Ralp nodded again, quicker this time, raining down streams of blood from his busted nose. His eyes were on the floor, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders low and slumped. I watched as my father shook his head, unable to hide the disgust at my brother for two very good reasons: he had been sloppy, and he wasn’t able to look him the eyes and own up to the sloppiness.
If Ralph wasn’t my father’s son, he would’ve been killed.
You never do business with a man who couldn’t look you in the eye.
My father continued, “They weren’t even your men; they were borrowed hands like always and you had a mole.”
“They had a mole,” Ralph corrected, stupid for even thinking it was okay to talk when Ricardo Rogue was speaking, despite if his sperm created you.
Ralph was slapped. He cried out, tears rushing and falling down his bruised cheeks. His eyes were back on the floor, his lip quivering and his face flushing.
…Weak men were dead men…
My father spit at Ralph’s feet, utterly revolted.
“No. You had a mole. It’s your job to make sure things are right. You handle the operation; hands on, upclose, overseeing it all. You always be suspicious of the paid hands from another family, always.”
His dark eyes went a few more shades darker as he stared at Ralph. “Wipe those fucking tears.” He waited as Ralph used the sleeve of his jacket to clean his face. “My shit holds together better than you.”
My father took a step back. He glared at both of us, but mostly Ralph received the attention of his heated, disgusted, gaze.
I licked my lips. “Do you think Lacone had anything to do with this?”
He ignored me and took out his cigar, ran it under his nose. A lighter was fished, a flame flickered and he was smoking. He softly puffed, encouraging the flame to soak into the tip of the cigar before the lighter was put back in his suit jacket.
He finally answered. “I’m almost certain, but I can never be sure.”
My father closed his eyes as he inhaled a wallop of smoke, the taste lingering on his tongue for a few more moments before he blew it out into our faces. When his eyes opened – black, focused, and so wrapped and secured in reserved rage -, I internally jump, my insides screaming, warning me for another hit that would hurt whether I prepared for it or not.
My eye had only managed to catch a flash of flesh towards my face. I felt his ring burying into my skin, tearing my lip open. The slap had collided against the same cheek and I was on the verge of murder if my father touched me again tonight.
“You don’t ever shoot a gun in this family unless I say you do,” he said, “you shot a guy from a partner family, and you could’ve started a fucking war.”
I could feel my nails puncturing the inside of my palm as I squeezed my fists tighter. “And we would have ereased Lacone and his dirty ass thugs even before they had the brains to lift a gun, or even the balls to look at us as if there was beef to be had.”
The beginning of what seemed to be a smile tugged at the corner of my father’s lip. “Hard words.”
“No, just hard truth.”
What was an attempted smile vanished and my father nodded towards the door.
I looked at Ralph who was still sniffling through his broken nose and still trying not to cry, but had his arm half way up to catch any tears that happened to fall. I glanced at Papa, who had said nothing through the entire ordeal, but sat comfortably drinking brandy with a face of stone that only gave way to a sly smile when my father waded into my face.
I walked out, trying to keep my pace at an even stride and not stop at the nearest mirror to inspect the damage to my face. My intentions were to make a stop at one of my father’s bars. I wanted to drink until my face felt numb, or numb the part of my brain that registered pain. Then I was going to go home and drink until my world tilted, spinned, and then finally drained away.
This was why I never took on life sober. Life was too cold, too brutal. You wear a condom first, and never fuck life raw.
I was almost down the stares when Papa called out to me.
“Here, Tristan.” He handed me an envelope. “Your pay for tonight.”
Trudging back up the stairs to face Jarred Rogue had been slow and agnozing. I had my head slightly turned to the right, so if he thought it was his turn to lay some blows, he would have a fresh cheek to work on.
I slid envelope into my jacket pocket, trying not to think about the thickness.
Papa took another step down the stairs, coming closer to me. “The operation is back on hold until we know more about Lacone’s involvement. You’ll get word when we start it back up again.”
“You still want me apart of the gun operation?”
“I don’t, your father does.”
“Even if I was the one who saved the shipment and got the guard talking and found the mole,” asked, damned right appalled that his look of usual disgust and disappointment in me had not given way – even if it was a little bit. “You still look at me like I’m shit?”
I hated myself for my voice cracking, but the lack of acohol, the berating in my father’s office, and now Papa – one man who I could never please, but never gave up trying – looking at me as if had been the one to pay for a hooker instead of making sure a quarter million dollar shipment didn’t get stolen from under the Rogue nose, and in the Rogue backyard, was weighing on me so heavily that I wondered how I didn’t just sink into the dirt, and be as little as everyone saw me.
I hated myself for how little my voice sounded. And hated how much I sounded like the boy growing up looking for love and receiving none.
What I hated most was how I sounded like all these things, and, yet, my Papa looking at me as if I was nothing.
He shrugged. “Every nigger has their day.”
***
I leaned against my car, still outside my father’s compound. My head was spinning, the left side of my face throbbing, and I still couldn’t get in my car and leave.
Driving away would do nothing. What I felt now would be in the car with me, inside my apartment and inside the bottle I planned on drinking.
Where I went, my problems did too.
I lit a cigarette, pinched the bridge of my nose and exhaled. I had decided to forgo drinking inside the compound, and life was still rubbing raw on my skin, still sinking in deep, still cutting off my breath by tightening my throat.
I briefly wondered if I would dream tonight; take a mental vaction from the bullshit. I never dreamed when I was drunk. Never went to bed, but fell asleep only to wake up confused and empty.
I pulled myself up on the hood of me and Zander’s car, and dropped my head into my hands and breathed, deeply and soundly, feeling the air run through the length of my body. I figured I would get in my car and drive away when the world made more sense.
I also figured that if I waited for the world to make sense then I would be waiting forever. If it wasn’t for the money inside my jacket pocket, I might have been up for the wait.
I inhaled another lung full of air, smoked the last of my cigarette and then slid from the hood of my car, prepared to leave my father’s home and come back when I was too drunk to have better judgement.
“Pssst… Tristan.”
The night was silent and sad, still and vacant – except for the few guards patrolling the outer borders on the property – but, somehow, I had failed to have one single, solitary, moment to consider my life and be completely, and utterly, disgusted without anyone watching.
Dominique took one, almost hesitant, step down from the darken gazebo. She flipped her hair out of her face and smiled.
“Leaving so soon?” She asked.
My keys went clink as they fell to my feet. I picked them up, weighed them, tossing them from one hand to another, as if I was weighing my options and seeing which side felt like the heaviest.
Stay or go; go walking like a commanded puppy when she called me over, or jerk my head away, open the car door, use the keys to crank the c
ar and drive out of here, and away from temptation like a man who already had a mountain to move and wasn’t looking to move anymore.
The smile lingered on Dominique’s lips. What was once a self assured smile – the look of a woman who only had to curl her finger to get your feet moving, walking swiftly over a cliff – dropped and made way for a tender, not so sure, smile.
It was that smile - that tender, soft, sweet and gentle, smile that tugged almost barely at her lips, which got my feet moving towards her.
Dominique stepped back into the dark gazebo and I stepped inside with her, and watched as the light dwindled away. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the lack of light.
She reached and touched my face. Her fingertips reading the marks my father had made like brail.
And… I… crumbled…
My breath hitched, my head dropped into her soft touch, the warmness and inviting feel of her hands. I crumbled well into Dominique’s palms, and allowed my world to shatter briefly.
“What the hell happened, Tristan?” she whispered the question and her voice was so sweet, so curious and so warming that I leaned into her touch.
I shrugged, feeling tears welling up in my eyes. “The Rogue family in it’s finest. Welcome Dominique Lougotti, welcome to the Rogue family. Welcome to hell.”
The talking is good. The talking is building the walls back up around me. I grabbed her hands away from my face, stepped around her and walked deeper into the gazebo. I shook out a cigarette, lit up, and blew out a stream of smoke.
The talking was a good start, but the smoking was working even better for my self composure. I realized it was bad to be here, alone with Lulina’s daughter - without supervision, at least.
“We have to stop this,” I say. I took a pull, inhaled, my eyes closing at the joy of the cigarette – the poisonous taste is numbing; familiar, and I let the smoke out slowly.
Dominique was back in front of me again. She removed a napkin from her robe and dabbed at the corner of my mouth. There was blood on the tip. She folded the napkin, licked the corner this time and started wiping the blood from under my left eye.
It was so very dark in the gazebo, but her eyes were like separate glow sticks – glowing orbs of gray.
It was a very bad idea to be here.
She sensed the unease, and stated, “Just wiping the blood off my uncle’s lip.” I cringed but she kept on dabbing. “Relax, Tristan.”
“Why? You’re only stating a fact. I am your uncle.”
Dominique glared at me and started dabbing harder at the cut. I winced.
“Uncles peck the cheeks of their nieces,” she said, “They don’t have their tongues in they’re mouths.”
“We were selling the image of a loving couple.”
“And tonight, when we kissed?”
“There wasn’t any tongue, Dominique, and you kissed me.”
She huffed as if she was swallowing a chuckle from deep down in her throat. I turned away from her hot gaze, and, instead, came a little too consumed in my second dwindling cigarette. The butt was flicked away, two shakes of my emptying pack and I placed another cigarette in my mouth.
Dominique changed the subject of conversation. “Despite what you may have gone through in your father’s office, whatever he said to you, or whatever your grandfather implied, you acted very wisely and saved a very expensive shipment tonight. Ralph is a fool and he will be slowly moved away from the critical parts of the gun operation. You may be the next man to take his place.”
It was an earful that sat in a very disturbing place in the pit of my stomach. “The fuck is this?”
Dominique said nothing.
“Okay, I get it,” I go on, “my father shook your hand tonight. He gave you the ‘job well done, job well saved,’ speech while I got the brunt of his real frustration; the hidden ugly he wouldn’t let you see, at least not yet.” I laughed around my smoke. “He’s still courting the future boss, while he’s too busy spitting in my face, rubbing my nose in my mistakes.”
“So this is where we talk about Harely’s wife? Her name was Katie, wasn’t that it?”
I jammed my finger in her face. “Don’t you dare say her name, you hear me? You don’t bring her up. You don’t know shit about her, or me, for that matter.”
“Oh, I know you, Tristan.”
“The fuck you do, Dominique. I may be a lot of things, but I’m still smart, and I’m still very, very dangerous when I have to be.”
She laughed. “And you think you know who I am?”
“That depends if I give a fuck or not, and I don’t. I don’t need to know you, I know me. And I don’t make a move until I’m pushed, and when I’m pushed – correctly – buildings will fall, worlds will crumble.”
“You’ve been pushed plenty, Tristan, and the only world crumbling is yours.”
“Fuck you,” I snapped and started away from her.
Dominique reached out and grabbed my arm. “You aren’t the only one who had to be raised by a monster. You’re not the only one who learned not to ask questions, not to talk in public places about what daddy does, and not to look directly in the Fed’s lenses when they’re snapping your picture at a funeral. You aren’t the only one who seen the evil in the world, and have that evil be you one day.”
I chuckled to keep from speaking right away, knowing my voice would sound tight and scratchy. “Still, you haven’t seen what I’ve seen, or experienced what I have. Who needs enemies when you have family, Dominique?”
“My father put a gun in my hand when I was just ten years old,” she said, and I couldn’t be sure in the dark, but I thought I saw tears glistening in her eyes, “He took me to his office, and there I saw one of his long time friends – beaten and tied to a chair, and begging for his life. My father helped me aim the gun: center of the forehead, dead center, too close to miss.”
Dominique shuddered and I had to fight the urge not to comfort her.
She shivered again at the memory but continued. “My father told me to pull the trigger and I did. And after, my father took my hand and sat me on his lap. He explained the business right then and there. Everything, all wrapped up in a package that only a child could understand. He was sick even then; already dying of cancer. I started to take over the business at sixteen. You know, try to make it better, but it was too late. The business was gone and the respect was following.”
Dominique quickly wiped her eyes and exhaled. “Your father is very much in control and I respect him. He chose me to run his empire, and I don’t plan on failing him. But, I need you by my side to do it. I want you to be my right hand man, Tristan.”
“Why do you want me as your number one?” I asked.
“There aren’t many men like Ricardo Rogue, or Jarred Rogue, and you’re a combination of both. And I trust you.”
I found this funny. “No one trusts me and no one ever will again.”
“Blue eyes are hard to pass up, Tristan.”
The mention of Katie is a hot punch that hits right in the gut. I swallowed and the pain went with it, back where it belongs and never leaves.
“You know my demons, seems like you’re on a first name basis with my skeletons, but you still trust me?” I asked.
Dominique nodded.
I took the last pull of my third cigarette and flicked it away. “You want to fuck me, Dominique. Not trust me. Wanting to fuck me is a good move if you’re in need of an orgasim that rocks you so hard you forget how to breathe. Yet, trusting me, a wife fucker, is a way to get your self killed.”
“Oh, you think?” She argued.
“Oh, I know,” I argued back, “Weak men are dead men in the world of the Rogue.” I shook out another cigarette but didn’t put it in my mouth. “I have to say, I like talking to you, but we need to cool it. Someone may get the wrong idea.”
I stepped past her and made my way for the mouth of the gazebo.
“No,” she called out to me, “You want to fuck me and have me ride you so hard you forget
how your chest rises and falls to keep from dying.”
Dominique was baiting me and I knew it. I looked back at my car, sitting peacefully among the more expensive and reliable vehicals my father owned. I now see the car is like me. I, too, stuck out like a sore thumb; tarnished, broken down, and running on my last leg, and, yet, I was surrounded by better suited, better looking, and a hell of a lot more reliable.
Dominique is one of those better suited, and maybe at the top of the list.
Why would she want the wreck in the family?
“Come on, Tristan. Don’t you want me?” She purred and smiled. “I swear I’m better than my mother.”
I turned to leave but Dominique grabbed my arm again.
“Where are you going?” she asked, almost as if my leaving was hurting her feelings.
“I told you at the pool that we can’t do this.” I snatched my arm from her grasp.
Dominique grabbed me again. “I’m sorry about what I said. What happens between you and my mother is your business.”
“There’s nothing between your mother and I,” I lied but I convinced myself it was true, at least in this moment. “And even if I was fucking your mother, why would you care?”
She pursed her lips as anger flashed in her face. “I’m your future boss, Tristan, and I was raised by a very old fashioned man, who is accustomed to the old way of life. A man fucking another man’s wife is a sin, a spit in the face to everything that has a moral code.”
“Lulina’s husband is dead,” I whispered, hating that we were having this conversation.
“That wasn’t always the case, now was it?”
“You have nothing to worry about because I’m not having an affair with my sister-in-law.”
Dominique’s hand slipped from my arm. She put her hand in mine and squeezed - her warmth of her palm lulling me, the strength in her squeeze, itching up inside me and settling deep.
It was hard to talk but I did it. “I’m not fucking your mother,” I repeated.
“Good,” she whispered, “because I want you to fuck me.”
“This isn’t a good idea.”
Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) Page 15