her phone.

I could return it. I could throw it away. I mean, the options were endless. But the reality was, I was too apathetic about my entire situation to give enough of a shit to do anything that didn’t immediately end this mission for us.

My future was waiting for me in Oxford, far from this fucking country.

Arlan Black threw a huge wrench into my plans, my entire life, all because he was decomposing before our very eyes and the very idea of a Black not orchestrating the future of the empire was blasphemy.

That’s how it worked.

The Black’s were in charge of every major event that went down in history for at least the last thousand years. They were the ones in charge of seating in power nearly every person at the top of the chain. Things like syndicates, government officials, celebrities. They puppeteered everything. After all, if you had enough money, you could buyanythingyou wanted. For Arlan Black to be reaching a hundred years old, and not have a single offspring to carry out his wishes exactly as he planned must have been a frightening thought.

It wasn’t his fault when the election was rigged, and the American people went crazy over that buffoon all those years ago. Some say he set off the chain reaction that led to the fall of democracy, some say he was just a reflection of the worst parts of ourselves. Either way, he wasn’t meant to come to power and after that everything went to shit.

It was before my time.

Then the virus hit, and my brothers and I were born.