The bartender pours me another shot and I drink it down, setting the glass on the bar afterward. My cigarette burns in the ashtray next to me, a dozen more all around me at tables, filling the place with smoke. A football game runs on two televisions set in the walls, one behind the bar. Rock music plays low from the speakers in the ceiling, but no one in this place is dancing or shouting over the music in a drunken stupor. This isn’t that kind of bar. Things here have been pretty relaxed in the weeks I’ve been coming here; regulars mostly: men having a drink and playing a game of pool to get away from home; women—like my temporary fuck-buddy, Jackie—who have nothing much better to do with their time than to hang out with people as pathetic as they are. Even me—I admit that right now I’m pretty fucking pathetic, but we’re all entitled to it every once in a while. But I haven’t been coming here to drown my sorrows in whiskey. I just like the atmosphere, the normal everyday faces, the casual conversations about petty bullshit that’s sometimes interesting to me considering most of my life consists of talking about how I killed someone, who I killed, who I need to kill next, what I’m going to kill them with; how much money I’m going to make when the job is done.
I spend too much of my time with a small group of people who each have their own set of fucked up issues that the normal people in this bar could never fathom, much less match. But whether I ever go back there again, to our Order, is still up in the air. I’m afraid of what I might do if I see my brother again—I only left because I wanted to kill him.
“Another shot?” Jay, the bartender asks; he stands in front of me behind the bar with the whiskey bottle ready to pour.
“Sure,” I say, sliding the shot glass toward him and he pours the drink.
Behind me, I hear the bell above the door ring as someone walks in, but I don’t look back. Jay normally doesn’t either—usually just a quick glance—but I notice his dark eyes veer off in that direction, full of interest and intrigue, a sure sign that whoever just walked in isn’t a regular, and probably has a nice pair of tits.
A little more interested now because of the possibility of a nice pair of tits, I casually wedge my cigarette between my fingers and take a quick drag before turning at an angle to see behind me.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I say under my breath.
I turn back around, facing Jay and the glowing television and the shelves of glasses and whiskey bottles. Raising the glass to my lips, I swig down the shot, just as Izabel, dressed like she should be in the kind of bar with loud music and dancing and drunken shouting, steps up beside me. Nora—I’ve got too much shit on my mind to even begin to understand what’s she’s doing here, what she’s still doing alive—sits down on the empty bar stool on my other side. Looks like a lot has happened in my short absence, a lot of really unexpected shit—hell, maybe Victor’s dead and James Woodard is in charge now; maybe Izabel is sleeping with Fredrik—at this point it seems like anything is possible.
“What do you want, Izzy?”
I don’t look at either of them; I puff on my cigarette, staring at the television. Jay asks them if they’d like something to drink, but they decline and he leaves us to our privacy.
“We need you for a job,” Izzy says, hopping onto the bar stool on my left, her tall black boots propped on the metal spindle.
I laugh lightly, shaking my head, and then gesture at Jay. He comes over and refills my glass.
“Yeah well,” I say with a smirk, “count me out of this one.” I look over at her. “Might want to count me out of the next, oh I dunno, all of them?” I set the burning cigarette in the ashtray, swig down my shot, and go back to staring at the television. “What’s Psycho Bitch Barbie doing here?”
Nora laughs lightly, unfazed by the insult.
“That’s a long story,” she says. “Come with us to Italy and we’ll tell you all about it.”
“Not interested,” I come back quickly. Then I turn and look directly at Nora. “You’re still one of my least favorite people in the world after what you did, so you might wanna stay the fuck away from me.” I turn back at the television.
Izabel sighs and rests both arms on the bar, loosely knitting her long, slender fingers together. I kind of want to look at her, because as much as she pisses me off, she’s the only person in our Order who…I feel sorry for. She doesn’t belong there. She’s a na?ve girl with ridiculous ambitions that are going to be the death of her one day. A couple years ago that wouldn’t have bothered me at all—I even tried to kill her myself—but things have changed since then and now she feels more like a responsibility than a threat. I think somewhere along the line I started seeing myself in my brother’s woman: forced into a life she didn’t want at a young age, abused in unimaginable ways, but a fighter and a survivor, and who, because of what she went through, isn’t afraid to kill. I still can only tolerate her so much, but out of us all, Izzy is the closest thing to a human being, and I guess I respect that. Admittedly, she’s even more human than I am.
“Niklas,” Izabel says with surrender, “this is an important mission, and—”
We lock eyes. “Important to my brother,” I point out icily. “I’m kind of not in the mood to make his life easier. He can do the job himself. What, is this his way of trying to bring me back into the fold? Your way maybe?” My eyes find the television again; my cigarette finds my lips. “I’m not interested in making amends, either, so spare me the fucking runaround and either have a drink in this fine establishment”—I wave my hand about the room—“run by this gentleman named Jay”—and then at the bartender—“or find someone else to buzzkill.”
“Stubborn to a fault,” I hear Nora say, and I turn around fast and find myself in her face so close I can smell her toothpaste and that crimson lipstick she wears and the perfume she dabbed between her tits.