Garden of Sins

I hate Dorian de Luca, Alayna. Nevertheless, I have to meet with him over and over again. It bores me, as do a lot of things here.

We’re home, Carter and I, and by that, I don’t mean with Mom and Dad, as you might think, baby girl. We haven’t had any contact with our parents in six months. Mom kept trying to reach us by phone, but we didn’t answer because we are being monitored. Every call, every message. At some point, Carter went to our parents and told Mom to stop. Then he told me she burst into tears, which he couldn’t handle so he beat a guy and sent him to the hospital. Unfortunately, it was one of our own men, so the boss wasn’t happy. However, I ironed it out, like I always do when Carter reacts impulsively — and he does that too often.

I stand in front of the glass wall of our shared penthouse, far above the rooftops of Chicago, including the private pool on the roof where we’ve thrown the hottest parties, and look outside. The city sparkles bluish below me, so small, so insignificant, so unsuspecting.

Alayna, for me the world has always been a playground. Only I have never been able to let off steam like I can at the moment. I have never been able to let my monster run free as I do now. Admittedly, it feels extremely good.

I take a sip of cognac.

Carter is fucking one of our hookers in his bedroom. The bed is forcefully banging against the wall while she screams. I’m already done with her. Today, it was blow job training. We have to leave soon but Carter takes his time since he usually arrives late, except in women. That’s when he comes too soon, in my humble opinion.

Alayna, I’ve never had so much sex with so many different, faceless women as in the last six months. And by that, I don’t just mean those who are paid for sex, but those who jump a handsome, powerful man as soon as they see him.

We are more jaded than ever. Nothing touches us anymore as we’ve seen too much and grown used to too much. The first time I watched my brother take someone’s life, I thought it would kill him because, fundamentally, he is sensitive and not a fucking asshole like me. But the opposite was the case. His pupils dilated and his monster finally broke out of its shell after all these years and wriggled free. Every day without Isabelle, whom I have never met, he gets a little worse, a little more hopeless, and a little more lost. I watch Carter carefully every day because, with him, you never know when the feelings will come back and he will pull everything into the abyss. However, there is nothing in his eyes except emptiness. Since that day, he has extinguished dozens of lives — with growing indifference. I have to take care of him. He says I’m a psycho, but so is he, just on another level.

As for me, I’ve given up on ever seeing you again. I hope I won’t either because I’m not the man I was then. You couldn’t love me like this anymore. I’m no longer different from the people who only appear in your worst nightmares, baby girl.

You should be afraid of me, Alayna. You shouldn’t come back, ever. Not the way things are because it won’t ever be different. You don’t need that.

I take another sip of cognac as my brother growls, “Ah, fuck, hold still!” Sighing, I decide that I have waited long enough, so I stroll to his door, which I simply open and lean against the door frame with my almost empty glass. Carter persuaded the blonde bitch to give her ass away. He’s breaking it in right now like we’ve done with so many whores before. Yeah, we give them a lot of training and we’re not very nice to them.

“Is this going to happen today, Carter? We have to go,” I remark listlessly.

He shoos me away with one hand without looking at me and buries the other in her hair. “Fuck off, Caden!” The chick squeals as he forcefully thrusts into her.

“Shit,” she gasps.

“I said hold still,” he snaps through clenched teeth and hits her on the ass.

I knock three times on the doorframe and she looks up in horror. So nicely conditioned. “We have to go, come now, literally, or I’ll count her away,” I warn my brother.

“Fuck! Fuck off then. Do you think I want to see your face during this?” he growls at me. I leave the door open as I stroll into my bedroom across the hall. At that moment, he hisses, “Shit,” and the bed finally stops banging against the wall. Hallelujah, Alayna.

* * *

An hour later, Carter is finally cleaned up and dressed, as always, in black, just like me, and we are sitting in my white Mercedes SUV. Carter has the same one in black. We earn good money and could afford five of them, but that is not something that fulfills me, Alayna. It’s only a car, just a penthouse, just a couple of paper slips, and just a couple of pussies who are attracted to it. This is not really life, but who says we want to live?

Next to me, Carter is franticly typing on his cell phone and repeatedly ru

His shit is my shit, Alayna, but you know that. He, on the other hand, still doesn’t seem to understand that after almost twenty years.

“Who’s that?” I ask and steer the car to the South Quarter. We don’t live in the South Quarter. None of us live in the South Quarter, it’s simply where the business is done.

Carter makes a dismissive gesture. “Dorian.”

A

Naturally, I’ve seen her picture because everyone is searching for her. My brother always picks such strange women, Alayna. That’s what happens when I don’t make the choice. Then he goes and falls in love with a mafia princess who is engaged to a crazy psychopath. For certain. Isabelle Marino’s father has been to the de Luca house a few times when we were there. Since I’m the best person for this kind of thing, I should find Isabelle now. Isn’t that fu

Carter and I involuntarily learned a lot about Isabelle from Dorian, her fiancé. It’s almost like he’s testing us. Maybe he suspects one of us has been with her but doesn’t know which one since we look alike.

We know how he had Isabelle before. We know how many times he hit her. We know how many times he played his sick games with her and they are nothing like my games. He loves to talk about her at length because he seems to miss her a great deal, Alayna.

Dorian and Carter are the new dream team, but only because Carter wants to keep him safe. For some reason, Dorian has made a fool of Carter, or at least, that’s what he makes us think. At first, I had to calm Carter down once a week, especially when he had to listen to all that stuff about Isabelle. Now he just gets quiet, silent, and snorts coke like it is going out of style.

We arrive in front of the purple-lit strip club, which is right in the center of the fun district, where there is one neon sign after the next. The club belongs to the boss, like every piece of shit here. We are here almost every day to make sure that everything runs like clockwork.

I park in front on the street. Everybody knows who owns this car and that they’ll die if they even breathe on it.

Carter enters first. He’s always in a hurry, is extremely nervous and edgy, totally restless because he’s never sober and always on the run from his feelings. I stroll behind him and we push past the bouncers who nod at us. Carter is still waving his cell phone around even though we are here and Dorian is sitting somewhere inside. We enter the red and purple-lit rooms. It smells of sex, money, and power. Dorian sits enthroned in his usual booth, directly in front of the main stage, where a perfect brunette is draped around the pole. Her eyes immediately glide towards us and she winks at me because she gave me a blow job last week while I watched the show on stage. She is hot, not as ordinary as the others, although nothing here is ordinary.