Page 80 of Chad's Chase
“No other way he could’ve hidden this from the Pinnacle,” he said. “So, yeah.”
I swallowed. There was just so much shit I hadn’t a clue about.
An overwhelming sadness enveloped me, but I battled the emotion, fighting to keep my head above water.
“What did you do?” I inquired of Chad to prolong the conversation and keep myself from sinking under, losing myself in solemnity. “Why were you punished?”
A full minute ticked off before he answered. “Pavel, my uncle, had a twenty-year-old mistress. Moved her there from the States. Bought her an apartment, showered her with gifts, bought her love with money. But because he was married, he couldn’t be with her all the time. And she was twenty-one, bored, with no friends or family in the country. My father and I were the only ones who knew about her. So sometimes my uncle would send me over to her apartment to keep her company. Go to the movies with her and stuff, whatever she wanted to do, anything to keep her happy…”—A pause—”She got attached to me. One thing led to another and…”
I tried to sound casual. “You started having sex.”
“Yeah.”
“And you loved her?”
A longer pause. “Yeah. She was my first fuck. It’s natural that I’d be infatuated.”
“You were fourteen,” I reminded him.
“So?”
I bit my lip, because I didn’t know why ‘so’. I only knew I detested that he’d loved some chick who wasn’t me. But then, when he was fourteen, I was six, so… Why was I vexed again?
Okay, this possessive jacket didn’t fit me. At all.
Was this how all heterosexual relationships were? The female becomes attached and obsessed with the male because he has good looks, good height, sexy hands, tattoos, strong arms, defined abs, a big cock and knew precisely how to use it?
Maybe I should go back to being a dyke. Or, hell, I was probably still a dyke but going through a straight-for-you phase.
When I gave no retort to his ‘so’, Chad continued with his recall. “Pavel found out about us. He was infuriated, wanted me punished. So he took the matter to my father. Now, my father had been waiting for the perfect opportunity to decimate me without making his actions appear unjustified. He’d hated me since I was ten. So when Pavel complained to him, he didn’t hesitate in finding the perfect punishment for me. I wasn’t forced to live on the training compound, though. I was pulled out of school and was picked up by the Chinese everyday where I was trained and educated for eight hours before bringing me back home. One kid trained by five psycho-ass, fast-as-light Chinese assassins. You can understand now why I’m so different from every other assassin in The Organization.”
“Wow…and….what?” I tipped my head up to find his face. “What do you mean your father hated you? Atten?”
Brushing his thumb across my left eyebrow, Chad watched me for an adoring moment. “Your eyes are downright unbelievable, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told.”
“They’ve gotten brighter, greener. I love having them stare back at me.” Deep inhale. “They ruin me every time.”
“Trying to change the subject?” I asked, brow cocking in suspicion.
“No. I just love your eyes.” When I rolled them, he chuckled and picked up where he left off. “The Niiveuxs are old money. Old, old money. Wealth coming way back from the eighteen hundreds. Passing on from generation to generation, always to the eldest son in the family. The legacy was supposed to be passed on to my father, but I don’t know what went down between Grandad and Rafail, because Grandad broke tradition and bypassed my father and both my uncles, passing the legacy straight to me.
“I was ten when he died. My father was livid. At ten years old, I was fifty-seven billion dollars rich. And just like the legacy was passed on to me, my father’s hate for Grandad was transferred to me. Of course, I was still a minor, so I couldn’t have access to the legacy until I was eighteen. And my father, he couldn’t access it at all. Grandad’s lawyers were paid a serious amount of money to keep that shit under lock and key. Grandad had thought everything through; I guess he knew my father would just control the money anyway if I was still a minor when he died, so he shut my father out completely. The only Niiveux that legacy would ever be available to was me. Some of the smaller family businesses he passed on to Vlad and Pavel.”
With a pause to breathe slow and steady, he rubbed his forehead, as if the memories pained. “He kicked me out of the house to the pool house and treated me like an outcast after that. No love. No care. I might as well have been homeless. It was Pavel who cared for me from time to time, though he was just as pissed about Grandad’s decision.
“At eleven, I met Ricardo. He invited me to his house. I loved it there, because your parents were kind to me. Lot better than at my own home. That’s why I was always at your dinner table, in your bedroom, living like a Byrd. The Byrds were my real family. When I was struggling through training, your mother guessed what was happening, and she used to talk me through it. I told her everything, and she never said a word. I loved that woman.”
Huh, that’s what those long sessions in my mother’s study used to be about.
Who knew it was this bad for him at his own home? Guess I’d been too giddy about having him around all the time to notice.
“How did you get out?” I asked. “How were you set free from assassinating for The Organization?”
“I bought my way out.” His eyes drifted to the ceiling and stayed there. “My father wanted one thing: the money. I wanted one thing: my freedom. Without my freedom, the money meant nothing to me. So when I hit seventeen, and had already executed eleven different assignments, I made a deal with my father: If he gave me my freedom, I would sign the legacy over to him the second it became available to me. That’s what he’d wanted all along, so he gladly agreed. But with one stipulation—to execute one final assignment before I could go…”
My heart stopped. My breathing stopped. Everything stopped. Tears blinding me as I concluded, “My family.”
