Reversed (NEW CHAPTER!)

Chapter 30: All Hail the Wank Lord

*Gabriel's POV*

I never thought of myself as one of those stereotypical, tortured soul, artist types. The ones that did nothing but drink their lives away. But with the way things were going for me lately, I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the cards my high-as-fuck gypsy of fate dealt me.

Everyone had different ways of coping with the fallout from Victor's parents lately, but all of them seemed to include reverting into the shells of the people we once were before we truly came together as brothers.

The whole false engagement thingamafucker was the final shit-sucking straw for me.

I got that Victor thought he was protecting us or some shit. He was terrified that his parents were going to retaliate against the rest of us for taking him, and therefore a large portion of their funds, and their only connection into the inner workings of high-society Charleston, away from them.

And that pissed me the fuck off.

They weren't mad about potentially losing a goddamn son, even though emotionally they sure as fuck lost him a long time ago. They were mad about the loss of the only two things they ever truly cared about in the world -- money and connections. Nothing else would ever matter to them. Certainly not each other.

Speaking of their connections, we all knew the majority of them weren't from the glammed out grandmas that ran the glitziest socials in Charleston. The ones with enough dumbass hats I nearly hurled chiffon fabrics, pearls, and virgin-sacrificial-looking dresses at the thought. Mr. Morgan was knee-fucking-deep in a sewer of the foulest smelling shit this side of the Mason Dixon line. Who shat the shit?

Alexei Mikhailov.

They called him the Crime Prince of the South. Crime Lord was apparently too lowly of a title when you've destroyed that many lives. Who knew there was a hierarchy for the filthiest scum humanity has to offer?

I sure as fuck did not.

Nearly every bust made in drugs, weapons, forgeries, or even trafficking could be traced back to Mikhailov. The fucker knew how to branch out. The problem was every trace was theoretical because the shithead also knew how to cover his tracks.

I guess Vic was scared that we were gonna be the next tracks Mikhailov learned to cover if he listened to the rest of us and went through with Blackbourne's plans. The problem was, it's not Mikhailov we're after -- it's Victor's parents. And we've taken down a lot worse people than the two of them.

While Victor was playing the self-sacrificing martyr because of his fears, I had a nightmare of my own I was terrified was going to come true.

Every day that passed, it seemed to become more and more likely that Victor would go through with this engagement. It was only supposed to be a way to appease his parents, make them think he was playing along, distracting them from what was really going on behind the curtain while the rest of us worked to remove Victor from their lives. At this point I'm fucking terrified that Victor's plan all along was to simply remove himself from our lives instead of theirs. The dipshit probably thought it was easier that way, but losing a brother was never easy.

I would know...

I didn't need to add a fourth black ring to my ear. If Victor turned himself over like that I might as well though because that place and those people would kill him. Sometimes though, I thought that maybe, despite everything, Victor still truly loved his parents. Sometimes I thought that it wasn't our team he was planning to sacrifice himself for, but them. I worried that after years of them beating him down in every sense of the goddamn word, he still couldn't bring himself to do anything that could potentially harm them.