Page 26 of Hades

“Don’t be so fucking crazy. I ain’t talking to Rider.”

“Rider now is it? Yeah. Kiss-ass suits you, really.” Kyle made a disgusted sound. No one was trustworthy in this life. No fucking honor among criminals. Goddammit it, he should have known. Really, he should have.

“You’re being paranoid as fuck, man.”

“What I’m being is cautious, and I don’t fucking trust you as far as I can throw you. This is over.” He turned to retrace his steps to where he’d parked. Dealers were a dime a dozen in this country, this state especially, he was practically tripping over people trying to sell dope, he didn’t need Marco to peddle for him, he could spit and find five more within minutes.

“Wait the fuck up.” And then Marco made his second mistake of the night. The first being showing his hero worship for the man they were both meant to be sticking it to.

He grabbed Kyle’s arm.

Without thinking, Kyle rounded on the man and had him in a choke hold, tight enough Marco began spluttering and grabbing at his wrist. “What in the good fuck do you think you’re doing, asswipe? It’s like you’re deliberately trying to piss me off.”

“You’re fucking crazy.”

Kyle squeezed all the tighter and grinned. “Oh, you know it, but here’s the thing. I’m also not a weasel. You tell Marinos of this meeting, fucker?”

“No. No, man. Fuck. It’s not like that. I swear on my mama!”

His poor fucking mother.

The lie was clear in green eyes, sweat pouring out of his forehead, Kyle dropped him like a stone. He had a knife palmed in his hand from his back pocket and before Marco could waste his last breaths professing his innocence again Kyle plugged him over and over in the torso.

He hated liars.

It was here nor there that Kyle himself was the biggest liar walking. Lie to his face and you were dead. Literally. Figuratively.

Bending down on his haunches, the dying man tried to grab him without success. “You made a big mistake here tonight, Marco. Maybe in your next life you’ll think twice about who you try to screw over. Good luck on the other side.” Fear in Marco’s eyes as life slowly seeped out of him with the faucet of blood pooling underneath his prone body.

Kyle murmured the Lord’s prayer.

Habits were hard to break. The words dripping off his tongue.

With Marco now dead, Kyle slipped a hand into his pocket retrieving the brick of coke. His hand coming up against a thin book, curiously, he pulled that free as well. Pushing the drugs into the inside of his jacket, he zipped it to the chin before he stepped over the dead body, walking slowly back to his bike, he flipped through the book, he couldn’t see the title, or most of the interior, but as he approached the bike parked near a street light a page illuminated and Kyle would swear on a stack of bibles in that moment his heart jerked inside his torso.

One word stood out among many.

His eyes scanned quickly reading the passage; God of the dead, the underworld, riches, darkness, death and mortality.Please Hades at all costs.

The thump in his chest thunderous now. He’d climbed back onto his bike without realizing, starting the engine, it thrummed underneath him and all he could hear was,Please Hades at all costs.That one sentence his thumb stroked over the page and it was as if a light had switched on inside him.

Hades.

It felt right.

He never knew, even years later, why his drug dealer was carrying around a thin book about Greek gods, but Kyle took it as a sign, somehow, he was destined to kill the man, to find the book, to step into his new skin.

He became something else, something bigger than ever predicted that very night.

King and God. He was darkness and death.

Hades.

CHAPTER NINE

“The Sweet Love OG.”

It showed how far he’d come in the last few years when just around the same moment he was shedding the skin of Kyle Williams, weak, malleable Kyle, who everyone had walked all over his entire miserable life until he could no longer take it, he was dragged right back there almost instantly when he slowed up to the club gate and saw a Black Hummer parked with the engine running.

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