by Sonya Jesus
“I know you don’t respect me.”
“I’m your brother, Breaker. We grew up in this place together. You think I don’t know what it’s like to be part of this world?”
“No, you don’t.” Because I protected you from it. “Costa spared you.”
“No, you spared me.”
His words strike me, resonating in my mind like a chime in the grandfather clock. Before I can find words to answer, Stone puts his hand on my shoulder and pinches the skin between his fingers. “He was a fucking asshole, and he still had a wife and two children, and apparently, a mistress who liked him.”
“She liked his money.”
“And Fabrizio?”
At the mention of my real father, I peer into my brother’s eyes and pretend like the memories of him don’t penetrate through my barriers.
“They were friends for years, like brothers and, taking Mom out of the equation, he had his back until the end.”
“He ratted him out to the Feds. Is that what you call having his back?”
“That’s what I call having your back.” The hand, still on my shoulder, drops to his sides, and he props up against the wall, next to me.
Because I know what’s coming, I speak up first, “Is this where you tell me it wasn’t my fault for murdering my father and having Franco rip his head off?”
“Fuck no.”
Somehow, his honesty is comforting. Scoffing, I bob my head in appreciation. “Thanks.”
Stone takes my thanks, deplete of sarcasm, for what it’s worth. “You killed him, but you didn’t know who you were killing. You thought you were getting rid of a rat, and you were, but would you have killed him had you known he was your father?”
No. The thought pops up almost immediately, too quick for someone like me, because the truth was dead snitches don’t snitch. “It wasn’t easy killing him.”
“Would’ve been even harder had you known the truth?”
I swallow down the memories tightening my throat. Son and all those times he rescued me from Costa. Not blatantly, of course, but he let me out of the closet and he’d intervene on my behalf, reminding Costa that despite my future obligations, I was still a kid and had to go to school. School held my moments of reprieve. “Probably,” I muffle out between the thoughts. “He was good to me.”
Stone sighs deeply and runs his hands through his hair, pulling at the ends. “You respected him, right?”
Surprising choice of words, but I bait him. “I did, but Costa had the power.”
Stone waves his hand in my direction and raises his voice. “That’s where everything turns to shit for you!”
He catches me off guard with his tone, and the corners of my lips curve into a smile. “Lectures?”
“Predictions! If you keep treating respect and power as two different things, you’ll never get both. Right now, you have fear and power, but you know what happens when people figure out death is imminent?”
I roll my eyes and circulate a horizontal finger in the air, telling him to hurry it up. “What?” That I ask because I’m genuinely curious, and I feel some sort of way about Stone’s predictions and scorn. He cares for me, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“They stop fearing and you lose power.”
The shit is making sense. “So, what do you suggest I do?” By the look on his face, I get the impression my question catches him off guard this time, so I make it simple for him. “Change who I am? Change how I run things? Change twenty-seven years of shit that’s been embedded in my mind?” Emotion is for the weak, and right now, I’m feeble because there’s a woman in my room who hates the person I am, and my brother is telling me the same thing.
What’s worse is I am beginning to hate myself for my actions. “I’m not going to change, Stone. I’m not going to be a better person or suddenly start nurturing relationships. I’m a fucking killer, and I know how to be a boss.”
“But you suck at being a brother. This is a family business! What happens when you have no family to back you up?”
“No offense, but you haven’t even made your bones yet. What are you going to do? Talk someone to death, so they don’t put a bullet to my brain?”
“Are you asking if I’d have your back?”
“No!” I shake my head and straighten myself from the wall, removing my stained shirt, so I can occupy my hands. “I already know you wouldn’t.”
“You’re not worth saving.”
I bunch my shirt in my hand, permanently wrinkling it with the force. The urge to throw him down the stairs crosses my mind, but I stifle it because …
I don’t finish my own sentence. My moral compass has suddenly decided to piss me the fuck off! Not once has something being wrong changed my decision to do it, and I hadn’t thought about right and wrong for a very long time. It only came up again when the truth came out about Costa using me and with 327. “You’re finally right about something.” I chuck the bloodied shirt at his pissed-off face.
He swats it away, and it falls to the floor at his feet. “You think you’re powerful, Breaker?”
“I’m the Boss.”
“Keep going the way you’re going, and you won’t have a family or people to boss around. You’ll be alone without anything or anyone. Fuck, even Costa had you and Kelsie in the end. Stop acting like you don’t need love to survive in this world. You’re not a psycho. You’re just a mob boss who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”
“Are you done?” I clip out, not intending to be convinced into moral decisions.
“I’d be done with all this shit, and you, if I weren’t obligated to be here.”
Stone turns his back on me, giving himself the luxury of walking away.
I wait until he reaches the top of the staircase and call out to him. “The fact that you’re still here and still breathing?”
Stone sways his head in my direction, hearing the threat when it isn’t meant as one.
“That’s my doing.”
It has been since he was little. If he knows about my childhood, then he knows he wouldn’t have survived Costa’s lessons. Stone is weak, like my mother. Always leads with his heart and never with his mind. He doesn’t think things through. He feels and acts, but he doesn’t plan and strategize. He doesn’t see the big picture or think of all the moving pieces, he thinks of himself first.
At least, that’s who he was when he left. I have no idea if he’s still the same person or if he will be when he finds out the truth.
He disappears down the stairs, leaving me alone.
Alone. But he’s right. Magdalena doesn’t seem like the family, and honestly, I don’t want my children growing up around her kind of crazy.
Children. I’ve been so concerned with securing my spot that I never thought about who would take it when I was gone. That’s probably because I never thought about death—not my own. I’m not invincible, but most days it feels like it.
Except when I’m with her.
Without 327, death wouldn’t be so bad.
21
My Monster
327
He pulses sin with every heartbeat, sucking out the light inside me and devouring me with every heated stare. Tearing my gaze away is impossible. I’m zoned in on his perfection—his darkness. The idle space between us clouds my judgment, and despite my hammering heart, I want to be dark with him.
Prayers are all I have—so I pray for him to come closer—to be encompassed by his massive arms, devoured by his mouth, and tainted from the inside out.
This is crazy. A small thought flickers through the surface of my arousal, but it’s quickly squelched down when he treads in my direction, leaving footprints on my heart. With every advance, I step back, searching for something to hold me up before I fall to pieces in front of him.
He corners me against the stark white wall of his not-so-pristine bedroom, towering over me and glaring at the woman he wants dead. “You can’t run from me, 327.”
His words are a th
reat, not only to my life, but also to my sanity. The battle raging between my heart and my mind confuses me and leaves me in a constant state of yearning and fear.
Fear he’ll touch me, and fear he won’t.
Fear he’ll kill me, and fear he’ll let me live.
Then again, I haven’t felt alive since the day he tried to kill me. “I know,” I say in barely a whisper.
Neither of us moves, transforming the small space between us into a sanctuary. I find solace in the foot of distance between us, and the fact surviving Breaker Beneventi may not be a possibility.
He singes through dignity like a blaze of fire, devouring it and consuming my will. No power flows through me, not an ounce as I’m ensnared by the monster who makes the devil look like a hellhound newborn.
Something tethers me to him. Is it the danger in his presence, the darkness that looms in his movement, or the struggle in his eyes?
I dare to glance at my monster. Ferocious eyes, burning with anger, consume me. The heat emanating from his body encompasses me, sucking the breaths from my lungs. My lips part, gasping for the oxygen his presence denies me, and my skin flushes as the temperature elevates within me, simmering my blood to the surface and rushing to my core.
He’s sex and sin, flames and ice.
He is fire, and I ignite. Then I’m liquid, and he is cold. With a rigid stance and a hardened glare, he chases any warmth in the air. His breaths, like coils absorbing the heat, and any drop of tenderness evaporates. He wields temperature, air, space, and me. Easily and wordlessly.
Under the pressure, my vessels desiccate, muscles lose their tension, and my knees go weak. I can’t think or process. I only see him. His intoxicating self. He’s everywhere—in the room, my mind, my heart—and escaping him is useless.
“Why am I here?” I ask, because there has to be a reason why we are both in the same room again, with two beating hearts, rather than one.
“Who have you told about The Farm?” His voice is calm and steady, nothing like it was minutes ago.
There was no who. I fill my lungs with air and answer truthfully. “I’ve told no one, except Addie. Right before you took her from me.”
“Why?” His voice elevates, as if he were disappointed in my action. “Why didn’t you go to the police? Or tell the people at the hospital or the woman helping? Or use the information to blackmail me? Why did you pretend like we didn’t kidnap you?”
“I didn’t pretend,” I peep and lower my gaze; it catches on his belt buckle, and I quickly glance back up at his chiseled jaw. “You don’t pretend to be normal after you’ve been erased. You rebuild the person you were. One second at a time, then a minute, then an hour. Until you can go one day without bursting into tears and hating yourself.”
My words throw him off guard. “Hate yourself?”
He doesn’t deserve an explanation, but I owed every single girl who lost her life at The Farm and every child who would never know the truth. “You obliterate souls, Breaker. You rub women raw.” Tears well in the corners of my eyes as I remember the beautiful girl with the bright green eyes. “There is no flight, you take away that option, only so you can take our fight. You leave us without clothes, so we lose our modesty, so shame is nothing but a word that once held meaning. You don’t stop there though. You strip us of everything—every morsel of hope, every ounce of faith— and you give us nothing to hold on to, not even death.”
He shows no remorse. Not one fucking bit. “You keep looking for goodness in monsters…” He scoffs and lowers his lips to my ear. “Do you think I don’t know what I do to them?”
My mouth drops open.
“I know what happens behind the walls of my establishment. I trained those men. They are following my orders.” His large hand curls around my neck, bruising the tender skin beneath his fingers as he squeezes.
Tight.
Tighter.
“You need to realize something: there’s nothing good about me. Stop looking for it.” He grips harder, but I hear the plea—the slight dip in his tone—begging me to do the exact opposite.
My eyes meet his, blinking takes longer in between gasps, but I manage to choke out, “You…s-saved…me.”
He grimaces and eases his hold a smidge. “Who says I saved you?” He doesn’t want an answer. If he did, he wouldn’t be cutting off my air supply. “I’m going to give you another choice.” He lowers his hand and steps back, grabbing the gun from his holster. This time, I have the distinct feeling whatever decision he is going to propose is one he can’t make on his own.
I divert my gaze, not because of the inflicted terror, but because my body recalls the thrill of his touch, and I’m ashamed of the desire flowing through me. Excitement mixes with adrenaline and flushes my body with intimacies that should’ve been long forgotten.
“For tonight, because that is all I can promise, choose me or death.” The vulnerability in his words strikes my heart, bleeding it raw. “You have five seconds.”
I hear the click of the safety being removed.
I stare at the blood on the carpet, which has seeped through the fibers and reached the tarp, hoping it blurs away the memories and erases the connection our bodies have to each other. The vibrant color blurs, but not the feel of his body inside mine. Like the blood on the white carpet, he is ingrained in me. I’m soaked through and tainted by the color of his desire. There’s no scrubbing him out of me, and no replacing me. My choices are limited: it’s him, or death, or death by him. Either one, unfair and an end to life as I know it.
“Look at me!” His voice booms through the dead silence.
My body trembles in response as I hesitantly obey. Frustration leaks from the ducts at the corner of my eyes, drowning my irises and obscuring my vision. Even through the liquid emotion and distortion, he is beautiful—deadly, but beautiful—and so damn terrifying even my heart shakes. I want to hate him. I want to rip him out of my soul and bury him in the driest of lands, away from people and salvation, but I can’t, so I step back, eyeing the barrel of his gun.
He growls, thick and throaty, as if his tonsils scraped against sandpaper. “Don’t make me say it again.”
I flinch, afraid to blink and release the evidence of my heart. Straining against the innate urge to blink, I force myself to look at him. A death sentence lingers in the air between us, diminishing the room. In the three hundred square foot bedroom, the only measurement that matters is the one between my body and his.
Twelve inches seems like too small a distance when he’s been inside me.
With narrow eyes, he searches my face, as if it holds the answers to months of questions. Perhaps what he searched for is written on the dried tears on my cheeks, or the fresh ones burning in my eyes. Or maybe the small lines of worry speak on my behalf, or the rapid breaths, which move the tiny beads of perspiration glistening on my upper lip.
But I don’t think so. He has questions even he doesn’t know he has.
“Me or death. Say the word… I’ll put a bullet in your heart, so you’ll never have to hurt again.”
He assumes love exists between us.
I stare back, wide-eyed, facing the monster whose jaw is clenched so tight his teeth might shatter under its strength. My lips move first, in response to the thoughts running through my mind, but I only register the words after they are spoken. “Kill me.” I test the monster.
The anger ripples over his defined, tense body as he steps closer, eliminating the distance between us.
My breath hitches, and out of fear, I inch back, desperate to regain the safeguard. The hard wall keeps me from safety and locks me in place. Only a couple inches separate the two of us. “Do it!”
He leans toward me, placing his lips near the edge of my jaw. My body jolts back, and my head hits the wall. Before I can process the proximity, his voice, in the form of an angry whisper, echoes in the room so even the dead can hear. “Not yet.”
I shut my eyes, expelling all the tears from inside. When I look at him
again, I need clarity. I don’t understand what is happening inside me. I want to die and I don’t; I want to hate and I can’t. I don’t want to love the monster, but I do, and it’s killing me.
“Not until I understand.” His words land on my ears, and I open my eyes to find his gun no longer in his hand. That’s even more dangerous. His hands on me will solidify our connection, and like an ice cube wielded by the devil, I’ll melt.
“Understand what?” I dare ask.
His head snaps back, as if my words smack sense into him. One hand wraps around the curve of my back, wedging itself between my body and the wall. He presses his body flush against mine, the tip of his arousal hard against my stomach.
“Tell me,” he demands.
Tell him what? That—
Nothing is gentle about the way he flips me around—face to the wall—and shoves his hardness against my backside. It scrapes against my tied-up wrists, as he demands, “Tell me why you’re still alive.”
Desire wells at the bottom of my gut, growing with each swallowed word on the back of my throat. Thoughts pop up in between bouts of pleasure. Because I ran. Because I hid. Because I have something to live for.
But both of us know the answer: because he wants me to.
“Why can’t I wrap my hands around your pretty little neck and squeeze until I force the last breaths out of you? Until your eyes roll back, and your tongue curls, and I steal your last breath?” His elevated tone turns into a low, frustrated grumble. “Why can’t I aim for your heart and pull the trigger, stealing your heartbeat?”
It’s not love, because he may not be capable of it, but it’s something.
“Why can’t I end you, 327?”