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)
I struggle against his hold on me. “Stop it.”
“I did nine years because of him, Rory. Nine years. Do you know what that does to a man? It makes him mad. It makes him seethe and simmer, and the need for revenge festers. So when I took a job for the De Kysa, and Vinnie De Kysa got the names of the three men who were responsible for what happened that night, I went looking for them, and I made them pay. Do you hear me, Rory? I made them pay for what they did.”
“I said stop it!” I cry. “You’re lying. It was a hit. You killed men for the De Kysa. Joey would never do those things. They got the wrong man.”
He slams against the wall beside me. “You want honesty? Yeah, I dedicated a good portion of my freedom to ridding this world of stains like your fucking brother. I killed them all, and I don’t regret a single damn one of them, including your brother.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck me? Fuck him for what he did to those women. For what he did to my Belle.”
“Get away from me.”
Instead of giving me space, he inches even closer.
“If I hadn’t ended his life, think of all the women he would’ve killed. All those families are missing someone around the dinner table. All those lives were snuffed out because he couldn’t keep his psychopathic hands to himself. There is only one way to look at this, Rory, and it’s my way. The world is better off without him.”
I cry out. A knife couldn’t have cut me as much as his words.
“I hate you.”
“Hate me all you want… I don’t give a fuck anymore. You’ve already taken everything with your lies.” He lets go of me and removes his cell from his back pocket. “You want fucking proof of what a psycho your brother was?” He scrolls through it, then hands it over. “Then here’s the damn proof.”
On the screen is a black and white video. It’s hazy, but I can clearly see a girl cowering in the corner of a room. By the look of her, she couldn’t be any more than twenty-one. She’s sobbing, and when an unseen presence enters the room, she shrinks back. A man enters the frame. He smiles over at the camera and then unleashes a violent backhand to the woman.
It’s Joey.
There is no mistaking it.
My throat goes dry.
This can’t be.
I watch on in horror as Joey continues to abuse the girl, nausea unfurling in my gut. He’s violent. A monster. She begs for him to let her go. Pleads that if he frees her, she won’t tell anyone. But he toys with her. Pretends she has a chance for escape. But even I can tell by his intimidating body language that this is not going to end well. And it doesn’t. He lunges for her.
The girl cries out at his brutality but goes silent when he viciously enters her.
“No, this can’t be true,” I whisper.
Joey laughs as he continues his assault.
My hands shake violently. “Oh, Joey, what happened to you?”
I want to look away, but I won’t because it is proof that I am wrong. So wrong. My brother, the boy who used to hold my hand when I was too afraid to walk up to my knees in the ocean, the boy who put his arm around me and told me we were going to be okay when our father’s coffin passed by us, the boy who saved all his allowance to buy me a Barbie doll when I was six, and he was just twelve, spent his adult life as a monster. A sick, twisted monster.
The old image of him seeps from the wound in my chest that is my broken heart. My happy memories of him are replaced by the reality that Ares is right. He was vile and depraved.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, bile rising in the back of my throat. On the screen, Joey continues to force himself on the girl. I close my eyes, but they snap open when I hear the girl begin to beg for her life, and I watch with a broken heart as Joey squeezes his hands around her throat.
Fighting the need to puke, I watch the life drain from her eyes and her body go limp.
Pleased with himself, Joey smiles up at the camera like a sick fuck and reaches up to turn it off.
I push Ares’ cell into his hand and begin to pace.
“It can’t be real. Someone must’ve edited it.” My brain races to make sense of what I just watched, of what happened to my brother, desperately clinging on to a fading morsel of hope. Fraught, I turn to Ares. “Maybe they were role-playing. Maybe they were acting out a fantasy…”
For the girl’s sake, I prayed none of it was real.