Whiskey and Wry (Sinners Series) (23 page)

Aw, Sinjun, you wrote your first love song.

Fuck you, Damie.

No, come on. I like it. It’s sweet. In a sucking on a razor blade and I’m bleeding in your mouth kind of way.

Yeah, but do you like it?

I do. It kicks ass. Does Kane know you wrote something sticky sweet for him?

Um, D, I wrote this for Dude.

—
Test Session 52, Take 1

“A
ND
the doctor said you’re all right?” Edie peered out at Damien through the tablet screen, her eyes boggled by her large eyeglass frames. “The headaches really are normal? Because if you are lying to me, Damien….”

“Doc said the headaches are normal. Nosebleeds are because I’m not drinking enough water, and when I get a headache, it just adds to the pressure.” He’d missed her bossiness. Combined with the owlish disapproval and her quirky, pursed lips, Edie’s long face was a familiar comfort in the whirl of doctors, lawyers, and cops he’d spoken to over the past twenty-four hours. “Promise. I’m good. Just a bit disconnected, but he said he hopes all of my memory will come back to me. I didn’t lose any motor functions, and hey, I can still play.”

“Because that’s what’s important.” Her sneer was epic, not a whit diminished by the thousands of miles between them. The harsh lines of her face softened, and the screen blurred for a moment as she pressed her fingertips to the tablet face. “I know it is to you, baby, but what’s most important to us is that we have you back.”

They talked for a few more minutes before the eight-hour difference between them tugged sleep over Edie’s weary face. Promising to speak to her soon, Damien logged off and collapsed against the couch.

It was odd having his life back, or at least the bits and pieces he’d left behind. Miki’d saved everything, refusing to throw out any part of Damien’s existence, and while he appreciated having clothes to wear and familiar guitars to pick at, he questioned his best friend’s sanity.

“I was
dead
, Sinjun,” Damien muttered as they went through the boxes, unearthing things Damien didn’t remember owning. “You should have tossed all this shit out.”

“I wasn’t ready for you to be dead, D,” Miki replied softly. “I guess I figured as long as I was alive, you were too.”

They’d gone through the boxes in the afternoon, after he’d woken up. The last thing he remembered of the night he’d come home was being sprawled around Miki on the couch they used to have in their apartment, its frame reupholstered and fluffed with new stuffing. There’d been some rocking motion and Sionn’s deep voice telling someone they’d sleep in. Drugged from lack of sleep, he’d woken up briefly when Sionn stripped his jeans from his legs and tugged a warm duvet over him, but the next thing he knew, he was blinking away at the watery light coming through the warehouse’s high windows and wrapped up tight in the Irishman’s arms.

Neither said anything, but Damien knew Sionn was awake. Instead, he turned around and forced the man onto his back, straddled Sionn’s thighs, and pressed his hands on the man’s broad shoulders. Working his way down the length of Sionn’s body, Damien laved at every curve of muscle he found until he could wrap his mouth around the base of Sionn’s cock. The man protested, making noises about Damien needing to take care, but he shook off Sionn’s hands.

“Shut up and listen to me, Irish,” Damie whispered, licking at the spongy head hidden beneath Sionn’s hood. “You say you’re safe. I
know
I’m safe. So unless you’re somehow going to get me pregnant, I’m going to suck you clean and fill my belly with your taste. Because I
need
that. I
need
you. Right. Now. Because the only thing that’s going to make me feel better right now is you.”

He then spent more than half an hour showing Sionn the way to heaven.

What followed was a slog through a queue of medical professionals, each shoving things into him or taking things out. He was bled and poked, then questioned until Damie thought he’d run screaming from the entire pincushion existence his life’d become. Once he’d turned to Sionn and asked if it would be okay if he went back to playing in front of Finnegan’s and forgot he’d ever
been
Damien Mitchell.

“Anytime, boyo,” Sionn answered after kissing the corner of his mouth. “There’ll always be a place for you there. As long as I’m alive. Now why don’t you be letting the nice doctor scrape at your brain so we can go get something to eat.”

He’d been spared having to view his mother’s mangled body. A quick trip down to the morgue was enough of a descent into Dante’s mind for him. Seeing her lifeless, flat face on a viewing screen was difficult, but there’d been no other choice. His father seemed to have disappeared into the wind without a trace. Calls to his assistant were met with reassurances the messages were communicated, and a nasally voiced lawyer descended on the police to answer any questions they might have had, but the man might as well have been a ghost.

“Had a good talk with Edie?” Miki slid over the back of the couch, jostling Damien into the cushions.

“Yeah, had to convince her I’d still be here when she got back from Europe.” He shut down the tablet and put it on a side table next to the couch. “Shitty for us to steal her from the band she’s working with just because I pulled a Jesus.”

“I dunno.” Miki’s hazel eyes glinted mischievously. “She
really
likes her wine. She probably wants to test out your new superpowers.”

“I’d probably turn shit into Blue Raspberry Slurpees.” He laughed. “You still haven’t told me about the GTO.”

“Yeah, it’s… um… in the shop.” Miki winced. “I’d been letting Kane drive it….”

“You let Kane drive it, huh?” He sniffed indignantly, laughing when Miki opened his mouth to apologize. “Dude, it’s okay. It’s your car. Did he fuck it up?”

“No, I kind of did.” The singer wrinkled his nose, pursing his lips in mock disgust. “I was trying to back it into the garage and kind of missed.”

“How bad missed?”

“Like slammed into the dividing wall and wiped out the brick face bad,” Miki confessed. “D, I was
so
ready to back it in. I’d driven it around the block for a month. I even solo drove it down the cul-de-sac a few times. Fucking wall was out to get me. I broke the axle, and, well, the paint job’s pretty fucked up. Maybe the transmission too, but Kane said the shop guys can fix it. Good as new.”

“Fucking walls. They’re mean, you know. Evil fucking things.” Trying not to laugh, Damien plucked one of the worn-edged notebooks Miki left lying on the packing crate turned coffee table. “You kept writing. I read through some of these.”

“Yeah.” The blush across Miki’s cheek was cute, and when Damien poked at his friend’s blood-warmed face, he got slapped across the fingers. “Fuck off. No one’s read my shit in a long time. I don’t know if it’s any good… or even what I was writing for.”

“You were writing for our band,” Damien said softly. “We
can’t
not make music, Sinjun. It’ll kill us if we don’t.”

“But without Dave and Johnny….” Stretching out over Damien’s legs, Miki rested his chin on the other man’s hip. “We aren’t Sinner’s Gin without them.”

“No. We aren’t,” he agreed, carding his fingers through Miki’s long hair. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t become something else. You and I… music’s all we know. We live, eat, and breathe it. Hell, Sionn says I hum in my sleep.”

“Kane told me he worries when he can’t hear me singing something.” Miki sighed. “You’ve just gotten back—”

“If I don’t do something, I’m going to go nuts, Sin,” Damie confessed. “All of this is hanging over me. I feel helpless. There’s shit I can do, and my mom…. I’m not sure what I’m feeling there. It’s like she’s been dead to me for years now, but now she’s really gone. It’s fucking with my head.”

“Yeah, I know.” Miki nodded, his fingers finding Damie’s in a tight squeeze.

“I just want to go forward in something. I need to
create
something. There’s been so much taken away from me… from both of us,” he murmured. “Sionn’s…. God, what the fuck do I do there?”

Miki cocked his head, his face serious with an innate wild wisdom Damien had missed. “Do you love him? Shit, I
know
you love him.”

“Do either of us know what the fuck love feels like?” He smirked at his friend. “He’s known me for what? A month?”

“Long enough,” Miki replied softly. “I knew. About Kane. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I didn’t want him to leave me. Everything was better when he was around. Kind of like with you, but in a different piece of my heart. Now you’re here the world’s tight again. Not so much black anymore. It’s like I can breathe in the colors again.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of it.” Damien thought on the golden Sionn brought with him, gilding the moments they’d spent together. “Fucking hell, Sin. What the hell am I doing falling in love?”

T
HE
man sitting behind the desk oozed greasy arrogance, tapping at the cherrywood top with heavily ringed fingers. Parker hadn’t seen his boss in several months, not since he’d taken the job, and the passing weeks had not been good for the man. Excess ran his pallor to a sickly pale, and a hint of yellow flushed under his skin where the morning sun fell on his face. The buttons on his shirt strained to hold back his barrel chest, wiry graying chest hairs poking out through the gaps, and his chair creaked under his weight when he shifted forward to rest his hands on the desk.

No, Parker thought, the man in front of him was a far cry from the actor hired to play Damien Mitchell’s father.

Surprisingly, he looked like a perfect match for the woman Parker’d slaughtered a few days ago and more than a mirror image of the man he’d been hired to kill after Damien. But it was the woman’s murder he was being called up on the carpet for, because his employer thought it’d been over the top.

Parker would take a great delight in showing the man just how far over the top he could be.

“Do you have a problem with how I do my job?” Parker helped himself to the brandy decanter off of the study’s wet bar. After popping off the crystal stopper, he paused to sniff at the liquor. It wasn’t as cheap a brand as Parker expected, but still, the man could have purchased better. He certainly wasn’t hurting for cash. He poured himself a double shot and swirled the brandy around the glass as he walked to one of the wing chairs in front of the desk.

The chairs were shorter than the one his employer sat in, a psychological domination as cheap as the brandy stocked in his bar, but they were more comfortable than sitting on the edge of the desk, a move Parker’s employer would probably lose his shit over. If anything, the man was consistent. He liked his people to remember they were his subordinates and worked hard to turn the thumbscrews every chance he got.

Just the thought of popping the man’s buttons made him smile, and Parker hid his grin behind his glass.

The large man cleared his throat and trifled with the fringe he’d combed over to hide his bald dome. “Did she suffer?”

That
was a question Parker never thought he’d hear the man ask. It was common enough from other people… more ordinary people who’d wanted an annoyance removed from their lives, but his employer wasn’t what Parker would consider ordinary. And coming from his viewpoint, Parker thought that was saying something.

He leaned back in the chair, knocking back another mouthful of brandy as he contemplated how to answer the man. Small beads of sweat were starting to pool over his glistening forehead, the drops grouping together until they were almost heavy enough to trickle down his milk-spotted cheeks. Parker debated lying to draw out the man’s discomfort, but the woman he’d killed deserved better… no matter how much her death stink clung to him after he was done.

After all, it seemed like Parker was the only one who’d marked her passing, even if it was with a celebratory salute of a bourbon bottle and an hour spent with a Thai hooker.

“Nope.” He swished the brandy around in his mouth, enjoying the burn of it against his gums. Swallowing, he regarded the other man with a jaundiced eye. “It was quick. She was passed out. Didn’t feel a thing.”

If anything, the man looked disappointed, and Parker wondered if he’d made the right decision in telling the truth. Shaking his head, his boss slid an envelope across the desk toward Parker. He stopped short of pushing it to the edge, forcing Parker to reach for it.

Parker left it where it was, sipping his brandy slowly, refusing to play the man’s head games.

“That’s a bonus for you.” The heavyset man shifted in his chair. His eyes flicked from the envelope to Parker’s face, seemingly discomfited by its continued presence on his desk. “For taking care of that matter so quickly. Although I would have preferred her discovery to be a little less… grandiose.”

“I wanted to send Mitchell a message.” Parker shrugged off the man’s grumbling displeasure. “It’ll be easier to get a hold of him if he feels like things are out of his control.”

“He’s gone public.” The man’s voice pitched up, rising to a near whine. “Everyone knows he’s alive. He’s going to be impossible to get near, and time’s starting to run out. Once the lawyers get a hold of—”

“Don’t worry about me getting to Mitchell. He’s holed up with that other faggot—the singer.” Parker sneered. “Probably going to drop Murphy now that he’s gone back to his original bang-buddy. Simple enough to pick them off when they go out to take a walk. From what you told me, he’d want to strut around now that he’s back in the thick of things. Won’t be long now. Is that why you called me in? To complain about how I’m doing things?”

“No, not really. I wanted you to do something for me.” Another envelope joined the first one, and Parker cocked his head, curious at the thick packets. “I figured out a way to get a hold of the boy’s estate, but first, I’m going to need your help to make it more…
profitable
.”