Rebel Read online

  “You’d hate it,” he scolded himself. “Your damned head’ll rattle around in the helmet and drive you nuts. It’s hair. Just fricking wash it.”

  He was mostly done combing conditioner through his mane when he heard a flush, and before Gus could plaster himself against the shower’s far wall, the water went hot, scalding his chest and stomach. Screaming at the top of his lungs only made the culprit burst into a hearty peal of laughter, and Gus pounded on the shower’s frosted glass door, cursing out the colorful blob sitting on the old dresser they’d converted into a vanity counter.

  In seconds the water balanced out when the toilet finished churning, and Gus sighed, turning down the hot water until a tepid flow cooled his skin off. “God, I’m going to fucking kill you when I get out, Ivo.”

  The promise was a weak one. He might have outweighed his baby brother by twenty pounds, but Ivo fought dirty, a gouging fury with nothing to lose and willing to break a tooth if it meant he took a guy’s nut sack with him. Gus taught him everything he knew to do in a fight, but Ivo always went a little further, latching on to the insanity their mother left in their genes and dishing up a beating to anyone who pushed him too far.

  “Yeah, sitting right here, asshole. Bring it,” his baby brother called out. There was a thumping noise, probably Ivo swinging his feet into the dresser’s drawers. “Bear told me you laid your bike down. See what happens when you get old? You can’t handle a bike anymore. Maybe you should get a minivan. You know, so you can drive really slow through the neighborhood and yell at kids walking on the street.”

  “I didn’t lay it down. It was laid down for me, but I caught it up before I hit the road. God, why do I always wash my hair first? I can’t see a fucking thing now.” He shoved his hair away from his face, then reached for the bar of soap sitting on the ledge. “Really, Irish Spring?”

  “Hey, you haven’t been home in six months. Be fucking glad there’s soap in there for you to use.” Ivo’s bare foot made a quick impression on the glass when he kicked it lightly. “That’s probably leftover from Mace. I’ve got some Dreamcatcher in there if you want.”

  “Found it.” He unscrewed the large brown container he found nestled next to a tube of violet-tinted conditioner. A punch of curry, cinnamon, and coffee hit his sinuses, and Gus wrinkled his nose at its strength. “I use this and someone’s going to take a bite out of me. Smells more like an Indian food truck than soap.”

  “You’re welcome, dick.”

  “I was going to say thank you, asshole. Give me a chance, for fuck’s sake.” The soap lathered up nicely, and Gus scrubbed at his tender spots, hissing when the rough-textured plastic sheet found a burr of scraped skin. “Okay, mostly didn’t hit the road. Caught some hedge, though. That hurt.”

  If Bear made him feel comfortable and cozy, Ivo was… it was hard to say what Ivo was, other than his weird little brother who wore what he wanted, did as he pleased, and could carve an image out of nothing but his mind, a scrap of paper, and anything he could lay his hands on to scribble with. Gus knew he was good. He could draw and ink circles around practically anyone. No ego. Not a boast. He knew it. So did everyone else.

  But Ivo… his freaky, odd, hyperfocused baby brother could blow him away.

  There were times when Gus could have cheerfully smothered Ivo with a pillow. But mostly—and he’d never admit it—he’d sooner take a bullet for him.

  “Hey, inked Rey today. Well, started some of the base color,” Ivo shouted at him over the water. “Told him you were back in town. He didn’t seem impressed, but then we didn’t talk about you much.”

  “Yeah, Bear told me,” he replied. Playing it cool wasn’t going to do him any good, since Ivo could find every single one of his buttons in the dark. Still, he wasn’t going to hand the kid any ammunition. “He’s the one who walked. Not me. And why are you still here? Aren’t you done pissing?”

  “Hurry the fuck up, will ya? I’m hungry, and you know Bear won’t let us eat until we’re all there. Oh, might have lied a bit about not talking to Rey about you, but you know, since you didn’t show up at the shop, I figured anything went,” Ivo shot back, flushing the toilet again, leaving Gus standing under a blast of nearly-too-hot water. “And, welcome home, dick.”

  THEY’D EATEN in near silence, mostly with Ivo bouncing his leg in time to whatever voices he heard singing to him in his skull. Bear gave him a cutting look when the thumping got to be louder than Earl’s snores, and he quieted down for a few minutes, then started up again.

  It was late. Or early. Depending on how he looked at the clock. Every aching part of Gus’s body begged to fall over into a soft bed, seducing his will with the promise of a feather pillow, but his mind wasn’t having any of it. Instead it raced about, rifling through his memories and pulling up things he’d sooner leave buried.

  Like Rey Montenegro.

  Sleep did not come, and Gus prowled downstairs, only to catch his knee on a Queen Anne table that hadn’t been there six months ago. His tongue took the brunt of the damage, mostly because he bit down on it to stop from screaming a hearty fuck through the house. Dawn was a few hours off—if that—and both of his brothers would be up in a bit, or at least Bear would, opening 415 Ink before the clock ticked over to noon. The place should have been empty, but a flicker of light from the back of the house grabbed Gus’s attention.

  Expecting Ivo, he was surprised to find Mason sprawled across a corner of the sectional in the family room, nursing a beer while a wall-mounted large-screen television played out a muted Korean drama, its subtitles scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

  The floor creaked when Gus stepped into the room, as did most of the house. The place was in much better shape than when Bear first purchased it, but there were still quirks and quibbles left to chase after. Square and watertight was all they’d hoped for in the first few months, especially since the mostly Craftsman-style row house sat on a sloping corner. Gus’d been one of the first to move in, culled from the system by Bear’s insistent pounding on social workers and the courts, but Mason quickly followed, hot on the heels of the Bear who’d protected him while they’d done time in one of the shittier foster homes the city had to offer.

  Lucas and Ivo came months later after prolonged battles, and the house grew cramped, its three bedrooms and attic bursting at the seams, but they’d made do and fixed things along the way. Not always as good as it could be, Gus thought, running his hand over a wonky built-in bookcase they’d torn the back off to open up the air flow between the family room and the front hall, but it was home.

  Mason shouldn’t have been there… unless more than just a table had been moved into the house. He had his own place now, one he shared with Gus’s biggest mistake. So unless that had changed since the last time he’d talked with Bear, Mason shouldn’t have be in the living room.

  But there he was, eating something out of a bag and staring at the TV screen.

  Only the light from the television illuminated the largest room in the house, an ever-changing palette of beiges, blues, and golds. They were good colors on Mason’s face, catching on his craggy good looks and the long stretch of his body, and the artist in Gus’s soul itched to sketch him, if only to piss Mace off. Another squeak caught Mason’s attention, and he shifted his piercing gaze to Gus’s face, giving him the barest hint of a nod when he padded in.

  The family room was where they spent most of their time, huddled together on the couch to play or watch a game. It’d been the place the band of brothers first found their footing, sitting shoulder to shoulder on ever-changing couch configurations, eating off of paper plates while catching up on each other’s day. It’d become their gathering place, a space to scream at the top of their lungs and sometimes hand out a shove or two before Bear stepped in. The room was where nearly all of them broke the no-intimacy-of-any-kind-in-a-shared-family-space rule and then got caught, because that was just how life turned out when the oldest brother of the clan had super-radar hearing and a sixth
sense about when to make a surprise appearance.

  He’d kissed Rey Montenegro to celebrate his graduation in the brothers’ kitchen, pressing Mason’s best friend against one of the counters and sucking on his lower lip as the newly sworn-in fireman halfheartedly protested, but it’d been the family room where he’d been handed his walking papers by the guy Mason’d pulled out of a fire and Gus lusted after since the moment he’d laid eyes on him.

  “Thought you had your own place.” Not much of a greeting, but it was going to be the best Mason got from him. They’d ended things not badly but prickly when he’d taken off, and from the slanted look he got in return, not much had changed. “Bear know you’re drinking his beer?”

  “Pretty sure Bear knows I’m good for it.” Mace snorted, then took a sip from the bottle, his eyes returning to the screen.

  “That a dig at saying I’m not?” Starting a fight with Mace probably wasn’t the best idea Gus ever had. Not with the damage he’d already done to his body from the bike spill, but he was itching for something.

  “You said it, not me. And yeah, I have my own place, but I crash here sometimes. Which you’d know… if you were here,” he replied, saluting Gus with his beer. “’Sides, I brought more over. Grab one if you want.”

  Fucker. The offer took the wind out of Gus’s tattered sails, and he was torn between telling Mason to go fuck himself and grabbing one of the beers and joining him on the massive U-shaped couch. Beer won out, a promise of a bit of numbness, and while pretty Asian boys casting longing looks at either each other or at the one young girl in the cast wasn’t porn, they were better than watching baseball.

  Gus snagged a beer, then took up the opposite corner of the sectional, resting his feet on the rectangular ottoman. The brew was good, potent on his tongue. It hit his stomach, easing away the aches in his bones a hell of a lot better than the handful of ibuprofen Bear shoved at him. A few sips in and the pretty boys lost his interest. He liked his men a bit tougher, a scrape of beard and large hands—preferably a bit rough—and willing to walk away when he was done with them.

  Just like Rey.

  Except he hadn’t been the one to walk, and for some reason, that dug into Gus’s soul, festering with a resentment he wanted to scoop out and slather over Mason’s face.

  “Spit it out, August,” Mason remarked softly, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Or do you want me to start?”

  “Why don’t you start? Bear hasn’t taken a good crack at me yet. You’ve got lots of uncharted territory.” He took a hefty swig, rolling the foamy brew in his mouth. “You go first, then when he’s done, we can compare what a crappy job you did at making me feel like shit.”

  Mason said nothing. He just sat there, one arm slung over the back of the couch, his long legs stretched out on the cushions, and just looked at Gus, his handsome face devoid of any discernible expression. He’d been Bear’s confidant, a slightly older, serious-minded teenaged boy Gus almost hated as soon as he’d come into the fourth or fifth crappy foster home they’d been moved into after… then.

  He’d hated Mason for about three hours, and then the older boy beat back their foster father, who’d come into their shared bedroom for Gus after Bear’d gone out, and Gus found himself standing behind another bloody-nosed protector, a fierce, angry knight in fucking shiny armor who’d refused to be cowed. Mason’s scar-marbled bare back was burned into Gus’s memory, older white slashes crisscrossed with younger, pinker marks, but there was power in his young muscles, and he’d lashed out with a stunning accuracy, breaking a cheek and then a nose to defend a sullen boy.

  He argued with Mason less and less over the years, while still stubbornly holding on to a slight grudge for edging into Bear’s good graces. There was still resentment—Gus hadn’t been willing to give all that up—but there’d been respect and then eventually a deep, unspoken brotherly love, especially when Mason coaxed a mute Ivo out of his shell after the youngest of their five finally came home.

  It’d been Mason who’d given them their first taste of freedom, a random gift of colored pencils and a stack of sketchpads he’d gotten at a swap meet, but it was enough to set both Gus and Ivo loose of the chains their mother’d forged on their souls. They shared a tattoo, a black-line nautical star cobbled together from each brother drawing one point of the star. Some sides were wobblier than others, as Lucas’s lack of artistic skills was evident in his point, while Ivo’s demanding need for perfection produced a classic rendering, despite being the youngest. Now they all wore it somewhere on their bodies, Ivo’s finally being put on him during his eighteenth birthday, in the very room they were in now… a massive health violation, but it’d seemed fitting, finally binding them all together.

  But then…. Rey.

  “Where have you been? Bear said something about you guest-inking at some shops but never really coughed up the details.” Mason shifted. “Six months is a long time to be dancing around in other people’s spaces. You’re what now? Twenty-nine? Too old to be couch-surfing, Gus.”

  “I had a lot lined up,” he replied as smoothly as he could, but the beer was settling wrong in his stomach. “Headed up to Seattle and worked my way down to San Diego. Had about five shops to work. Double-timed in Los Angeles.”

  Gus left off the part about bumming around for weeks in between his guest gigs, roughing it in between crashing at friends’—or strangers’—houses, trying to scratch the growing itch along his spine. He’d added a bit of ink, getting Kari to freshen up the Rebel tattoo he’d put on his arm to cover the circular keloids blemishing the stretch of skin above his wrist, and there was a curious red dot on the back of his neck he’d somehow gained somewhere between Portland and Humboldt. Rubbing at the spot hidden under his hair, he smirked at Mason, daring his older brother to say something—anything—about the time he’d been gone.

  “How long are you going to be around for? Or are you sticking around?” Mason cocked his head, giving Gus his full attention. “Because if you are, then you and I are going to have to talk about Rey.”

  “Montenegro’s….” Gus swallowed, hoping Mason didn’t catch the movement in the shadows veiling the room. “Look, it’s been what? Two years? Nearly three? Why the fuck bring Rey up now?”

  “Because he’s got a boyfriend. Or close to it.” Leaning over, Mason stabbed his index finger into Gus’s shoulder, unerringly finding one of the bruises purpling the joint. “And knowing you—and trust me, August, I fucking know you—the very first thing you’d do if you saw them together would be to try to screw them up, because you can’t leave things alone. And that’s not something I’m going to let you do. Not to Rey. Not to yourself. Be better than the guy I know, be the guy Bear thinks you are, and for God’s sake, stay out of Rey’s life and start to live your own.”

  Three

  THE EARLY morning pea-soup fog burned, an icy death hand shoving its long, invasive fingers deep into Rey’s air-starved lungs. Behind him, the pound of sneakers on pavement warned him his pursuer wasn’t far behind, and on the predawn city streets, survival was often measured in inches… how close a doorway… or the stretch of an uphill sidewalk and its steep pitch.

  There were people out. It was Chinatown. There were always people out. But it was a neighborhood steeped in a traditional silence, placid eyes dulled by years of oddities and slips of the strange escaping from the night into the breaking day. The fog tasted of hot metal and rotten vegetables, a lingering hint of iron and decay Rey carried with him in his lungs. The rattle of a garbage truck a few streets over temporarily drowned out the beat of his pursuer’s pounding feet, but once the beeping faded and the churn of the truck’s crushing maw ended, Rey could hear he was losing ground.

  California Street was steep, too damned steep for a full-out, heart-stopping burst of speed, but he tried, pushing at the slant even as his thighs burned and his lungs withered, too frozen from the cold to do more than shudder under the inferno of his rushing blood. He just needed to make it past the hotel. St.
Mary’s was behind him, and another notch of angle added to the hill, but Rey knew he could do it. He just needed to get to Stockton and cut a tight turn, then sprint on the straight, even street, using his speed to his advantage.

  When Rey turned right at the corner of Stockton and California, his heart stammered, and despite his lack of air and the clench in his chest, he swore up a profanity-rich storm, painting the street blue, red, and every color in between.

  He’d forgotten about the damned stairs.

  The drop on Stockton between California and Sacramento was severe, and at some point in the city’s history, it was decided to deal with the shift in elevations by digging under the hill and slicing a three-block tunnel beneath the upper street, coming in from the south entrance and ending near Bush. Since the tunnel was built for streetcars, foot traffic was expected to use two stairwells on either side of Upper Stockton’s balustrade-edged dead end, but they were hard-going, narrow dark stairwells tight in on Rey’s shoulders, and the guy was on his ass.

  “Shit… shit… shit.” He was wasting breath on swearing, but he’d gone too far to get caught up by a flight of stairs. They were as narrow as he remembered, and as a tickle of an idea grabbed at his thoughts, he banged his elbow on the wall, deadening the nerves along his forearm. Just as he’d done the last time he’d come down the stairs.

  Hitting the lower street at a dead run, Rey sprinted hard, heading toward the red brick building a short block away. A flock of tiny Asian women shuffled out onto the sidewalk from a twenty-four-hour egg tart bakery, and Rey was forced onto the street, kicking up a spray of pebbles in his wake. An outraged storm of muttered Chinese and grumbles erupted behind him as he mounted the walk without breaking his stride, a sure sign his pursuer attempted to pass through the group.

  The women gave him enough of a lead, and Rey pushed through the pain, clutching at his side when the storied redbrick building finally emerged from the fog. Ignoring the sidewalk, he took the crossing at an angle, careful to moderate his run when he hit Sacramento’s descent. An empty playground coyly snapped its banners out over the sidewalk, and Rey took a hard left into the alley cut in between the recreational space and the building. Skidding to a stop, he shakily slammed his hand on the orange-painted brick, then doubled over, using the restaurant’s front to prop him up, unsure his rubbery legs would hold.