Page 114 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

“Go ahead. Ask.”

“What happened with your brother? Why did you... gouge out his eyes?”

“Not an easy rumor to come by,” I observe.

“It took a bit.” She gazes at me, strong and steady. She wants to know. She’s different, this girl.

I line my mug handle up with the edge of the counter. “Growing up, it was just the two of us—Alteo and me. Alteo was seven years older and very much my father’s son. Violent, angry, and excited to be in the Ghost Hound Clan. For me, the last thing I wanted to do was to follow in his footsteps. But I was expected to. In my world, the sons follow the father.”

“Even if they’re not into it?”

“It’s like the royal family in a way. There’s a whole bloodline thing with the clan leaders, the kyre, descending from an ancient king on a mountaintop like our fucking Jesus. It’s hard to explain. Our lore and the superstitions that have been handed down are a sort of gospel to us. You don’t opt-out. The oldest usually takes over control of the clan, but the younger brother is in the clan, too. Anyway, the fights between my father and me got worse every year. He was a lot harder on me than he was on Alteo. Nothing I did was right. And then, one hot July night, men came to take me to a school. They wouldn’t say anything about it, just that it was a school. I absolutely didn’t want to go; they had to drug me. I woke up in a cell in St. Neri Reformatory deep in the jungles of Tucumayo.”

“Oh my God. Just... no warning?”

“No. The place... it was extreme. It’s not exactly the kind of place where you get to go home for Christmas break, either. A lot of troubled kids were sent there. The sort of kids whose parentsdidn’t want them to go to military school and acquire any sort of skills that could be used against them. I didn’t know that then, but it seems obvious now. And maybe that’s how they got my mother on board, telling her that it would be rigorous instruction, which there was a lot of. History, math, languages. Classics right alongside rigorous discipline methods. In the end even she didn’t lift a finger to get me out of there. And they knew what was going on. If not at first, they surely knew from the letters I smuggled out to them.”

“They were whipping you, and your parents don’t see fit to get you out?”

“Nah.”

“And nobody ever noticed that suddenly this clan family’s son had disappeared into thin air?”

“It would have been a problem if not for this prophecy that was circulating at the time. That the youngest son would blind the king and then kill him.”

“I heard about it. It’s like a really mixed-up version of Oedipus.”

“You have done your homework.”

“I’m a diligent student.” She shrugs. “You said they went too far. Which is hard to imagine considering the whipping.”

“People are adaptable. You’d be amazed at what a human being can get used to. Them going far wasn’t about draconian punishments or deprivations. It was what they did to the girl I loved then. Her name was Sara.”

“Oh no.”

“She was a student—an inmate like us, really—at the girls’ reformatory connected to the place where we boys were. The girls had it worse than we did.” I pause and force myself to look her in the eye for this confession. She needs to know. “Sara died because of me. Because of my carelessness, my selfishness.”

She reaches out for my hand. I let her take it.

She says, “Tell me.”

“I didn’t think. I wanted what I wanted.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re the one who killed her.”

Of course, she’d say that. “Sara was from a town south of Tucumayo. She was a year younger than me but eons more innocent. I mean, a little ruffian, but she’d never even kissed a guy. Things never got much further than that.”

“And you loved her.”

“To us, it was love, or whatever love is when you’re sixteen and seventeen. There was a huge wall between the girls’ wing and the boys’ wing, but there was a hole in that wall we’d use. Kids sneaking out wasn’t unheard of. You put a lot of teenagers in a cage, they’ll find ways to do things. She was always really nervous about it, but I promised her she’d be fine. I had no right to make that kind of promise.”

“You were just a kid.”

“Still,” I say.

“So what happened?”

My phone pings right then. It’s the doorman asking if he should let this charcuterie delivery team up. Within minutes, there’s a dizzying spread of cheeses, dips, crackers, and chocolates, and Edie’s eyes are wide as saucers.