Gorgeous Misery (Creeping Beautiful Book 3) Read online

  This is my problem.

  No matter how hard I try, Wendy Gale always wants to kill me in the end.

  And this fight was just a tease. The previews. And I know what you’re thinking. She’s not gonna kill you, Nick. Don’t be stupid. You are her best friend. You’re all she has left. And besides that, she loves you.

  But you’re being stupid. And by you, I mean me. Because I’ve been waging this war inside my head for four years now.

  I started out denying it. She’s not like them. She’s different.

  And she is, of course. But she’s not, either.

  She knows if we stay together for too long—and I’m not talking two months, I’m talking two weeks—she will kill me.

  She won’t be able to stop herself.

  So she picks a fight, and she leaves.

  And it breaks my fucking heart every single time.

  I can’t live like this.

  She can’t live like this.

  And anyway, I was telling the truth.

  I would do anything to save her.

  Anything.

  CHAPTER TWO - MERC

  PRESENT DAY

  Sometimes I look around and wonder where it all came from.

  Not the world. Don’t be stupid. The fuckin’ family.

  I need to know how I ever got this lucky. How a guy like me, who came from the Boston slums, who threw away a free MIT education, who joined the army instead and spent the next several years breaking people’s minds and hunting down runaway Company girls, could possibly end up a husband and a father.

  And then I think, How long? How long can it last before someone realizes I don’t deserve any of this and they try to take it away?

  Thinking is almost never good. And the internal monologue is poison. Because it always comes to this. The inherent certainty that what I have here is temporary.

  “What are you so deep in thought about?”

  I look away from the pool where Avery, Jacob, and Lily are playing in the shallow end. They are still young enough to enjoy the oasis I built out here in the desert. Lauren and Daphne have moved on to bigger and better things. They are inside, hiding behind the three-feet-thick adobe walls that keep things reasonably cool, talking about boys, and makeup, and all that other shit teenage girls gush about.

  Even though we are sitting in a grove of shady palm trees, mostly hidden from the late-afternoon sun, Sasha’s face is pink, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. She and Jax came down with the kids this afternoon. Just for a weekend. We get together often enough, but this isn’t a holiday and this visit wasn’t planned. It’s just some random day in July. Which means Sasha came all the way out to the Palm Springs desert because she has something to talk to me about.

  Something she can’t—or won’t—say over the phone.

  “These kids, man.” I sigh. “Why do they have to grow up?”

  This makes Sasha chuckle. “If you’re missing diaper days you can always try for another.”

  Try for another. Interesting way of putting it. Sydney and I have been together for nearly a decade now and there has never once been talk of babies. These girls—Daphne, Avery, and Lily—they’re ours. But we didn’t make these kids. They were gifts from Nick Tate. So was Lauren, Sasha’s teenager. And Angelica and Hannah, who live with James on the other side of the world.

  They are Company girls. The kind I used to hunt down.

  The irony is borderline sad. It’s like the world is fucking with me. And it’s all gonna come crashing down eventually. I will have to pay for my sins one day. I see it so clearly. I see what fate has in store for me.

  An apocalypse of sorts. That’s what it’s gonna come to.

  Sydney and I won’t be having children. I’m not against it, but she refuses to pass her bloodline along. It ends with her. She thinks Sasha was crazy for having a biological child. But Jacob is a boy.

  They are different.

  “Yeah,” I say, but it’s a throwaway response to her throwaway idea. “So what’s up?”

  Instead of answering right away, Sasha looks around the backyard. It’s like a fucking resort out here. The massive pool, the water slide, the fake beach, the cabañas, the gardens. Having all this luxury was the only way I could convince Sydney and the girls to live in the desert. I pay a fucking mint for water. We have one legal well plus four more illegal ones. Water is tightly regulated and when the government decides to limit natural resources you have to make sure the whims and decrees of those assholes can’t touch you. I bribed the driller who made the wells with a yearly stipend to keep his mouth shut. It comes to about two hundred thousand dollars a year. But it ends with him and he’s old, so whatever.

  I like it out here though. You can’t sneak up on me in the desert. I have this place wired from top to bottom. Hell, I have cameras set up on the highway for five miles in both directions. I have sentry drones to cover the sky and if any uninvited guests make it over my walls, I have four face-eaters who will literally eat off your face. If you get past the dogs—well, you don’t get past the dogs, but if you do, then we just shoot you.

  Even eleven-year-old Lily can hit you between the eyes.

  We have a house in Montana too. Really fucking nice log house with one of those massive stone fireplaces. It’s a dream at Christmas. But if a bear can break into your kitchen while you sleep at night anyone can break into your kitchen while you sleep at night.

  We don’t stay in Montana much.

  “I got a call about a week ago,” Sasha finally says.

  “Yeah?” I ask. “From who?”

  “Do you know Adam Boucher?”

  “Adam. Boucher.” I say it like that. Two words. “No. Never heard of him. Who is he?”

  “He runs the Company now.”

  My eyebrows go up. “No fucking shit?”

  “No fucking shit.”

  “So… what’s up with that? He wants to kill me or something?”

  Sasha chuckles. “No. He’s not like that. I mean”—she pauses—“he is like that, but he doesn’t care about us.”

  “So what’s he care about? And why is he calling you?”

  “Well, that’s why I’m here. Apparently, what he cares about right now is a man called Donovan Couture. You ever heard of him?”

  I shake my head.

  “How about Carter Couture?”

  “No. I don’t know either of them.”

  “Well, this is the problem, I think. They are the same person. And Adam is looking for a favor.”

  “Same person? What the hell does that mean?”

  Sasha lets out a long breath and averts her eyes to the pool where Jacob is coming down the slide. The kids are squealing and laughing. Then she looks over to the outdoor kitchen where Jax is cooking hamburgers and hotdogs and chatting with Sydney. “He’s Company too. Very… what’s the word I’m looking for here?” She taps her chin with a finger. “Um. He’s… royalty, I guess.”

  “Royalty?” I can’t stop the scoff.

  “The Coutures are one of the original families. God, I haven’t thought about this shit in so long, I can’t even remember what we called them.” She pauses to think. “Founders. Untouchables. Remember?”

  “No,” I say again. “I’m not Company, Sash. I’m not really up on the family jargon.”

  “Well, that’s who he is. Like… major fucking rank.”

  “OK. What’s that got to do with me and this dude Adam?”

  “Adam is rank too.” Her face darkens, like she just remembered something important. “He’s like Nick. He’s the same rank Nick was. The Tates, the Coutures, and the Bouchers, they are all Untouchables.”

  “Oh,” I say. A chill runs through my body.

  “Anyway,” Sasha continues. “Donovan is… well. Fucked. He’s fucked. He’s a dual personality. He was trained as PSYOPS—”

  “Fuck that,” I interrupt. “Fuck, no. Hell the fuck no.”

  “I haven’t even asked you the question yet.”

  “I don’t need to hear the rest. My answer is no. I’m not getting involved with any of that shit. Never. Ever. I won’t do it.”

  “Merc.”

  “Sasha.”

  “Just listen for a moment. Let me tell the story and then, if you say no, I’ll call Adam back and tell him it’s just no. I promise.”

  “And then what will he do? Come fuck with me? Hunt down my kids?”

  “No. I told you, he’s not like that.”

  “He runs the Company.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Did the Company stop doing Company shit?”

  “Not really, but—”

  “But nothing. We have a truce here, Sasha. We can’t get involved.”

  “You’re the only one left, Merc. You’re the only man left on this entire planet who has been trained in Company PSYOPS. Donovan is loved by some very dangerous people. He’s not a bad guy, either. He’s actually… I mean, I’ve always liked him. When he was him. Carter, on the other hand…”

  I turn my head away from her. I don’t want to hear this shit. I don’t want to know this shit.

  “Carter is insane. And there was some kind of… standoff at the Boucher house about a month ago and Adam’s daughter… I don’t remember her name. She shot Donovan in the back of the head with a psychotropic dart and he slipped into a coma. The Company thinks he’s dead, but Adam kept him alive, I guess. Life support or something. And now Adam needs someone to come in and… unfuck him. He wants to save him.”

  “Why?” It’s blunt and cruel, but honest.

  “They’re friends. They—Adam, Donovan, and another guy called McKay—they raised a Zero girl called Indie. And… well, Donovan has stacked up quite a few loyalty points, I guess. They just want to save him and you’re the only one left
who can do it. Trust me, Adam would not have called in this favor if he didn’t really want to save Donovan.”

  “Called in what favor?” I ask. “Why do you owe him?”

  “I mean”—she chuckles—“he’s the whole reason I was able to get those drug lord assholes on board with that Santa Barbara massacre. I knew him from my father’s gun-running days. He used to come in to the antique mall a couple times a year. So I called him up and asked him for that favor. How do you think we got that meeting with the drug lords in the desert that day?”

  I think about this for a moment, trying to conjure up the memories. Nick left Sasha behind to go do Nick stuff and she called me to pick her up from a hotel room in Wyoming. She was like thirteen when all this went down. But she was pissed off about the Company assassinating her father and grandparents, so there was no way to stop her once she got her mind on murder.

  “It was Adam, Merc. He delivered me the drug lords.”

  “He delivered you…” I pause to think. “That Matias guy?” The moment that name comes out of my mouth I regret it. Because he’s the man who took Nick Tate. He’s the man who crushed Sasha’s whole world when she was just thirteen years old. He’s the reason she had to shoot Nick in the head nine years ago. He’s the reason she’s broken.

  And I don’t care how happy she is with Jax—and she is happy. She won. And every day she thanks her God for what she has left. But when you have to shoot your best friend in the head to change the world, you don’t get over that. Ever.

  That’s the whole problem with breaking things.

  You either have to put them back together or throw them away.

  When you survive an event like the Santa Barbara massacre you don’t get to throw yourself away. You have to just suck it up and put it back together. And no matter how well you match up those pieces—even if the thing you broke still functions—it’s just never the same again. But when you have to metaphorically kill yourself to save the rest of us, what’s left isn’t broken. It’s destroyed.

  Sasha lets out a long breath. It’s packed with weariness. “It’s an old debt. But it’s a real one, Merc. I owe him. If I didn’t feel some kind of genuine obligation, I wouldn’t even bother you. I would just tell him no.”

  “But you don’t want to tell him no, do you?”

  She shakes her head. “I want to do this for him. I liked Donovan. And yeah, I was just a dumb kid back then so what did I know about it? But we’ve lost enough loved ones, don’t you think? Yes, the Company is still around, but none of those old-school assholes are alive. Adam had something to do with that. He helped get rid of them.”

  “And then he took over. Don’t you think that’s a little opportunistic?”

  “Of course. But someone has to run things. The Company isn’t going away. People are greedy, Merc. They want shit. And some of these fuckers are not only greedy, but evil enough to do whatever it takes to get their money. Adam isn’t like that. He doesn’t care about money. He doesn’t want more, he wants less. He wants to be left alone, but that’s never gonna happen. And trust me when I say this, when you’ve got an organization like the Company that needs leadership, you want a man with no ambition in charge of it. We could do a lot worse than Adam Boucher.”

  I let out a long weary breath too. She already knows I’m going to do this. I would never tell Sasha no. If she comes to me looking for help it’s because she needs that help. For whatever reason, she needs to save this Donovan guy.

  “There’s something else,” Sasha says.

  I turn back to her.

  She takes off her sunglasses to look me in the eyes for this part. “Adam said something to me when we talked on the phone and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said… if I help him, he will give me a secret. But I need to be very, very sure I want that secret. Because…” She shrugs. “I dunno.”

  “It’s something bad?” I ask.

  “Of course it’s bad.” She scoffs. “But he didn’t have to say that to me. Ya know? He didn’t have to and he did.”

  “So he wants to tell you the secret, but he doesn’t want to be responsible for the fallout.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And even though you know damn well you should let this go, you can’t.”

  “I can’t,” she admits.

  “What do you think it is?”

  Her eyes go distant for a moment. Like she’s picturing something in her head. Then they refocus on me. “I think it’s Nick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think it has something to do with Nick.”

  “But why do you say that?”

  “Because he’s the only one who could ever hurt me. And whatever secret Adam has, it’s going to hurt me.”

  I consider this in silence for a moment. Nick Tate. He’s the Ghost of Company Past. The sacrifice so that we could live these good, calm, easy poolside lives.

  I’ve heard rumors over the years too. Rather, I’ve seen rumors. There’s a chat board where guys like me like to hang out to get news of things most people don’t want to talk about. It’s the details. The behind-the-scenes kinda shit. The up-close-and-personal.

  Hell, most people don’t even want to know about ordinary stuff. They want to live their lives. They want to work their jobs. They want to raise their kids. They want to eat out at restaurants, they want to watch live bands, and stream TV, and go on socials. They want to take vacations, and make plans for the future.

  They do not want to know what the people who run this world are doing to it. They don’t even wanna know what those people think of them.

  That’s all inside baseball, as they say. It’s minutiae. Detailed inner workings that affect almost no one directly, so almost no one cares about it.

  But the people who hang out on this chat board are the definition of inside baseball. And these guys on the board—it’s all anonymous. You’re not allowed to have a name on these platforms. You’re no one. Or rather, you are what you post. If you post bullshit, you’re full of shit. If you post new facts, you’re a good digger. But if you can draw straight lines between things across weeks, or months, or better yet, decades? You don’t need a name to get respect. You’ve got rank. For an hour or two, at least.

  I’ve toned my participation down a lot over the years. Sometimes I only visit the boards once a month. But when shit happens, I’m on there dozens of times a day trying to put the pieces together just like everyone else.

  There was an incident a couple years ago that got a lot of attention on the boards so I made it a point to lurk. The incident was actually the sudden death of hundreds of elites. Billionaires and their entire families suddenly died. Not all the same way. At least, that’s not how it was reported. Some of them suicided. Some of them were in a plane crash, boat crash, weird hiking incident. Others died of an illness. How they died didn’t matter because it was all lies. The point was—they were dead. Entire families just wiped out. The board called this operation the Purge. And it had Company written all over it so I was following every fucking detail back then. Over the years I lost interest in the board, but I kept up my diligent lurking. And it paid off a few months back when his name suddenly popped up.

  Nick Tate.

  Back when he was killed—rather, back when Sasha killed him—there was a lot of chatter about us. All of us. Even me. But it died down to an almost imperceptible whimper because all that happened almost a decade ago now.

  But then, during the Purge, there he was. And the people on this board, maybe they didn’t know him, but they knew of him. And they were intrigued.

  It should go without saying that grabbing the attention of anonymous posters on a board like this is a bad thing.

  Here’s how it works on the board:

  All information posted is public. There is no hacking happening on this site. There is no leaking of hacked information, either. That’s illegal and if you want to keep your anonymous operation going in plain sight like this and not be relegated back to the depths of the dark web, you keep it all legal.

  So these anonymous posters, they wait for some nugget of information to be leaked—on purpose or by mistake—onto socials or in the news. Then they pick it apart. They find connections. And lots of times—not always, but lots of times—they even find the truth.