WHO: Tragos, Kaden, Barak WHEN: Late one evening, long after dark WHERE: Inside a worldchanging seat of a car WHAT: Some BAD SHIT IS GOING DOWN GUYS WARNINGS: Death, guns
Barak was waiting in a car outside the gym. It was not his car. It was not one of Ares’ cars. It was not a car Tragos recognised at all. He frowned at it, and Barak got out of the drivers seat and left the door open, one large tattooed arm resting on the roof. “You’re driving,” he said.
“Am I,” said Tragos, but climbed into the drivers seat all the same. Barak outranked him, after all. He turned to throw his gym bag into the back, and Kaden smiled thinly behind him.
“Yo,” he said, his voice just as thin. The bruise from the day of his suspension had almost faded, from his skin if not from his memory.
Barak got into the back with Kaden, and showed Tragos directions on his phone - an address in Queens. “What’s here?”
“Business,” Barak said, buckling in.
“Kaden’s not coming with us on business,” Tragos said firmly, locking eyes with his little brother through the mirror. “Kaden, get the bus home.”
“Kaden is coming with us,” Barak said firmly. It was a tone that set off a bone nausea in Tragos, despite his own strength, despite his own position. He could see Kaden wearing the same feeling, his face less adept at masking it, and that look made Tragos dig his heels in harder.
“No he fucking isn’t. Kaden, get out.”
“Drive the fucking car, Tragos,” Barak barked. “This thing has a deadline. We miss it and Ares is going to be fucking pissed.”
Tragos gritted his teeth, trying to think on his feet. Barak was right, if Ares expected them to be somewhere he would not accept family squabbles as a reason to be late. Reluctantly, he started the engine. “Keep your head down, Kaden,” he said. “And do everything I tell you to.”
“Everything we tell you to,” Barak corrected. Tragos shared a look with his little brother in the rear view mirror. I’m so sorry. I don’t want this.
Kaden shifted uncomfortable in his seat, no one wanted him in this car less than he did. Barak had been waiting for him outside the school gate and the dread grew every minute that had passed since. Apologetic looks didn’t change a damn thing.
“Car’s stolen,” he said to Tragos, to stop silence taking over the car.
“Figured,” Tragos said, with a gentleness to his voice reserved for Kaden only. He shot an angry look back at Barak. Had Barak taken Kaden along for that, too?
Barak looked pleased with himself. Tragos hid his fury – if Kaden got an actual police record it really would fuck up his changes with school. Kaden, well aware of this, but not at all sure how to stop any of it happening, put his earphones in and slumped down in the back, kicking the back of Tragos’ seat. Tragos waited till he could hear the tinny music coming out of his earbud before he turned slightly toward Barak, though his attention remained split between the road and keeping an eye on Kaden’s face to see if he was listening. “What’re we doing?”
“Taking care of something that should’ve been taken care of two goddamn months ago,” Barak said, and looked over at Kaden. Noticing the earphones, he gave the cord a yank and pulled them out of his ears.
“Ow – hey,” Kaden protested.
“Pay attention,” Barak ordered.
“To what, the traffic? Ooo, businesslike,” Kaden snarked, and Barak grabbed his forearm and squeezed hard. “Ow – fuck – get your gorilla hands off me, I’m here, aren’t I?”
Barak released him with a warning look, and Kaden fell back into annoyed silence, irritation covering up the dread. He stubbornly put one earbud in, leaving his Barak-facing ear open. A compromise. He was listening. He wasn’t staring out the window in a state of frozen apprehension.
“Tonight we going to right a wrong,” said Barak, shoving a balaclava through the gap in the seat toward Tragos with one hand. “Tonight we gonna prove that we ain’t scared of no fucking thing.”
“Same thing we do every night, Pinky,” Kaden muttered, emboldened by Tragos’ presence. He wouldn’t have dared say it if he and Barak were alone. He saw Tragos snort at his joke and felt even more bolstered, till Barak yanked a balaclava down over his own face.
“Same thing we would’ve been doing every night if some of us weren’t fucking cowards,” Barak said, the accusation in his voice aimed at someone outside of this car. Tragos knew this because if it had been aimed at him Barak would have been looking straight at him. Barak didn’t do passive aggressive. Barak didn’t do passive anything.
Kaden's hands groped at the black fabric over his face. It smelled of sweat and oil and he was desperate to take it off but Barak's voice carried too deadly of a warning, he didn't dare. He twisted it a little to line the holes up with his eyes and mouth and tried not to be sick.
Cowards? thought Kaden. He never knew what to think about his brothers’ version of bravery. Undoubtedly they were brave, if you thought brave and fearless meant the same thing. Kaden wasn’t so sure.
Kaden didn’t think he was brave, but sometimes Kaden he could be fearless. Running cross the road in front of trucks with Tragos, he wasn’t scared of that. Risking ridicule with the stuff he posted online, he wasn’t scared of that either. Walking the streets of the Hole at night, nope, that wasn’t scary, that was just home, and he was faster than most of the dangerous stuff around. He tried to tap into that feeling now, that belief that somehow he’d be okay despite the odds.
But every hope of that shattered, and his vision tunneled right down to the moment in front of him, no future, no past, no alternatives – when Barak put a gun in his hands.
“The woman at the edge of the park, with the dogs,” Barak said to him. “Shoot her.”
Kaden’s stomach turned all of the way over, and his arms had gone heavy and cold. Barak reached across him and wound down his window, then grabbed Kaden’s chin and forced him to look. There was a woman in a green coat and high brown boots, half her long dark hair messily pinned up, the other half falling down her back, which was facing them.
“Barak what the fuck - Kaden, no,” Tragos snapped from the front. The car sat at a traffic light, as soon as the light changed they’d be driving past the woman.
“Eyes on the road,” Barak snapped back at him. “Kaden, like we practiced. Aim it.”
The force of Barak’s voice made Kaden lift his arms, his hands gripped around the gun. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe and how to think, and Barak’s tone overrode everything else. He aimed the gun because Barak told him to aim the gun.
Tragos’ voice, saying “put it down, put it the fuck down, Kaden,” did not have the same impact. He wasn’t afraid of Tragos. Tragos couldn’t command his muscles to move like Barak could.
“Breathe out,” said Barak, and Kaden did, though shakily. The light went green. “Ready,” said Barak, and Kaden’s mind bucked like a horse and he couldn’t react, couldn’t obey that order to be ready.
But words like “Pull the trigger,” were solid, straightforward, clear. Kaden could feel every one of his muscles in his fingers, in the back of his hands, in his wrists, in his arms, feel where they connected up to his guts. And when the sound of the shot ripped through the air everything shattered again, he could think even less. The shock of it made the gun slip from his hands and then another shot came, same as the first, then a third, definitive, deafening. And then Kaden was being pushed back into his seat as the car took off, cutting across two lanes of traffic with brutal speed to get away from the scene.
Tragos threw his own hot gun into the footwell of the passenger seat and gripped the wheel with both hands. Furious. Sick. He was too angry to think, too angry but do anything but concentrate on nothing but putting as much distance between themselves and the woman he’d watched fall.
Barak, with a victorious laugh, reached across Kaden again and rolled up the window, and Kaden pushed himself hard back into the seat so Barak’s arm wouldn’t touch him. When Barak reached down to pick up the gun he’d dropped Kaden felt himself blank out for a second. Not pass out – everything went blank, he couldn’t see or think but he was still aware of the ringing in his ears.
When his vision or his brain cleared, he could see Barak checking the gun to see if Kaden had actually managed to fire it. The look of disappointment on his face made Kaden’s insides curl up even more, and he braced for Barak to do something like turn the gun on him…
But Barak just leaned in and whispered something in his ear.
“What are you saying?” Tragos snapped from the front. He’d seen Kaden’s face go so pale, and was worried he was going to throw up and they needed to be real careful, right now, not to leave too much forensic evidence in the car.
Barak leaned back in his seat and laughed. Kaden looked like the whole world was ending.
Tragos wanted to rage at Barak, screamed at him, ask why above all else. But he knew why – years ago, when Barak was younger even than Kaden was now, he’d been riding with two of his uncles and one had put a gun in his hand and told him to shoot into the crowd of a rival gangs gathering. Barak had done it, he’d told Tragos and Cy about it later, re-enacting the scene with a pop pop pop.
So yeah Tragos got why Barak had tried to do the same thing to Kaden.
But to risk fucking up a job Ares had sent them on? Tragos was furious about that. Not telling Tragos what was going on, he was furious about that too. Barak was running this whole mission on a need to know basis and getting off on the power of being the only one who knew what was going on. That was how missions failed, with the overcockiness of a leader. If Tragos was any less of good getaway driver they might all be absolutely fucked.
Silent with rage, Tragos drove. Kaden put his headphones back in and Barak didn’t stop him this time, didn’t look at him at all as he hunched down in his seat, turned away from his brother, body curled protectively in on himself. Barak spent the time on his phone, silently messaging, a wild grin on his mostly-covered face. Tragos stuck to the speed limit and, as the fury started to wane, he replayed what he’d done over and over.
It was the dog he’d recognised, not the woman. One of Ares’ pups, a sister of Nikkos. As soon as he’d realised that the rest of the memory of the woman coming to pick up the pup filled itself in, and he recalled her face. A really pretty face, and one he hadn’t connected until now with the woman who’d appeared in the club and ripped the tattooed woman out of the War Dogs grip. A madam. But a madam that Ares knew, was close enough to to have allowed her to have one of his dogs.
What the fuck had he done?
What he had to do, he told himself. What he had to do to stop Kaden from doing it. He’d been about to. Tragos could see he’d been too petrified to disobey. When he snuck a look at Kaden in the rear view mirror he could see his shoulders shaking, silently, and wondered how much worse it would be if Tragos hadn’t stepped in.
No cops stopped them, though. At least there was that to be grateful for. Tragos turned where Barak told him to turn, and worked out where they were going before they got there. The junkyard where he’d been training Nikkos just days ago, where he’d spent the evening sexting Marcie. Gino’s grandfather ran it, and Gino was waiting for them, and the four of them waited while Gino set things up and crushed the car, crushed the evidence, into a cube.
Kaden hung back, but not too far. He was too afraid to go too far, in case Barak took offense and came after him. He wanted more than anything to disappear into the ground. To crush himself up like that cube. To have never been born.
A movement caught his eye among the trashed cars and sheet metal and shadows, a dark figure moving low to the ground. His breath caught, fearing police, but the figure did not look human.
This did not make him feel much better.
Kaden kept his eyes on the shadows and saw it move again, this time a large eye glinted back at him. An animal? Maybe a dog but a really, really big dog. Kaden swallowed stiffly, and a moment passed and the dog was gone. Was he seeing things? There was no way the woman’s dog – which had been that size – could have followed them here. They’d driven for ages. There was no way. He was seeing things. He was going crazy from stress and he was seeing things.
The next movement that caught his eye made him jump, but this time it was Tragos, walking over to join him where he leaned against the half burned out car. Barak and Gino were deep in conversation about fucking with CCTV cameras and not paying attention and Kaden wanted to ask Tragos if he’d seen the dog too but couldn’t handle opening his mouth.
“What did he say to you, back there?” Tragos asked.
Kaden shook his head. He wouldn’t say it. The words had been turning over and over again in his head, but if he spoke them out loud they would choke him.
Tragos didn’t ask him again, but he did keep looking at him and Kaden could hear him wondering. Worrying. Stop thinking about me! Kaden wanted to scream at him. Worry about yourself! You killed someone! You fucking killed someone!
But every time he thought about it tears started pricking at his eyes and he had to stop, and think about something else, because he refused to cry where any of his brothers could see him. He made that promise to himself when he was a little kid and had kept it since.
He made another promise to himself now: never to tell Tragos what Barak had said. Because it was damning to both of them, and Kaden didn’t want to say, do, or even think anything that would damn either of them any further than they were already damned.
He didn’t believe in god or a savior or any of that bullshit but he knew being damned was a real thing.
When Barak had taken the gun back, and proved to himself that Kaden hadn’t fired it, and when Kaden was so sure Barak was going to break his jaw with the butt of the gun, Barak had grinned instead, broken and crooked and twisted all the way through.
“Well, puts you on the same level as our glorious leader, Kaden,” he’d said, voice hushed but highly amused. “He couldn’t kill the bitch either.”