Burn (Virtues & Lies 1)

Looking out of the other window, my anger boils over. I recognise those voices as if they are my own.

“I said light the damn car, boy!” A familiar hand reaches towards Jack with the silver lighter my nan gave him last Christmas.

A token of her gratitude for looking after her boys.

All this time I thought he was a good man. That he was everything my father should have been. I never understood why or how an apple could’ve fallen so far from a tree. Turns out it didn’t.

The one person I have trusted my entire life without doubt or hesitation.

My grandfather.

“But…” Jack looks down at the window I’m looking out of and for a moment the sorry look on his face makes me question all the things I ever thought of him.

“But what?”

Jack continues looking down at the blackout glass, like he knows I can see him.

“Leo?” Mum rasps at me when I force the door open. “Don’t!”

I look from her to Wayne and then Cassie, and I know that I have one of two choices here. I can either hide and risk everything, or I can face the devil and buy time until the others get here.

“Don’t leave them,” I instruct her. “Keep her alive and safe.”

“Don’t be foolish.”

I can’t be anything but foolish when it comes to Cassie. To this. To keeping her alive.

Stepping out of the car, gasoline soaks through my trousers as it drips from the roof, coating my bloodstained hands, burning as it seeps into the cuts and grazes.

My eyes dart up to find two of my grandfather’s security men aiming their weapons at me.

“You,” I spit, tears burning my eyes, as I recall every conversation we’ve had over the last eighteen months. Every little crumb of information I fed him, thinking that he was on our side. One of the good guys.

I told him Kit had found the transactions. I told him about the party and the priest. I told him everything thinking that he was an innocent in all this.

He knew where to get to Cassie because of me.

“I trusted you.”

“Trust is for the weak.”

“Love will always lead to loss.” I utter the words he’s told me time and again throughout my life.

“Never be afraid to lose.” He finishes.

I finally truly understand what those words mean. I always thought that there was some deeper elemental meaning to what he was telling me. Like maybe he thought I needed the re

assurance that love is something worth losing everything for.

Loving my mother would always be worth losing my father’s affection. Loving Cassie would be worth losing everything I worked so hard for.

That’s not what he meant at all. It’s not love, or trust, or family, or any of those things that he thinks are worth losing over. It’s the money. The status.

“The trouble with you millennials is that you all think the world operates on an even keel.” He takes in a deep breath and then exhales, “It doesn’t.”

He’s right and I’m done with pretty, useless stories and ideals.

I want blood. I want it to pour from the heavens and flood every path I’ve ever tread. I want it to drown every naive feeling I’ve ever housed for this man and his lies.