Page 30 of Carnal Wagers

I found my brothers in the breakroom with half a crew full of distant cousins and trusted men, Brody in the middle of a poker game—probably counting cards—and Liam arm-wrestling his way to free cash. The cloud of smoke crammed its way down my throat. I tapped my fingers twice on the table, the room going silent, and walked to the office.

Firm footsteps shuffled after me as I relaxed into my chair behind the desk and swiveled to face the charcoal walls and the sole painting in the space. The mystery guest in the bar reminded me of the painting’s wrath-like woman, reaching out with wispy fingers toward the castle in the distance. She was a survivor. Broken but not beaten down, yet always coming back for more and never giving up.

The door rattled shut. Chairs scratched along the linoleum. I swiveled around to face my two brothers.

“Who do we know in the chemical trade?”

“Chemicals like floor cleaner?” Liam flipped a spare pen off the desk into the air. “Riveting stuff.”

“No, weapons.”

Liam whistled. “That’s not our usual market.”

Brody’s eyebrows dipped as he fixed his gaze on the wall behind my head, likely running through his database of knowledge. He liked to memorize facts with his eidetic memory.

“There was one in Indonesia,” he said after a moment of silence, direct and dry, “recently shut down. Another in China. Quality’s not great but gets the job done. One in Russia but with thief prices. And there’s one more in Europe, not sure where. Has small quantities but novel goods.”

“That’s the one. In Europe. Who runs it?”

Brody rolled up a tuft of his beard, eyes shifting. He shook his head. “The owner calls themselves the Toxic Fiend, but I never found any records, pictures, or voice recordings of them. Details about the contacts change every month, and they always wear masquerade masks.”

A memory flashed up front and center of a dark silver-and-gold mask from the one and only masquerade ball I’d ever attended. It had been worn by a woman unlike any I’d ever met before or since, with a strength hidden behind an enticing frailty, frocked in a killer dress with a slit to her upper thigh I’d fully taken advantage of. We never saw each other’s faces. We never exchanged names. But one night of the most livening conversation and the sexiest fuck I’d ever had made me chase her memory ever since. That had been a decade ago. In a way, this chemist reminded me of her.

“Is a woman possible?”

“I’d say. Symbol’s a succubus. Traditionally, a succubus represents a woman in an alluring shape to tempt or seduce men with their base desires.”

“Aye, we know, Gloss.” Liam twisted the pen through his fingers, focus taken.

Brody rocked himself. “Don’t call me that. You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”

“That’s why I do it,” Liam said.

Brody’s eyes flitted across the room. With the way he was cradling his fists under his armpits, tension must have been thrumming through his mind. I shot a glare at our younger brother.

When we were teens, Da made us tag along to his business deals, both over and under the counter. It had been his way of teaching by doing. Each time, one of us would take point, and we had to prove that we weren’t wet behind the ears, that we deserved our place, so that others feared or respected us, preferably both. Jeers and insults were the easy part. If they toyed with us or roughed us up a bit, Da didn’t intervene. He was an adamant believer in no pain, no gain. Every encounter was meant to hone our fighting instincts yet restrain responses. “Show ’em nothing” was his motto. No hate, no anger, no pain. We’d get a beating if we did. If we lost our tempers with his business partners, he sent us to work under them for a week, with no limits on how they handled us. If we lost him a deal, not only were we forced to work the dangerous, shit jobs on the streets for a month, but the beatings would be twice as bad, and whoever fucked up would be on first rotation for the next deal.

Out of all of us, Da used to push Brody the worst. No matter what any of us told him, he refused to understand that Brody saw and grasped the world differently from us. Overstimulating him with threats only ever made his reactions that much steeper. Da finally understood that the day he forced Brody to a deal at the airport with the Lebanese, and I tagged along. Brody had one of his meltdowns right in the middle of negotiations—screaming, pacing, and kicking at the asphalt. When the Lebanese pulled their guns on him, he attacked one. I shot the rest down, before putting the gun to our father’s head, and making him swear that this ritual of his was over.

“Oi.” I wrapped my arms around him tight, then rubbed my hands up and down along his biceps. It usually helped calm him down if he hadn’t disappeared too far into his head. When his breathing calmed, I pulled back. “You good?”

“Chemical agents. Succubus. Aye.” Brody nodded. “I am. Good, I mean.”

I gave Liam a dark look. He knew better than to tease Brody the day after we’d visited Da. He shrugged and tossed peanuts in the air, catching them in his mouth.

“Don’t make me say I’m sorry. I’m not. Best way to desensitize is exposure. He knows I say it with love. Don’t you, deartháir?” Brother.

Brody ignored Liam, staring at a spot on the wall, a frown buried between his brows.

“Why?” he asked. “Why did you ask that? About the woman? Why do you want to know that?”

“Because I think I just met her. The owner. She came to talk business.”

“Here?” Liam straightened in his chair. A peanut bounced off his face and skipped along the floor.

“Aye, here.”

Brody pulled out his phone and scanned through the security footage. It was his way to keep busy and occupied so he could shut out the rest of the world now that he had something specific to focus on.