Page 52 of Redeem

“It means before I had been a boy playing at a game, but after…”

“After?” I said.

“After, I knew it wasn’t a game.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

Part of me didn’t even want to know, but I had to see this through.

“Believe it or not things were pretty calm for a couple years. Not good. Never good. But home. By that time, my father had lost all of his old status, and it was up to me to keep the family afloat. I did. Did shit work for others.”

I shuddered involuntarily, then asked, “Do I even want to know what ‘shit work’ is?”

“Probably not, but I’ll tell you anyway. Cleanup work, collecting debts. Kicking the shit out of anyone I was paid to. Not the stuff I had dreamed of when I’d heard stories about the glorious future that awaited me as the leader of Clan Dragos. But it was fine. Kept food on the table, and it made my father proud.”

Though his expression didn’t change, I could see his pleasure at that. I didn’t understand that world, didn’t understand the process behind it, and though I’d never had a family of my own, I could easily imagine how important it would be to make someone proud.

“How? How did you make him proud?”

“I was tough. Didn’t take any shit, and could handle anybody. It gave him stories to tell. Kept him out of trouble.”

He had slipped the last of that sentence in but I recognized the significance. It hadn’t been the pride that made him happy, but the knowledge that he’d kept his father out of trouble, maybe kept him from making things worse.

“So…?”

The story, which was not good, would only get worse. I knew that.

“My mother and my sisters died.”

He said the words without any hint of emotion, no inflection at all, but I could feel the pain in them anyway. Then a sudden, horrible thought occurred to me.

“Was it…?”

“No. It wasn’t because of the business, such as it was. It was just one of those things. Slick road on a rainy night. They all died instantly in the crash,” he said.

Tears began to well in my eyes despite myself, and I had to physically restrain myself from going to him. It was no excuse. His loss didn’t make what he had done okay, but I felt for him anyway. I’d never hated myself more than I did in that moment, wondered when I had gotten so broken that I could conjure sympathy, feel it so deeply for the person I should think was a monster.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

And I meant it.

I didn’t know what that was like, to lose so much of your family, to have family to lose, but I felt his pain. Felt it even more acutely when I looked at him and saw that he was not reacting. Was trying not to anyway. Still, despite his stoic expression, the way he seemed to hold himself back, I saw the emotion.

He blinked though, and in the next instant it was gone.

“My father… He didn’t take it well,” he said.

“I don’t imagine anyone would,” I said.

“Funny, I can see that now, but I didn’t then. When they were alive, he paid no attention. Didn’t seem too concerned with them at all. But when they died, he…he spiraled out of control,” he said.

I tried to imagine what that meant, and couldn’t really contemplate it. Much of what Ciprian had told me was so completely beyond my understanding that I had no context for what “out of control” meant. “So what does that mean?” I said, asking the question that was on my mind.

“It means he started drinking more, which wasn’t so bad. But he started borrowing money, racking up debt. And forgetting about respect.”

It was the second time he had mentioned respect to me, and I started to realize how important that was. It also occurred to me that there would be consequences for that, ones that Ciprian was probably responsible for.

“So it was your job to clean up after him?” I asked.