ONE

Dog

“You’re a fucking embarrassment to my name,” my father yells across the dinner table, the glassware rattling with the force of his fists as he slams them down.

My name.

Sums it up perfectly, really. If you asked my father, the von Essen name belongs to him. I bet if the asshole could copyright it, he would.

Me? It might be mine by birthright, but as he likes to remind me, I haven’t earned the perks that go with it yet.

Not sure I ever will.

“I told you I’m not interested in enlisting.”

“So you turn up to the interview I set up, drunk?” He scoffs, leaning on one elbow dramatically. “The things I do for you …”

Correction: the things he thinks he does for me. Rollan von Essen does nothing for anybody else, only things that’ll help him. Me enlisting was one of those.

“Imagine the esteem that would come with my son being in the army.”

He wants a general, something distinguished to add to the family tree. Only problem is, I’d actually have to give a fuck long enough to reach that status. Not going to happen.

“Seemed like a good idea at the time, and considering,” I snap, “that I wanted to get my ass booted out the door as quick as I came in it, I’d say the plan was a success.”

“Show some respect,” my older brother mutters as he slices delicately into his rare steak.

I swing my gaze right to the pretentious asshole and then drift a little further to his waif of a wife who picks at her salad as though she’s not surrounded by a testosterone filled room of hate. He trained that one well.

“Mind your fuckin’ business,” I snarl.

“Your constant degradation of our name is my business,” he growls, slamming his fisted knife onto the tabletop.

His wife doesn’t flinch.

“Can you comprehend on any level how awkward it is when the first thing a shareholder says to me is, ‘I see that brother of yours got arrested again. Must make family dinners awkward, huh Derek?’” His nostrils flare, my father watching on with sick interest from the far end of the table. “What am I supposed to say to that, Koen? You tell me.”

“Same thing I said before.” I give him a tight-lipped smirk. “Mind your fuckin’ business.”

His face flushes red, his fists clenched so hard on the oak tabletop that his knuckles turn white.

“Boys, please,” Dad roars, despite the fact we’re two grown men capable of holding our own. “Koen, I tolerated your pastime at the start because it seemed like a phase, a passing curiosity, but now …”

“Now, what?” I challenge him, pissed he’s brought up my real family.

“Now, it’s proving to be a bad habit you need cleansing of.”

Oh, no he didn’t. “Fuck this,” I snarl, tossing my pretentious napkin down on the table. “I don’t even know why I came here today.”

He’s got no right to tell me what’s right and wrong. No business to look down on my choices simply because they aren’t the same as his. Neither of them does.

“You know why you’re here,” Derek says. “What today means.” His eyes are hard, his heart probably even more so.

“Yeah,” I scoff as I push my seat out and stand. “I do. Question is, why the fuck did I decide to come here and celebrate it with you?”

This time last year, I witnessed my father show weakness for the first and only time in his life. This time last year, I held my mother’s hand as her grip fell lax, waiting on her to pull the next breath, to fight to stay with her family.

Yet she didn’t.

She was tapped out and tired of life, and I knew it as well as my father and Derek did, that she welcomed death.

Dad sighs at the far end of the long table, running a heavily adorned hand over his rapidly aging face. “Koen …”

“No, Rollan. I’m done.” I shake my head, hands braced on the back of my seat. “Done with you tryin’ to direct my future, done with both of you lookin’ down on my choices, and done with you actin’ as though you wish I’d never been born.”

He doesn’t deny it, instead choosing to sit stoic as I take my leave from the place I used to call home. It lost all semblance of family when Mom left us. Never will be home again.

Derek chooses to ignore me by staring down at the table, yet his wife watches me go with a hint of jealousy; as though she wishes she could up and walk out like I am. I snort a pitied laugh at her dead eyes, at the shell of a woman she is. That is what being a real von Essen does to people—drains them of all distinctive traits until they’re compliant zombies.

Unlike my father and brother, I don’t get a kick out of stripping people of their free will. Bullying others around simply because I was lucky enough to be born into a family that has lorded a fucking name over the lesser for decades, was never my game.

That sick game of cat and mouse is their specialty.

I might share the same physical features as my blood, but on the inside, where it counts, I’m nothing like them. And that couldn’t make me any fucking happier.

The cool night air bites at my collar as I step out the front doors of the house, and I shrug my cut a little higher on my shoulders, relishing it’s comforting weight as it hangs on my back. The Fallen Aces are my home now; best decision I ever made.

My father? My brother? They’re dead to me.

Them and their million-dollar empire of hollowness and misery.