5

Adam’s lip curled as he heaved the bloody corpse towards the drain in the middle of the floor. He’d thought he was in really good shape before he’d had to haul his brother’s latest victim—a six foot four, three hundred pound rapist—from said victim’s car to the center of the abandoned slaughterhouse. While Adam was fit, his brother…wasn’t.

Atticus was tall and fair with a gym body and ginger hair. He looked like a Mormon and a tax attorney had a baby with shitty eyesight. Even now, while they were attempting to dispose of his brother’s fuckup, he was wearing a pair of seersucker pants and a white button down shirt, though both were covered in blood.

“Seriously, dude? Wet work is not my thing. How could shit go this completely sideways? And what the fuck are you wearing?” Adam finally asked after they got the man where they wanted him.

Atticus gave him a pissy look, using the back of his hand to push his glasses up his nose. “I had a work thing.”

“A work thing?”

“Yeah, you know work? That shit you do and they pay you for it? Oh, wait. No, you still live on Dad’s dime.”

Adam snickered. “You need to let that go. You might have a medical degree, but you work in the sciences. Dad pays your bills, too. You can’t afford that luxury mom car you drive playing mad scientist at the research center.”

“Fuck you,” Atticus said, voice testy.

After a minute, Adam sighed. “What was your work thing?”

Atticus brightened a bit. “The research center threw me a party because I scored a grant that will fund our program for the next five years.”

“Congrats. But don’t forget our real job.”

Atticus bristled. “This isn’t our job.”

“What would you consider it then? A passion project? Community service?” Adam placed his foot on the dead man’s chest, grabbing the handle of the blade, which was embedded in the man’s head, pulling with all his might. “What the fuck is this thing? Excalibur?” Adam grunted, starting to sweat through his now ruined Armani t-shirt. He gave his brother a disgusted look. “Seriously, man. How did you fuck up this bad?”

Atticus’s eyes bulged behind his glasses, his face contorting. “My fucking gun jammed. I had to improvise.”

Adam gaped at him. “And your first thought was a hatchet?”

Atticus snorted, his voice full of derision when he said, “It’s a meat cleaver, you miscreant. We were in his kitchen. It was that or a butcher knife, and when you have three hundred pounds barreling towards you, you make a decision and you let it play out.”

“Well, now, it’s two in the morning and we’re stuck here, in Satan’s tiled asshole, trying to pry a cleaver out of this fucker’s skull.”

“I’m sorry to pull you away from the coke you were probably snorting off some rent boy’s ass.”

Adam scoffed. “Coke? What are you, eighty? Who the fuck does coke anymore?”

“Haven’t you heard, it's making a comeback. It's all about nineties fashion and eighties drugs. Kids today,” August said, pushing through the clear thick plastic sheets that separated one room from the other. They reminded Adam of the things you saw in an automatic car wash.

Adam’s head snapped around to glare at Atticus. Why was Adam there if Atticus had already called August? This was August’s raison d’être. He loved the blood and guts. He was the cleaner, the enforcer, the stone cold killer with an iron stomach. Ironic given he looked like a taller, more terrifying version of Harry Potter, minus the glasses. He was the second oldest and had the least magnetic personality of them all as far as Adam was concerned. The family nerd with a dark side who would terrify the most hardened criminal.

August held up an electric saw, giving a smile even Adam found unsettling. “Found this,” he said, unnaturally cheery given their surroundings. He pulled the trigger and the blade roared to life until he let it go. “It’s cordless.” His mouth turned down in an imagine that expression that probably would have sent most people screaming.

But that was August. He had taken to killing as easily as he’d taken to quantum mechanics. He had a way of compartmentalizing that was almost supernatural. Adam had once watched his brother torture a man for five hours, then strip off his gloves, change his clothes and go give a three hour talk on particle acceleration in magnetic fields.

“What are we supposed to do with that?” Adam asked.

August looked at him like he was stupid. “We have no idea how much of Atticus ended up on our friend here. So we’re going to dismember him, bleach him, package him up in nice little pieces and chuck him into the river with some cement blocks. By the time he floats to the surface, any and all trace evidence should be gone. And then we won’t have to tell Dad that his pride and joy fucked up.”

Atticus plopped his gloved hands on his apron covered hips. “You know, it's not my fault I excelled at everything growing up. Maybe if you had all tried a little harder, Dad could have doted on one of you instead.”

Adam rolled his eyes, crouching beside the body to start undressing their recently deceased serial rapist. “Oh, yes. Please tell us again how being Dad’s favorite is so hard.” Adam got some perverse pleasure out of knowing that the man who’d forced himself on others without their consent was now being stripped and dismembered against his will. Too bad he was already dead.

“It was!” Atticus cried, indignant. “He always expected me to be perfect and to make sure you guys were perfect, too, and we all see how well that turned out.”

Atticus and August looked down at Adam with their patented older sibling superiority. “Oh, fuck you both. I’m sorry I’m not a doctor or an egghead professor. Has it ever occurred to you that I did you all a favor by never applying myself?”

Atticus snorted. “How so?”

Adam grinned. “I half-ass everything and still rise to the top. Imagine if I was using my full potential. I’d leave both of you in the dust. I’m the black sheep by choice.”

August snorted, but Atticus looked like a fish out of water, mouth opening and closing before he sputtered, “You’re a fucking supermodel. What exactly did you intend to ace, Tyra? Smizing 101?” August gave Atticus a smug look. “What? Kendra liked America’s Next Top Model. I know some things.”

Adam wrinkled his nose at the mention of Atticus’s ex-girlfriend. She was a fucking nightmare. A total gold digger who’d descended on the Mulvaney household like a plague, her army of skanks doing their best to land the Mulvaney brothers one at a time like they thought they could clear the board in one shot.

They were definitely barking up the wrong family tree. Half of his brothers liked dick, two of them didn’t care about gender at all, and August…well, Adam was pretty sure he was a fucking android. He couldn’t imagine his brother sticking his dick in anything that didn’t require batteries.

“Look, I’m not saying modeling required the same amount of skill as brain surgery or gene splicing or whatever the fuck you do when you’re in mad scientist mode, but at least I didn’t get a hatchet stuck in the head of a three hundred pound rapist.”

“It’s a meat cleaver,” Atticus and August said in unison.