Blade (RBMC: Dallas, TX #4)

Chapter Five

“ScarsThatI’mHiding”—AshesToNew(feat.AndersFridénofInFlames)

Fifteen Years Old….

There was a man who had tried to run off with Luis’s product and his money. Luis sent me with Fernando, his most trusted lieutenant. Not that I’d had a choice. It was either me or him. Luis’s right-hand man held a gun to my head. “You wanted the opportunity to make more money, right?”

I swallowed hard and nodded. The cold steel brushed my temple as I did.

“Well, here’s your chance. Luis will give you a bonus for this. Two K.”

“What do I gotta do?”

“That’s easy.” He grinned maniacally. “You kill this guy, or you’ll be dead first, then I kill him. Either way, he ends up dead. One or two makes no difference to me.” He shrugged like it was nothing more than swatting a fly.

“H-H-How? I don’t have a gun.”

“Oh, I got that covered.” He pulled a pistol from his coat pocket with a handkerchief and held it out to me.

For a moment, I just blinked at it. He poked me in the temple with the muzzle. Sweating profusely, I reached for it, taking the weapon in my shaking hand. It was heavier than I anticipated, and I had to quickly catch myself so I didn’t drop it.

“There’s already a round chambered. All you gotta do is pull the trigger.” The smug look on his face made me want to punch him, but I knew better.

“Come on, kid. You don’t wanna do this,” the guy whined, trying to reason with me. He was kneeling on the hard gravel of the seedy bar’s parking lot.

Though the last thing I wanted to do was take a man’s life, I had my mom and Sage to watch out for—I couldn’t leave them unprotected. The muzzle of the gun pointed at my head made my choice for me.

Stomach roiling, I clenched my jaw, and squeezed the trigger. The kick of the pistol threw my hand back a bit, startling me. However, it didn’t startle me half as much as seeing the spreading crimson spot on his shirt as the man writhed on the ground.

“He ain’t dead. Shoot him again,” Fernando demanded as he poked me in the temple with his gun.

Guts heaving, I did as I was told and fired again. That time it hit in what I assumed was his heart because he stopped his spastic movements and simply laid there twitching.

“See? That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” He lowered his weapon.

I ran off into the grass at the edge of the gravel and dropped to my knees. With the pistol clutched in my hand and resting on my thigh, I puked until I thought my stomach turned inside out. Sweat dripped off my forehead, and I choked and gagged but nothing else came out.

“I’ll take that,” Fernando said as he took the gun from me with the bandana. I watched as he wrapped it carefully in the fabric and tucked it back in his pocket. “Just in case you decide to do anything stupid, I have this gun with your prints on it and the ballistics will match what’s in the dead guy. If that’s not enough of a deterrent, remember, I know where your madre works. It would be a shame if one night she didn’t make it home. Huh?”

My blood ran cold.

I wish I could say that was the last time I did something like that for Luis. Instead, I ended up doing unspeakable things for him.

The scariest part was that a small, dark part of me started to enjoy it.