by JA Huss
It was always Jesse. He was always on their radar to do something… bigger. He was the charming one. The adorable one. The baby.
I had my first panic attack the night of Jesse’s graduation party because this was when I knew they were going after him. The Way would recruit him. He’d get sucked into this life and never get out.
Before he graduated high school Jesse was always a public fascination. His face was the one people saw when our father did interviews for glossy magazines or cable financial channels. He was tow-headed blond a lot longer than I was. Well into his teens. And his love of the ocean and the boats made him glow from the sun.
He was, in a word, golden.
Before he turned eighteen Jesse had plenty of run-ins with the law and the paparazzi. His face was a regular on covers of that nature. But it was small stuff. Crashed a car. Had a fight. Public intoxication. Rehab at fifteen. Shit like that.
No one cared. Not really. Sure, they wrote nasty things about him, but it was the kind of bad publicity that builds up an image, not brings it down.
So after I got over that first initial panic attack the night of his high school graduation I made a decision. I made a conscious choice to ruin his chances. I called the paparazzi myself. I got his face on every cover I could. I got him busted for drugs more times than I can count. I got him kicked out of the yachting association he loved so much.
I not only ruined his chances, I ruined his life.
It was fucked up. I knew that back then and I still know it now.
But I’d do it all over again.
Because they lost interest in Jesse. The Way moved on to someone else’s little brother.
I kept track of all the little brothers the same way my father kept track of his contemporaries. It wasn’t me who decided to plaster the windows on the top floors of the Bossy with news clippings. It was my father. I just kinda kept it going after he died.
It was a reminder to him, I think. That bad things happen to those of us who fall out of line. That every single one of us is replaceable.
I don’t kill people for a living.
Let’s be clear. I have killed people to stay among the living. But I don’t get paid for it, for fuck’s sake.
I am a bank teller for a secret organization, that’s it.
Joey was another matter. Altogether different than Jesse in many ways.
For one, I’m pretty sure he’s not my real brother. I’m not sure how much of this he’s figured out, but that’s the facts.
I heard my parents arguing once. I was really small. Jesse was an infant, so I was no more than three.
But I’m telling you, I remember that day so clearly. They were fighting in one of the rooms on the family floor. Far on the other side from where I spent my time. I don’t know where the nanny was. Who knows? All I know is that I heard voices. Loud, angry voices. And I followed them through all those hallways, and all those doors. And when I finally peeked in my mother was holding a baby.
Joey.
I didn’t know what his name was then. And Joey probably isn’t his real name. I’m pretty sure we just called him that to make him fit in with Johnny and Jesse.
She was screaming at my father. Screaming at him.
I wet my pants in the hallway, that’s how scared I was of my mother in that moment. It trickled down my leg and made a puddle on the floor.
But the baby wasn’t screaming. His eyes were closed. My mother was holding him to her breast and his cheek was smashed against her shoulder. He was asleep. Through all that anger and vitriol, he was sleeping.
This is the only part of the memory I question.
How was Joey not afraid of my raging mother? She was using her free hand to slap at my father. And she, like me, like my father, like Check, was not a person you fuck with.
How could Joey have possibly been asleep?
Sometimes I wonder if I made all that up. The whole scene. Like maybe it was just one more example of my overactive imagination? Because I have a very overactive imagination. Even now.
I am one of those guys. One of those conspiracy theory people. I believe in all of it. The Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations? Setups. Moon landing? Faked. Aliens, sure. Why not? Knights Templar, and the Zeitgeist, and One World Order? You betcha. MK Ultra, and the Illuminati, and Skull and fuckin’ Bones. Yup. It’s all real. Or, at the very least, it’s disinformation based on the truth.
I get lost on the internet sometimes just looking this shit up. Trying to find meaning in my life. Trying to make the pieces fit together in some reasonable fashion.
I justify it though. Because I feel like I’m a part of it. I’m someone in the grand scheme of things, I’m just not sure who.
I have seen shit. I have done shit. I know shit. All those seductive secrets inside me have to mean something, right? They have to.
My father and I are alike in more ways than I want to admit. I’ve seen him roughed up many times by the Way. He was a thinker too. He’s the one who plastered newspaper articles on the windows and did deep-dive searches on the internet about the conspiracy theories. He threw his power back in their faces plenty of times.
So did my uncle. I’m not sure what kind of team they were, but I know they were close. I know they did things together, and made big plans that had nothing to do with being a Way banker, and I know they were both killed for it.
First my uncle when I was twenty, then my father when I was thirty-one.
I might not have figured everything out about the Way in the last five years since I took over, but I’ve figured out enough. They want me to be scary. They want all my contributors to think I’m insane. They use me to keep everything running smoothly. Disruptions at the banker level mean disruptions at the contributor level, and that—that they cannot have.
That money’s gotta flow.
I don’t know how or why Joey came to live with us that night. I don’t know what that argument was really about. All I knew was this: From that day on Joey was the middle Boston boy.
I liked him. I still like him. Hell, he was barely two when he came to live with us, but I was only three. It was like I got a best friend. And we were best friends for a long, long time. After a year or two the age difference barely mattered. We did everything together. And soon after that, Jesse was old enough to join in.
It was pretty good for a while.
We were a team.
The Boston Brothers.
And now what are we? Just three guys who share a last name. It’s my fault. I get that. I did this to us. But what choice did I have? Telling Joey to fuck off and never come back was the best thing I could do for him. Everything I did to ruin Jesse and make Joey an outcast was done with one goal in mind.
Make sure the Way never saw us as a team.
Make sure the Way never saw us as a threat.
So if Jesse ever gets pissed at me for ruining our brotherly bond? If Joey ever accuses me of never loving him? I’ll tell them about that shit I saw. Because I saw a lot of it.
But now here we are. A team again.
So what was the point of all my underhanded dealings with Jesse and the effort I put into rejecting Joey?
Megan takes another bite of her sandwich. She chews methodically as she considers me, or my question, or hell, maybe she’s considering all her past choices just as I’m considering mine?
“Well?” I say. “Where did they go?”
She takes a deep breath and turns her head to look off into the distance. Studying the dark, still night. The relatively calm sea. “You know I don’t know or I would’ve told you already under the drugs.”
“You were pretty out of it.”
“I guess I was. Since you undressed me and I don’t remember it.”
“Just trying to help you out.”
“Right. Well I don’t know where they went. I’m not exactly on their list of trustworthy people at the moment.”
“You have ideas.”
“I’m sure you do as well.”
She pauses to purse her lips and side-eye me. “I was a prisoner. They weren’t filling me in on their plans.”
“Why did everyone up and leave?”
She shrugs.
I want to get up, lean over, and choke her until she tells me something useful. But I don’t. I would never call myself patient. I’m the opposite of patient, actually. But I know when to bide my time. So I stay flat on the sun lounger, arms behind my head, and look up at the dark night sky, smirking like none of this matters. Like Charlotte Kane might not be the last chance I’ll get to save my family and all their friends who have now been dragged into this dark mystery that will surely end in epic disaster.
“Take a guess,” I say. “What happened before everything shut down?”
“Why?” she asks. “Why are you here?”
“I’m looking for a woman named Charlotte Kane. Do you know her?”
“Know her?” Megan laughs. “Heard of her, of course. Everyone’s heard of Charlotte Kane. But if she was on that island I didn’t see her.”
“You’re sure?” I ask. “Because she went missing almost a year ago and her last known location was on a boat in the Straits of Florida.”
Megan takes another bite of her sandwich. Eyes darting around now, like she’s thinking.
“That’s not very far from here,” I continue.
“There’s more than just one island facility,” Megan says.
“How many more? I only know of this one. How do you know this? Where did you get this information? Who do you work for?”
She stops chewing and stares at me. “I guess it’s safe to assume I didn’t tell you my last name then?”
“No,” I say. “You didn’t. Just Megan.”
“What else did I tell you?” she asks.
“That doesn’t matter. It wasn’t what I was looking for.”
“Well, it matters to me,” she says. “Because what you basically did was rape my brain. I’m a very private person, mister… whoever you are. And while I might not look like I’m enraged over being mentally mauled by a predator, I am. I’m quite pissed off about it. So how about you tell me something first? Hmm? Like your fucking name for one.”
I crack a smile. Not because I think she’s funny, but because I know that level of arrogance and came to terms with its absurdity a long time ago. But she hasn’t. She is someone important, I know that now. Someone with power. Someone who lost that power very recently because she thinks she still has it.
“OK,” I say. “I get it. Little quid pro quo? Little tit for tat?”
“Just tell me your fucking name.”
I’ve only been in this situation a few times over the course of my life. Everyone back in the city knows who I am. And typically when I’m in a tense conversation like this I have the upper hand because of that name. They know what I’m capable of and they know my past history. They know what I’ll do if they don’t start telling me what I want to know.
So this is a twist in the narrative of my life.
A twenty-five-year-old woman who comes off as fresh. Not yet jaded. Still confident and filled with self-assurance.
Way women aren’t fresh and strong. They’re weary and worn down. I don’t have a lot of experience with them because if there was one lesson I learned early it was to avoid them at all cost, but I remember my mother. She was not fresh and she was not strong. Not even that night she brought Joey home. She was afraid. She was angry. She was begging my father to listen.
She acted like baby Joey was her last stand. She acted like she was done.
And she was young when she went missing. Probably younger than this girl right here.
So Megan makes no sense.
“I’m Johnny Boston,” I say, just to get this show on the road. “Who the fuck are you?”
CHAPTER FOUR - MEGAN
Who am I?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself my whole life. I am lots of things. Many labels attached to me. Daughter, of course. Everyone has parents. But the meaning of the label of daughter goes beyond just family ties for me.
It’s the label that defines me most. One mention of my daughter status to anyone in the Way and they instantly take notice. Eyes get wider. Chins tip up. Spines straighten.
At least that’s how it was up until our recent misfortune.
I grew up on the Way Island of Osprey Cay. Just a stone’s throw—relatively speaking—from Nassau. It’s a lot like the island I just came from. Which does not have a name. At least, not one that can be found on a map like Osprey Cay can.
My island is bigger than the prison island I was just liberated from by Johnny Boston by almost three hundred acres. The main house—which was my home until just a few weeks ago—is a twenty-thousand-square-foot boutique resort for the “privileged friends” of the Way Board of Directors. I call it home, but it was never really mine. Or my father’s. We were just the caretakers. But our family has lived in the main house for four generations now. We are synonymous with that place.
My great-great-grandfather is the one who elevated our station in life. He was the one who turned the mansion’s expansive basement into a laboratory. Granted, what he was doing in that lab eighty years ago was nothing compared to what my father was up to, but he had vision.
It was pretty iffy science back then. The things he was doing down in that lab could be considered crimes against humanity these days. But back then they just didn’t know. Hell, back then they didn’t even know x-rays were dangerous. They had x-ray machines in shoe stores, for fuck’s sake. Little kids were encouraged to put their foot in the machine and wiggle their toes so their parents could be convinced that the shoe fit properly.
So of course, now, we know that x-raying the feet of children is a long-term health risk. But back then…
Who am I kidding? This justification is bullshit and I know it.
These x-ray machines were still around in the late 60’s even though the long-term effects of radiation exposure were known in the 1920’s and dosage regulations took effect in the 1930’s. It’s just the line I feed myself so I can live with the early days of my family’s role in the Way, not to mention what we’ve been doing recently.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m pure or innocent or anything like that. I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t relish—or even take advantage—of my privilege on Osprey Cay. I’m not going to pretend that the work my father and I have been doing was for the purest intentions.
Those x-ray machines in shoe stores were a gimmick to attract customers and sell shoes.
What my father and I are doing? Well, we can’t even claim money as our motivation.
But this in no way makes me unique. I was taught that we all have a position in life and this one was mine. I am the daughter of the Mad Scientist of Osprey Cay. The whole thing was practically preordained.
I am Megan Machette and up until a few weeks ago my life was a wicked fairytale.
Everything about the Way is compartmentalized, meaning everything is need-to-know. I don’t need to know much. I know that I live on Osprey Cay and I know that people arrive regularly for meetings or parties. I know we keep girls there in the brothel. I know a little bit about what happens behind closed bedroom doors. I can, at least, take a good guess.
But I don’t know anyone’s names on that island. I don’t even know their faces because everyone had to wear a white mask. And the women all wore veils too. I could probably pick out some of the Way men based on voice or facial hair. But it would just be a guess.
I would not even be able to recognize the brothel girls who work in Osprey mansion and that place was my home. They weren’t supposed to talk to me and those veils never came off if they were outside their rooms.
This white mask rule applies to me as well. It’s for our own protection. At least that’s what they say.
I kind of believe them. It’s comforting to know that no one would be able to pick out my face from a book of faces.
My father explained
the importance of the white masks and veils when I was still very young. Long before I needed that protection. “One day,” he’d said, “someone might take you into a room and present you with a book of faces. They might ask you to point out people you know.”
He insisted that while such a situation was not probable, everything is always possible and our masks and veils protect us from being identified by someone else in that room looking at a book filled with faces.
So if Johnny’s looking for the names of the board members, sorry, buddy. Can’t help you there. Not only have I probably never met them, I would not be able to recognize them if I had.
But I have other secrets he’d probably like to know.
I know for a fact that the work I did in my father’s lab wasn’t hurting people. Once I was old enough to assist him in the lab he made sure my job assignment was pure, sanctioned scientific research.
What he and I worked on in private, well… that’s a whole other matter.
Those are big things. Secret things. Things I have thought about constantly since I was old enough to begin wondering about this strange, isolated world I was born into.
No one knows about that stuff, though. I’m sure of it. I would not be here doing this if they did. It’s the whole reason information in our organization is all need-to-know. It’s the reason we wear veils. It’s the reason we all live and work on different islands.
But why they do those things or what they hope to accomplish by doing them? I don’t know that. My father has explained what he’s doing in the labs in very general terms. I get why he’s doing it. But how he did it? When he started doing it?
That I do not know. All I know is I will protect him and his secrets with every fiber of my being because this makes us stronger. And if there’s one thing he’s drilled into my head since I was a very small girl it’s this: We live in a very dangerous world and the only people we can count on are each other.
“Well?” Johnny asks.
His voice is very deep. Kind of growly. Authoritative and commanding. But all the Way men speak like that.