Page 7 of Venom Sweeter than Honey
Astor’s brow furrows; gives me a solemn nod.
I expect him to ask me to elaborate, but to my relief, he doesn’t.
“Growing up, I didn’t have a father. It took a long time for me to heal from that kind of resentment and abandonment. It wasn’t until I learned to lovemyselfas a father should; instead of hating myself and the world around me...”
He shakes his head as if getting off track, but he has no idea how much those words resonate with me, even though my father loved me.
Just not enough to choose a safer career path, apparently.
“My point is that I wish I’d had someone to guide me down a different path. To give me an out. Growing up, my mother and I, despite her best efforts, were poor.”
He pauses for a moment, expression tightening, and I suddenly see the sadness radiating off of him. The loneliness. I’d guess he doesn’t confide in very many people.
“I grew up in a trailer with a broken front door and a fucking hole in the floor that the grass would grow through. My mother used to sleep with a knife in her hand.”
Astor’s gaze grows distant as a nostalgic grin tips his lips. “She would keep a used paper target from the shooting range nailed to the front door with all the bullet holes in the head and the dick... Would steal nice clothes for us so we could at leastlooklike we weren’t just trailer trash. Most people I grew up with who were born in that trailer park died in that trailer park—including my mother, despite that knife she slept with, or the stolen gun in her drawer—and I refused to end up the same. Was willing to doanythingto escape.”
He pauses again, and I find myself holding my breath.
Jesus, fuck.
You’d never guess any of this by looking at him. Learning this part of his origin waters the seed of begrudging respect I have for him.
Astor’s gaze eventually shifts back to me.
“I am under no delusion that I am anything but that, still. Trailer trash. There was a time, not that long ago, where I’d managed to escape but...”
Astor’s words drift, and I swear I see his eyes glisten before his gaze wanders from mine. “Here I am... Just a thug with a little money and power, in a life path not dissimilar to the very people I tried so hard to get away from. The only difference isthat now, I don’t have to steal my clothes, and I no longer live in squalor.”
Several beats pass as he chews his cheek before he seems to reach a conclusion.
“I’m going to make you a deal.”
LEVI
Ican’t get home fast enough to give my mom the news—along with the $10,000 Astor gave us to live off of for the next two weeks. If he honors his word, and I honor mine, my mother and I are set for the foreseeable future. It seems too fucking good to be true, but now seems like a good time not to ‘look a gift horse in the mouth.’
Bracing myself for my mother’s disinclined reaction, I burst through our front door. She’s well aware that he’s a notorious drug lord, black market arms dealer, identity broker, and thepatron saint of refugees—a pseudonym chosenforhim, not by him.
The soft scratch of the record player’s needle circling the locked groove at the end of a song fills the apartment. Logic tells me my mother is passed out from drinking all night in her futile attempt to self-medicate, but somehow—in the depths of me—I know this is different.
I can feel it.
Like somehow my future self is warning my present self.
Stomach churning with icy dread, fear poisons my rapidly waning joy as I come to a halt in front of my mother’s bedroom door.
A sealed envelope is taped to it right at my eye level, and without even opening it, it tells me that whatever is on the other side of this door is something I’ll never recover from. I try the doorknob anyway—it’s locked.
I attempt to knock, my voice cracking as my eyes begin to burn.
“Mom...”
Silence.
Squeezing my eyes shut, my body begins to tremble.
Please, please, please, please, no.
