Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) (5 page)

You had to be a killer.

Anything less was a countdown before you were caught.

I studied the photo of the man that was lying dead in the bathroom. Under the picture was my father’s writing: Z. Moss. Was he a Zachery, or to more puerile thinking, was he a Zander? Names weren’t important but I wondered just who the man was, other than Eddie’s partner. He had died savagely, like bears had mauled in his thousand dollars a night hotel room. I guessed that the same hit squad that took out Jimmy Ricky, had taken out Z. Moss, a.k.a, the Rat.

Names of the hit squads were never given out freely. You had to have earned the privilege of the family to receive that kind of information.

I only knew one name from a hit squad.

Yet, I had only known about Harely and what he did for the family only because I was fucking his wife. Now caught, chastised and demoted, I wouldn’t hold my breath on my father pulling me aside to share the family secret of just who did the dirty work. But, cleaning up after the hit squads made me feel like I knew these men, like I understood them better than the chosen ones who prided themselves on just knowing their names.

I felt like I knew their work. And when they had inflicted a wound, I felt like I knew just what was in their minds when the infliction occurred.

Jimmy had been fucked up but not
as
fucked up as Moss. They had hurt Jimmy as a way to teach a lesson to others who had it in their mind that a married woman was fair game.

Men like me.

Moss, on the other hand, his wounds shouted a clear message of pain –
intended pain, a fusillade of pain
. He was messing with the lively hood of the Rogue family, and they were simply showing him that was a very not nice thing to do.

I folded the picture and burned it. The fumes of the smoldering photo were much better than the fumes of death, pain and blood. I soon realized I was drunk, but still raided the tiny mini bar looking for something to keep my presence state on the rise. I staggered to the balcony, the little chirps of the birds catching my attention, the lull of the waves lapping at the beach sounding so inviting, and somewhere distant, I heard children laughing.

Somewhere over the barely audible lap of the ocean, or the distant laughs as children ran up and down the beach as their happy parents watched, I slowly began to feel sorry for myself. I puffed softly on a ciragette, enjoying the small little clouds of smoke being torn apart by the wind. I was concerned with pouring another drink, closing one eye to help me balance and steady my hand as I topped off my glass. The liquid looked so dark and thick as it splashed against the ice cubes. My throat tightened with anticipation of the drink. As the burn eased down my throat, I felt the tears running down my cheeks as I refused to cough out the fire.

And it was here on the balcony that the pain that I had flown away from finally arrived in Miami and was standing beside me. Twenty-four years old and not a damn thing I was proud of. I was in love with a married woman. A woman who was never mine from the start, but that hadn’t stopped me. In truer words it hadn’t stopped her.

She had raised a perfect lover.

She had been the closet thing to a mother when I was just a kid. She had been the closet thing to a girlfriend in my adult years. Our twisted relationship wasn’t to be explained only because it didn’t make sense – not even to me. Somewhere over the countless varieties of women I had my dick buried in – some women beautiful and willing, while others were ugly and paid -, I had come no closer to understanding myself.

It wasn’t until this moment did I understand what my father was really asking me in his office. Stay and be part of the family, and maybe have your shot at running it, or go and prove your grandfather right that you’re nothing more than a screw up. I had failed the test, horribly. Too busy living up to Zander’s drunken expectations and Papa’s rasict predictions and hiding, or more like running, from Lulina’s dangerous manipulation, I hadn’t understood that my father saw something in me that I couldn’t possibly see and trained not to look.

I leaned over the side of the railing. The beach wind slapped lightly at my face, and ran through my hair. I exhaled, my chest heaving from the gust of air between my lips. The setting sun touched my bare chest, firm shoulders and arms as I dragged a hand over my face. I blinked through the cracks in my fingers and watched the world through my own obstruction.

Life had been nasty and cruel, and I learned a little too early that the glass was empty rather than waiting to be filled.

I watched as a mother trotted after her children who rolled around in the ocean just a little ways away from her. The family dog rested lazily in the sand watching it all. The father was already dozing in his beach chair with a light beer in his hand, oblivious to the moment – as delicate as it was and priceless, with the promise that it could never be shared, similar, or better, but never the same – played out in front of them. The family would know happiness. They would never know what I knew: how ugly and short life could be and how bad it could end. And the family would never know the man that stood over them in the hotel room of a dead man, admiring them and wishing he had their life for just a moment.

The life of the Rogue was set for a change that may not be good. With every year, my father was getting older – too old for the business. None of his sons were fit to take his place. And because of my decision to come here, despite my gut screaming at me all the while as I made the decision to fly away when my father may have needed me the most, I knew that I had quietly, and politely, taken myself out of the race for the thrown to the Rogue Crime family business.

Yet this was my life. I hadn’t felt good enough for much of anything. I was a screw up, a fuck up, and my course of action would always lead to the same results: destruction.

And as life would never change, and I knew this from the depths of my soul, it did anyway.

“Wish you had their lives, didn’t you?”

I smelled her before anything. A smell that seemed to linger in the air over the salt and the ocean breeze - the smell of roses blowing in a summer midnight air, and, I, of course, had never smelled roses in a summer midnight air but that was what I pictured immediately at the fainest whiff of her scent.

Her words took a delyed moment before it reached me.

Wish I had their lives?

Had my longing been too obvious?

My chin hit my forearms as I leaned heavily onto the banister. Once again, I watched the family, half smiling, and half crying inside. “They’re happy.”

“They don’t have to worry about anything.”

I nodded my agreement. “Their worries are bad report cards and a flat tire on their way to church.”

She chuckled for a moment then was silent. The ocean rushing the shore was all that was heard between us.

“But there’s another world out there,” she said.

I nodded. I’m holding my breath and can’t remember why and let it out slowly. “A world without promises; without just decent goodness; a world where no one gives a shit if you’re happy or not.”

A relevation… a time to express the things you thought instead of holding it in should have been a breath of fresh air, but it wasn’t.

My eyes lingered on the happy family for a moment longer before I followed the voice that had spoken to me. Her creamy, olive tone skin shimmered in the setting sun. Her fingers, long and delicate, held loosely onto her banister. My eyes followed her hands up to her toned, bare arms to her profile. Her long, dark curly hair blew backwards from the wind. Her mouth was a set line, as if she was in thought. She sensed my stare – her eyes slid towards me…and…

Gray eyes… Gray and beautiful…

A lone ringlet blew across her forehead. She removed it and tucked it behind her ear. “Are you enjoying this place?” She asked me.

A rush of air erupted through my chest. I exhaled and had no idea at the reason why. “I’m just passing through.”

She was looking at me and I understood all too well that I didn’t want her to stop. Her body was well complimented in her sun dress. Her breasts more than a large handful and perky, her stomach tight, and her hips hugged to the side of the dress - a true Italian woman. She did not have an accent but if in the right setting she would, and if the itlian language was spoken to her, I didn’t question that she would speak it back.

I was aware that time was passing, but I just didn’t know how much as we watched each other; she on one balcony – right next to mine – and me on my side. The setting sun and the lap of the ocean waves below soon didn’t matter anymore to me. But what took forefront in my mind, besides her, was my extreme short comings of a man. I found myself hating Zander because at that moment I wished I was him. He was Spanish trash but not black trash. If the family would’ve allowed him, he could dismiss the Hispanic blood in his body and pass for a full Italian man and no one would know the difference.

Not me. Not Tristan Rogue. I was a black man by the one drop rule. Sure I was the looks in the duo. Yet, I was the play thing, the fun toy, for girls who wanted to fuck.

Zander had the looks of a man you could settle down with.

I felt like the misguided mutt that I was told I was. I felt like the whore I had become. I was the drunk that I had worked hard to be. I was everything that was ugly and lived with it; a head held high to it all, but now I was ashamed. I swore when she looked at me that she could see it all.

My eyes hit my feet. My cheeks flared as I clenched my jaw. I felt her moving closer. I looked up and there she was, leaning over the railing, her body still on her side but her head on mine. She curled a long, delicate finger, telling me to come closer. I did as I was told until I was leaning just on the side of her, my elbows aching from the cooling steel on the railing.

God she smelled so good.

There was a certain air about her. She reeked of sexuality and awareness of herself and just how to use it.

“May I ask how old you are?” I posed the question.

She smiled as she tilted her head. She pondered my question while watching me from under her eyelids. “Twenty.” Something about her was familiar. I wanted to say I had seen her before but I knew I hadn’t. “And you are?”

“Twenty-four,” I responded.

My eyes followed her fingers as it dragged up and down the cold steel of the banister separating us. I was smart enough to know she knew I was watching her stoke the rod.

My pants felt suddenly tight.

She knew she had my attention. “Are you on vacation?”

“Business.”

“What kind?”

I found myself wanting a drink, my throat feeling extremely dry. I had reached for the glass that I had been sipping on well before I noticed this girl here, but my fingers never touched the cup. She had leaned over, knocked the glass out of my reach and off the balcony. I watched as the liquor lurched out, broke apart in the air, into the little droplets before spreading and disappearing. The glass sailed upright as the liquor and ice cubes was thrown out but started tilting the further it went until it hit the bottom and shattered. I knew this because I watched it from the railing all the way to the bottom.

I was an alcoholic.

That was my drink.

I mourned split liquor that I never got to taste.

Time had to have passed by but I could not take my eyes off the shattered glass that was once a cup full of liquor fifteen stories below. I was well aware of the woman standing there, watching me, and observing the small twitch in my body – not from anger but from the excitement that I had held her attention this long.

She spoke and I listened intently. “I would say it was an accident, but it wasn’t.”

I leaned in and touched my lips to hers briefly – barely filling her lips against mine. “Niether was that.”

“You’re forward,” she chuckled lightly.

The sun gave off one more ray of light that hit her gray eyes in just a way that they appeared facet. It was beautiful, and that beauty imprisioned my breath in my throat.

I was proud of myself for the stolen kiss. I felt I had taken her off guard. Then she showed me two could play the game. She cuffed my chin, pulled me close, close enough that her radiating smile and her intense gray eyes were all I could see. She didn’t kiss me. She looked at me and I was sure that whether she was kissing me or not, whatever she was doing had the desired effect she wanted.

I was baffled enough but a sense of calm had found itself to the pit of my stomach. “Do you always touch random men?”

“Do you always kiss random women?” she asked.

“I do only because they catch me off guard.”

“And when they don’t catch you off guard?”

“My rule is never to kiss,” I answered.

“And when you do kiss, it means nothing?”

I shake my head with her hands still on my face. “Obvisouly not this time.”

I could almost see her rolling my words off the tip of her tongue. “What’s your name?” Her voice was like a jolt.

“Tristan,” I answered her.

“Last name?” I shook my head against her palm and was thankful I had. Being here was a mistake. She was a witness. She was someone who could place me at the scene where a man was beaten to death. She was way too close not to be able to give a description of me.