 by Marie James.jpg)
Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
I didn’t swear vengeance when my father, a coward who wasn’t man enough to seek justice for her, drank himself into a divorce.
Going after them would be a death sentence.
I chose to live my life in the shadows, seeking revenge for others.
That was until I ran into the very man that took Ellie’s life.
I can still smell the smoke clinging to my skin from all the bridges I burned because of that man.
Walking away was no longer an option.
Killing him would be easy, but taking the woman that was promised to him seemed like a better wager.
Exacting retribution through her was the gamble I made.
Surviving her now seems impossible.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
Hollis
10 Years Old
I angle my head a little to the right, but it doesn’t help me hear the television any better.
Closing my eyes only makes the noise louder.
My chin trembles, but I refuse to let the tears fall.
I’m not a little kid anymore. Crying won’t help me, but the tears I hear in my mom’s voice cut me in a way I can’t explain.
“You don’t understand,” Dad mutters, his words sounding different right now than they used to.
“I do,” Mom argues. “I understand what it’s like to lose someone. You’re right in front of me, but you’re already gone.”
He huffs, a familiar sound these last couple of years.
Dad changed when Patrick, his partner in the police force, died. Patrick changed when Ellie died.
I miss her, and I think a part of me always will, but I miss my dad, too.
Mom is right. He’s here, but he’s not.
The man I knew, the one who couldn’t get his gun belt off fast enough after his shift to throw a baseball with me, hasn’t made it to a game all season.
They don’t think I hear the arguments. I can tell they try to keep their voices down, but Dad struggles with his volume after he starts drinking.
“It’s not the same!” he yells, and I can picture him raising his arms before letting them fall at his sides. He’s always done this when he’s upset. “He was like a brother to me! Ellie was like a daughter!”
“And you have a son,” she says as if he needs a reminder, as if he couldn’t remember me himself.
I swallow against the threat of tears. I know I lost a part of Dad the day Patrick was buried beside his daughter. I know Patrick lost a lot of himself the day he got the call about her accident.
Accident.
That’s what everyone says when they speak about it around me, as if I’m a baby that needs protecting. What people don’t realize is I have ears. I listen all the time. What else could I do over the last two years when others around me are spiraling out of control? I heard Mom use the phrase regarding Dad, but I didn’t understand it fully until recently, until the argument about him losing his job due to drinking.
I heard them mention Ellie and her accident a hundred times in front of me, but the conversation is different when I’m listening outside of the room.
Several men hurt Ellie. Men who Dad and Patrick could identify but for some reason couldn’t arrest. Patrick had an accident, too, only a couple of months after Ellie’s “accident”, but it still makes no sense to me. He was a cop. He’d been trained on gun safety. Dad blames the bad men that hurt Ellie, but the whiskey he drinks hasn’t made it any better.
“Do you think Patrick would do this if the tables were turned? Would Patrick drink himself into an early grave if Ellie were still alive?”
Silence follows, but I don’t understand why Dad doesn’t know the answer. Ellie was Patrick’s world. He’d never do anything that would hurt her.
“You know he wouldn’t,” Mom answers for him. “Please, just sign the papers.”
“I’ll do better,” Dad says, sounding like the broken man I’ve become all too familiar with recently.
“It’s too late, Ray. Sign the papers.”
He begs a little longer, but Mom stands her ground.
He’s letting the bad guys win, and he can’t even see it himself.
I’m losing my dad because he feels helpless. He won’t punish the men that hurt Ellie and caused Patrick to hurt himself by accident. When I see a bully being a jerk at school, I punch them in the nose. Dad should do the same thing. He should hurt the people who caused all of this, especially after the lawyers said there was nothing they could do.
If Dad knows who it is, he should solve the problem.
Instead, he’s going to lose his family.
One tear slips down my cheek at the sound of my dad’s sobs.
As I dash it away with the back of my hand, I vow to never be that weak.
I’ll never be the type of person to let an injustice go by without speaking up about it or solving the problem myself.
I don’t care what the lawyers say. If someone is guilty of hurting someone else, I’ll make sure they get the punishment they deserve.
Chapter 1
Hollis
Present Day
I’m all for playing a trick on someone. It’s not often in my isolated world that I get to engage with people I don’t have the first inclination to kill, but what happened here tonight is a little out of my comfort zone for several reasons.
First, I want to warn Liam about his woman. Any chick willing to have you kidnapped, hit over the head, tied up, and gagged, is someone to run from, not smile at. But despite Liam looking around the room with an expression that tells me he’d slit all of our throats, he also seems ecstatic to have just experienced what he did. I don’t mean the sex he had in that fucking room. His woman, Raya, looks just as love drunk as he does.