Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 78487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Wishing I could fall in love with Ares.
Wishing there was something more for us.
I push the unwanted thought away because I’ve fucked everything up, and there is going to be a price to pay.
It’s a given that I won’t get away unscathed.
I accept that.
But I will do everything in my power to ensure it is as painless as possible for Ares.
Stepping into the rainy Boston day, I hail a cab and take it to the cemetery, immersing myself in the familiar landscape I’ve driven past a hundred times in the last twenty-two years.
My father’s grave rests near the row of sugar maple and weeping hemlock trees on the far side of the cemetery. When he was alive, he was everything to me. My best friend. My protector. The one person in this world I could count on.
Then he was gone.
Killed by a rival crime syndicate when I was only thirteen years old.
I had never known a pain like it and to a naïve daddy’s girl, it felt like I was living in a nightmare.
Less than a year later, my mom married Donnie—one of my father’s lieutenants—and a new nightmare began. Within twelve months, he was visiting my bedroom late at night.
As I kneel before my father’s grave, I start pulling the weeds and dead flowers from around his headstone. My heart is a heavy weight in my chest as I wish for the billionth time he was still alive.
A few feet away, my brother rests in his own grave. His is a simple headstone with his name carved into the marble. There are no flowers. No trinkets. No sign that anyone has been there in weeks, months even, and they probably haven’t been.
I’m the only one who visits his grave.
By the time Joey died, he didn’t have many friends left. He’d pushed everyone away.
Including me.
When I heard he was missing, I hadn’t seen him for four years.
Oh, I’d heard the rumors about him not being the same kid anymore. How the drugs had stolen his soul and turned him bad. But they were whispered by the very men who killed for our family or were involved in the seedy underworld and lived beneath a skin of lies, pretending they didn’t do dark deeds in dark corners. So I took their word with a grain of salt.
Joey and I were born into crime. We were raised by the sword in a world where only the most vicious survived. He left for college when he got a football scholarship and never came home again.
I don’t doubt he had changed. But in my head, he’ll always be the seventeen-year-old boy who held my hand when our father’s coffin passed us by and whispered, “Don’t you worry, sis, I’ve got you.”
A few feet away, a hooded warbler lands on a grand tombstone that towers above the rest. It’s an ostentatious structure of black Italian marble and crystal, and it’s so ridiculously over the top, it’s almost out of place.
The name blazoned in gold leaf across the marble is hard to miss…
Donnie Hatzakorian
My stepfather.
The man I told Ares I wanted killed.
Yeah, he’s already dead.
His life was snuffed out by three bullets. One to the head, another to his heart, and one point-blank ranged shot to the balls.
That was where I shot him first. His balls. It didn’t kill him. It just hurt like a motherfucker, and watching him suffer was payback for all the evil things he did to me when I was young, all because he could.
By rule, I don’t even look at it when I visit the cemetery. Because the less amount of time I spend acknowledging his regretful existence, the better.
The truth is…
I didn’t hunt down Ares to kill anyone.
I hunted him down because I want revenge for my brother’s death, and I know it was Ares who ended Joey’s life.
I don’t know why.
It was the one question I was going to ask him right before I put a bullet in his head.
No one could ever tell me why.
Not the police.
Not my family.
No one.
For some reason, Joey’s disappearance and death is shrouded in secrecy.
I know he wasn’t a saint. We were raised by the sword, and my brother often let that lifestyle seduce him.
But my mother says Ares killed Joey in cold blood.
And it’s up to me to take revenge.
I’m not visiting Flintlock to fuck Ares and develop feelings for him.
I’m there to kill him.
My mother lives in a narrow, two-story house in Dorchester with her fiancé, Connor. He claims to be a wealthy entrepreneur, but really, he’s just a local gangster who spends more time taking other people’s money than making his own.
He’s nothing like my father, but thankfully, he’s also nothing like my dead stepfather. The only thing the three men have in common is their lack of respect for the law and a complete disbelief in earning an honest buck.