“Yes, sir.” He nodded to me, but kept his gun pointed at the governor’s head as I stepped up to him.
“Make sure to cry for the cameras. They will eat that shit up,” I said, leaning over to take the bottle of brandy off the table. “My condolences again.”
He bared his teeth like a starved animal, but Adam just pressed the gun to the side of his head. Taking a swig out of the bottle, I winked at him before heading toward the exit. There, waiting at the door was the same old manager.
“Bill the company for any damage. I want this place fixed before opening tomorrow,” I said before stepping out into the cold air where Mannix already stood waiting by the Bentley. Taking a seat inside, I waited for him to close the door before reaching under my coat, to the side of my shoulder. Wincing slightly, I pulled my hand away, glancing down at my own blood.
And this is the reason I fucking hate drunks. Not immune to the irony, I drank the brandy in my hands.
“Where to sir?”
Good fucking question.
TEN
“I’m a coward when it comes to matters of the heart.
That is my fatal flaw.”
~ Haruki Murakami
HELEN
Buzz.
Buzz.
Buzz.
That’s all I’d heard for days now. I should have turned it off. I should have thrown it away. After all, I left the mansion dead set on not speaking to anyone, and yet here I was listening to my phone vibrate around the glass of my coffee table as I sat in my boy-short underwear and a white tank-top fixing my old robot vacuum—
“Child’s play,” I muttered to myself when it came back to life. Setting it on the ground, I watched it clean up Oreo crumbs that had dropped. I looked around my apartment for anything else to fix, but there wasn’t anything. If it had a circuit board in here anywhere, I’d already fixed, updated, or replaced it over the last few days.
“I could clean up.” My eyes looked to the kitchen to see the crime I’d committed against it for even attempting to cook in the first damn place. “I’ll leave that to the professionals,” I muttered to myself as I shifted over on my side. Tilting my head, I stared out at the city lights.
“I should go out.” But where? A club? A bar? Those weren’t my scenes, and I didn’t see how forcing myself into a building with drunks hoping to get drunk myself was going to do anything other than annoy me. I could see my sorry self in the reflection of the glass. My hair was a complete mess. I had been in my pajamas for hours. I looked pitiful. “Go out. Call a friend. Do something.”
But I didn’t want to go out.
The only friends I had… were my family.
And the only thing I could think of doing was going back to the mansion and working on Cain.
“You’re pitiful,” I said to my reflection, which only made me frown. The sight bothered me, so I reminded myself, “It’s not your fault though. They made you pitiful.”
They. My family. The Callahans. They made me like this. My best friend killed my biological father, trashed his name. Then their drugs killed my mother, which was the reason I was an orphan. Everything, just like with computers, was a series of cause and effect. Input equals output. Since I was young, I could see it. It was logical. It was dependable. You put one and one together, you got two. A series of zeros and ones, you got code. Giant puzzle pieces that just needed to be set together. The complete opposite of people. People were messy and complicated and…
“Pitiful,” I said again. I was exactly this, often by my own craziness or my family’s. I tried to spend most of my time with computers. Input was computers and family; therefore, my output was that nothing else mattered but computers and family. Without either of those things, I felt useless.
“So why am I so upset?” I asked myself.
Buzz.
Buzz.
Buzz.
My phone went off again. I wanted to answer, but I didn’t. And I didn’t understand myself for that. I wanted to go home.
Home to the people who destroyed your real parents? But they had no way of knowing their actions would lead to me.
So forgive them? Yes.
They don’t want forgiveness, though. Because they’re happy they have me.
So how do you forgive people who don’t want forgiveness? Who don’t think they did anything wrong? I don’t know.
I didn’t have an answer. I was at war with myself. My heart wanted to go, and yet my head kept stopping me, because I couldn’t think of an answer.
The scientific rule of Occam's razor states that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily, which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories are preferable to the more complex, or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities…basically in layman’s terms, the simplest answer is usually the right answer.
My problem was that the Callahan family is the reason my biological parents are dead, and yet I want to go back to the Callahan family. Applying Occam's razor to my problem, then the simplest answer is that…
“I don’t care about my biological parents,” I whispered to myself, and yet I couldn’t help but look away from myself. “That is a bad answer.”
But it didn’t feel like the wrong answer. I knew I wasn’t a good person. I’d come to terms with that, which was how I was able to get Ethan the information he needed, knowing what he’d do to the people I found. But for me to be this black-hearted? My biological parents loved me. I was sure of that, and I’d betrayed them by not even having the decency to leave the Callahans.
Maybe it’s
