J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

“I can’t take it much longer, T.”

There came an agitated grunt, then the sound of boots pacing back and forth over tile. “ You can’t! I feel like I’m gonna crawl right out of my fucking skin.”

“If he doesn’t wake up soon, we’ll have to leave Bartleby here with him and come back when it passes.”

Xander froze, listening.

“How much longer we got?”

“Three days minus sixteen hours,” muttered Mateo. “And counting.”

Groans. “Jesus Christ.”

He waited, but they didn’t say more. Curiosity got the better of him, and he made his way silently to the kitchen, where he stood there in the doorway, unnoticed, looking them over.

His boys. His brothers, in heart if not in Blood.

They were assassins like him—collectively referred to as the Syndicate by the rest of their kind —and like him they were disgraced sons of powerful males who’d been handed over as children to the brutal tutelage of the capoeira master Karyo, a human the Manaus colony kept on retainer because he was both a perfect killing machine and perfectly tight-lipped about his “unique” students and their kin, who paid so handsomely for his silence. It was either study under Karyo or be tossed into the Drowning Well; bringing shame to one’s family name was not well tolerated by his kind, and at least the Academy offered a chance to save face.

It offered their fathers a chance to save face. The young boys who would become the hardened killers of the Syndicate never gave a shit about things like that.

Mateo was the son of a duke, of the Grandes do Imperio —Great Ones of the Empire. At six years old he’d called his pompous father a cachorro puto —dog fucker—in front of the entire Manaus Assembly. He now leaned against the counter by the sink, muscled arms crossed over his chest, chewing his lower lip.

Tomás, eldest son of the colony’s Matchmaker, had burned his family’s home to the ground when he was eight in a fit of rage after his father had spanked his bare ass in the middle of Sunday church services when he wouldn’t stop squirming in the pew. He sat at the big square wood table with one knee jumping up and down beneath it, his head bent over, hands clasped over the back of his neck.

Julian, a giant skull-crusher of a male with shaggy dark hair who always drove the getaway car no matter the job, had stolen apples from a neighbor’s tree. He sat hunched over a bowl of pasta at the table, mechanically shoveling it into his mouth with a blank-eyed stare as if he didn’t even know he was eating.

And he, Xander, had simply been born to the wrong woman.

They had trained together in Brazil since boyhood in the fine arts of murder and mayhem, until his three adopted brothers had gone into the American military as spies of sorts and he had gone slowly insane.

They were the only three souls in the world he trusted with his life. They knew all his secrets and he knew all theirs, and if anything was finer than that, he hadn’t seen it.

“Boys,” he said.

Uncharacteristically, all three of them jumped. They gaped at him as if he were Lazarus, risen from the dead.

His brows arched. “What’s doing, gentlemen?”

And then they were on him like a pack of enormous, rough-and-tumble puppies, hugging him, slapping him on the back, making him see double in pain with arms squeezed around his middle.

“You look like shit,” Tomás said when it was over. He stepped back to peer at him with a critical eye. “You shouldn’t be up yet.”

“How’s the gash, man? Thought we lost you there for a minute, bro. You were pretty chopped up,” said Julian, his big hand wrapped around Xander’s shoulder.

Mateo merely looked him up and down and shook his head. “You’re one tough fuck, you know that?”

“And you’re just as ugly as I remember,” Xander answered, grinning. “But I guess a jarhead isn’t supposed to be pretty, right?”

“Navy SEAL, asshole,” growled Julian from beside him. “Jarhead’s a marine. And we have better hair.”

“Yeah, well, you’re all cannon fodder as far as the military is concerned. But we know better what you really are, don’t we?” He winked, and the big male grinned at him, nodding, and slapped his shoulder.

“He’s a shitty driver is what he is,” Tomás said in an affectionate tone, looking sideways at Julian. “We would have gotten to you sooner at the hotel, but Driving Miss Daisy here took his sweet time leaving Monte Carlo.”

Julian scowled at him. “I made a seven-hour trip in under three, jerkoff. Top that!”

Tomás shrugged. “Would have been quicker if that bus of bikini models hadn’t been unloading in front of the Fairmont.” He smiled, the lines around his mirror eyes crinkling. “Thought you were going to have whiplash. Or a heart attack.”

“You drove here from Monaco?” Xander said, surprised. “What were you doing there?”

The three of them knew how to fly—and hijack—anything from a single-engine Cessna to a military fighter aircraft, so he’d assumed they’d come by plane. Fortunately they had been close enough to get to him quickly. If they’d been in Quebec or Manaus, his chances of survival might have been exactly zero.

Tomás and Mateo shared a dour look. “Ali Baba sent us to do recon on some big-shot casino owner named Stark,” Mateo said. “Seems he’s into this guy Stark for some serious cash and is looking for a way out of it. And if Stark has a little accident , so to speak, Ali Baba won’t have to pay at all.”

Xander’s jaw tightened. “He’s gambling again,” he said, and the three other assassins nodded.

Ali Baba was their nickname for Xander’s half brother, Alejandro, who ruled as Alpha of the Manaus colony. A preening, undisciplined, shifty-eyed male with an ego the size of a small country, Alejandro was also incredibly lucky. Hence the nickname. Though he had a knack for winning big at casinos—and occasionally losing big, which it seemed he had been recently—that wasn’t what had earned him the sarcastic moniker first coined by Tomás years ago. The Syndicate called him Ali Baba because he’d been crowned Alpha only by a lucky turn of fate that propelled him to a position of power he hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve. He wasn’t as Gifted as Xander, or half as strong or smart.

But he was the firstborn son of their father’s new wife. The new wife who hated Xander with an elemental ferocity and was ultimately responsible for having him shipped off to the Academy. The new wife who’d taken Xander’s mother’s place when she died. More correctly, when she was killed.

By his father.

Ancient history, that. But some scars never fade. Like the scars on his back where his father had whipped him whenever he was disobedient and then poured salt over the flayed skin just to hear him scream. So the mention of his half brother’s name brought his blood to a boil.

“The gambling will have to stop when the rest of the Alphas convene on Manaus,” Xander said, dark, thinking of the move all the colonies were preparing to make. Since it had been discovered the Expurgari knew the locations of all the colonies except Manaus, preparations had been in the works to combine all four colonies into one mega-colony. Logistics were proving to be a nightmare, but once Alejandro was surrounded by three other snarling Alphas, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting away with his usual idiocy.

And hopefully he’d do something to piss one of them off and there would be a bloody—deadly —fight.

“Maybe,” said Julian. “But our friend Mr. Stark still might not wake up in the morning.”

“Speaking of morning, how long have I been out?” Xander asked, curious how long it had taken him to heal this time. He wasn’t fully operational, of course, but a human wouldn’t have survived the hit he’d taken, forget about being up and around.