Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
But there's more to this story. There's gotta be. Because the math I got doesn't add up to the answer I'm standin' in.
That's what I'm thinkin' as Lazarus Kane rakes his fingers through his hair—slow, deliberate, the way a man does when he's organizin' his thoughts before he lets 'em out of his mouth—and starts walkin' toward me.
Boots on concrete. Steady gait. No rush.
Same build as me, same face with just enough variation to make it strange instead of familiar, same blue eyes catchin' the low light like somethin' forged in the same fire but cooled in different dirt.
A lot more to this story.
CHAPTER 6
It's a strange thing to see yourself comin' at ya from across the room. Lazarus Kane isn't a twin, exactly. And if he wasn't tatted up and wearing colors, I could probably wrap my head around it better.
But he is tatted up, and he is wearin' colors, and it's… still a lot.
His smile is easier than mine. Not sure why.
Actually, that's not true.
It's the smile of a man who's always known his place.
His worth.
Not sure what June was hintin' at when she mentioned his mother dyin' young. Could be fate, could be tragedy. But he had people to hold him up after.
The same people June came from.
Hell, Legion. That skates over the entire point.
He wasn't taken in by June's people.
He was taken in by his people.
That's the difference.
He had a whole club.
I had two secret relationships with two generations of Ashby women. Women who didn't belong to me and never could.
Women who only existed peripherally.
Out of the corner of my eye.
In the margins of my fuckin' life like footnotes nobody was ever gonna read.
On certain days of the week.
Certain months of the year.
Certain years of the decade.
That's what I had.
Not a club. Not a family holdin' me up when the ground gave out. I had Eleanor Ashby payin' me to sit still in her studio while she turned me into somethin' I wasn't.
And I had her daughter meetin' me in a condemned grain silo like I was a prayer she couldn't say out loud in church.
Two women who showed up when it suited them and vanished when it didn't, and I stood there every goddamn time like a man waitin' on rain in a drought, grateful for whatever fell.
That's the thing about peripheral people. They're always almost there. Always just outside the frame. Close enough to feel, never close enough to hold.
And you learn to live on that.
You learn to stretch a Tuesday night into a whole week's worth of warmth.
You learn to make October last until spring because that's the last time she touched your face and meant it.
You learn to measure your life in the spaces between visits, and the spaces get wider, and the visits get shorter, and you keep standin' there anyway.
Laz had everything I didn't.
Everything I ever wanted.
He had brothers.
Colors.
A seat at a table where somebody carved his name.
I had shadows and I called them enough.
He doesn't slide into the booth where June just was. He stands there, waitin' for an invitation. It's a small gesture of respect, but I accept it with a wave of a finger.
He sits.
He folds his hands on the table. Slow. Deliberate. Like a man settin' down cards he already knows are winners.
And I look at those hands because I can't not.
The ink crawls across every knuckle, every joint, every stretch of skin between bone and tendon. Skin peeled back from skeleton. Not ripped—rotted. Layers of flesh curlin' away like old paint off a barn door, exposin' what's underneath. Metacarpals drawn in white and gray, precise as anatomy plates, runnin' from wrist to fingertip.
The shadowing is sick—and I mean that both ways. Whoever did this work understood decay the way I understand scripture. Intimately. From the fuckin' inside out.
And there, right over the knuckle of his middle finger on the left hand—a maggot. Fat. Detailed. Burrowed into the split where ink-flesh separates from ink-bone.
I look at the right hand. Same finger. Same knuckle. Another one. Twin maggots, feedin' on the dead thing he's chosen to wear like a second skin.
I stare at them longer than I should.
He smiles at me while I study him. Not a nervous smile. Not a polite one. The kind of smile a man wears when he knows exactly what you're lookin' at and he put it there for you to find.
My eyes move up from his hands to his neck and the ink keeps goin'. Doesn't stop. No. It climbs. Skin peelin' back in long, sick strips, exposin' the layered meat underneath. Rendered in blue-black and bruise-purple, striated muscle fibers drawn so precise they almost fuckin' pulse when he swallows.
The shadowing shifts from gray to green in places. Somethin' that used to be alive and ain't anymore. Patches of flesh hang like wet paper, curlin' at the edges, and beneath them the tendons pull taut across ink-bone like guitar strings wound too tight.