Cousins: An Alpha Bad Boy Romance(26)

The man's name was Carl. I'll always remember that name. Anytime I hear it my eye inadvertently twitches. He was in the ICU for five days, and they had to resuscitate him twice. Luckily for me, Joseph took care of the details, and I was never a formal suspect in the beating even though there was DNA evidence all over the place. It was filed by the police as an unsolved gang-related assault thanks to a few connections my father had at the precinct. Although I never faced any charges for it, there was something about almost beating a man to death that stuck with me.

It changed me.

And the change has been darkening, growing, and curling inside me ever since.

That's what my father sees when he looks at me - darkness, disappointment, lack of control.

Joseph comes from the very same humble beginnings that I do, and in order for him to carve out the immense success that he has, I understand that he's had to make tough decisions. Sacrifices. Choices that have cost him a lot. When you make those sorts of choices in life, there are always consequences, and he never likes to look back. I think I remind him of what's back there. What he comes from. What he's had to do. What he now looks upon with disdain and would like to forget. He's rather fucking hypocritical though, and sometimes I'd really like to tell him how much of a hypocrite he is.

Joseph started out his career doing exactly what I do. As a fixer. A man that other men hire to make their problems go away by any means necessary. He worked in the mailroom of a law firm where a then young and upcoming lawyer named Jack Mills hired him to make a paternity suit go away for one of his clients. No experience required. Jack thought he saw something in Joseph's eyes that told him that the problem would be handled. And it was. Joseph never talks about the details of how he handled that case, but rumor has it that he beat the crap out of the woman's younger brother until she agreed to recant her statement and drop the paternity case for a ridiculously low settlement. Something disrespectful like a settlement for a thousand dollars. It was the best beating Joseph ever gave in my opinion. It changed his life and mine in the best way possible. Sometimes I think he forgets that.

With the increased popularity of the Internet, cell phone use, and social media, it was easier than ever for the public to find out all about the trouble celebrities were getting into. This was great for Joseph's new consultant business, because he was gaining the reputation of being one of the best in the business. When it became glaringly obvious during my high school years that I inherited Joseph's natural tendency to fuck somebody up with little remorse, I then became his protégé. His heir apparent. Or more accurately put, his muscle. I do the shit that he no longer wants to do. The dirty stuff. The rough shit. But the reason why Joseph is still one of the most highly sought after fixers on the East Coast is because of his ability to handle problems swiftly, quietly and without loose ends. The Carl incident almost fucked up his pristine reputation, and Joseph never forgets mistakes, especially when he’s not the one making the mistake.

Carl was a two-bit dealer who was selling weed to a very popular teenaged Disney star, who he later decided to blackmail when the kid started using another dealer. I didn't understand why he was resorting to blackmail over one lost customer, but it wasn't my job to understand why idiots do what they do. It was my job to get him to see reason very damn quickly. Joseph's kind of reason. Unfortunately just when I thought Carl and I were coming to an understanding, he spat in my face. Something I don't take kindly to. So I pummeled him ... again. And just when I thought to myself for a split second that it wasn't my fight, that I should walk away and have Joseph find somebody else to deal with him, he managed to muster up the strength and the balls to tell me to "Go fuck yourself, you piece of trash."

And that was it.

Something snapped inside of my brain. Something old and festered, that I preferred to keep locked away deep inside of me, rose up front and center. And that's when I kicked Carl's ass one last and final time, until I made sure that he couldn't say one more fucking thing out of his swollen, bloody mouth.

During that final beating, my heart was racing as my fists hit the side of his skull, my breathing was heavy as I cracked and kicked in the sides of his ribs, and my nostrils were flaring like a wild animal's as I paced and circled around his limp body waiting for him to make a move. I felt alive and powerful as if it was an out of body experience. There was a definite high I felt when I was in the middle of a fight, but this was different. He'd called me trash, and like I said something snapped. I wasn't trying to fight him; I was trying to finish him.

Yet when I was done, and my breathing slowed, and I took a really long look at the man lying stock still in a pool of his own blood, I didn't feel justified or powerful or alive anymore. I was scared. Scared that I had killed the little fucker, and that I had enough blind rage inside of me to actually have done something like that. It hadn't been a fair fight. It hadn't been a fight at all. So I just felt like shit. Dirty. Like there was a layer of grime that no matter how much I wanted to, I just couldn't seem to get rid of. Like there was something really wrong with me that everyone could see. That my father could probably see.