This wasn’t his first end-of-life talk, and not everyone knew how pathetic they truly were until they were faced with their impending death.
But her eyes flashed, the tears suddenly drying up. “If I’m so pathetic and clueless, why am I here instead of my father?”
“You’re a blood debt,” Hades answered simply. “Your father gave you to me in exchange for his own life.”
Her chest heaved at his words. “Oh, my God. This is not happening. I’m supposed to be going to Disney World in two days. How is this happening?”
Here was the freak-out he’d been expecting from the start.
No, of course her father hadn’t told her. Cowards always coward in all situations, big and small. They were predictable in that way.
And this was the daughter of a coward, which was why he simply pointed out, “The offer’s still on the table, ma belle. One more day of life in exchange for those pretty lips around my chok.”
His nasty offer made her hyperventilate that much harder.
Ouais, he knew exactly how the Perreault Virgin would answer his offer. With a yes. She’d debase herself, agree to whatever he proposed. Anything to stay alive. Just like her fath—
“Okay…okay…I’m ready. Do it.”
Hades grinned and began to unzip his jeans. This would make for a fine piece of video to send to her father, after some heavy editing and doctoring of voices, of course.
“Eww, no!” she answered before he could finish unzipping. “I’m not going to suck your dick. I’d rather die than ever do that for you. Just kill me. Kill me now if that’s what you were planning to do.”
Rage and shock battled for dominance inside his head.
Men twice as large as her had sniveled and begged him on their knees. A few of them had offered to suck his dick without an ultimatum. Anything to stay alive.
But she’d denied him. Said she’d rather die, hissing the words angrier than a snake in a gator’s mouth.
The Perreault Virgin was many things, Hades realized at that moment. Spoiled. Clueless. Mostly a user and a liar—garbage, just like her father.
But she wasn’t a coward.
He knew that when, instead of taking her words back—like any sane person would—she bowed her head to await her bullet.
CHAPTER 8
BENJAMIN
Benjamin had only volunteered for his boarding school’s summer-long mission trip to escape his father. Enduring a three-hour flight to Ohio in a cramped middle seat was better than what he might do if he stayed home.
“You’re swole. You don’t need me there now,” his big brother had insisted when he called to explain his last-minute decision to spend the holiday break partying with his college teammates as opposed to coming back home to South Boston.
If he’d seen the bruise forming on his younger brother’s face, Benjamin’s brother might not have said that.
Absence was supposed to make the heart grow fonder. You’d think Benjamin’s time away at the boarding school he attended on a hockey scholarship would have given his father some perspective.
But no, it was the same drunk “woe is me” routine as soon as Benjamin walked through the door.
First came the slurred derision because his youngest boy with his black-Irish hair and pale skin had the genetic nerve to look too much like her. The wife who’d left him and their two sons for a hockey player.
It was bad enough to have one son who’d decided to follow in the footsteps of that fucker who “stole your mother from me,” he’d claimed. “Now I gotta lose you too?”
Benjamin hadn’t bothered to point out that his father hadn’t lost him. His mother had left him too, so he’d had no choice but to come home to his drunk father for the holiday break.
He’d learned from rough experience that trying to introduce logic into his father’s beer-soaked rants only made them worse.
Not that staying quiet had helped much either. Their father had woken him out of a dead sleep with a punch to the face for the crime of thinking “you’re too good for me now. You’re just like her!”
