Stephan

by S F Draven

  I promised myself that I would spend the rest of my life showing her just how much I love her, how much I want to stick by her no matter how difficult things may get in the future. I knew that there would be hard times, especially in a career like ours, there were always people trying to get the upper hand, trying to steal the limelight from us when we weren’t looking.

  We managed to build a support system amongst two of the biggest crime families in the country, and I knew that everyone else was buckling down, trying to figure out how they were ever going to match up to that kind of power. Annika did an incredible thing for us all, bringing us all together when we thought that all hope had been lost, teaching us to believe when there just doesn’t seem to be a way out of a terrible situation. I remembered the look in her eyes when I had finally woken up, when I had realized that she had saved me that night at the massacre of the Chadov family, and I had been indebted to her ever since.

  I promised her that I would never stop fighting for her safety, that I would never let her out of my sight again for the fear that something bad might happen, but she always reminded me that we were going to make it out no matter how hard things may seem in the moment.

  I glanced over at her, watching her take the podium to welcome everyone to the biggest crime gathering in history, and I couldn’t be more proud to join her up there, to hold her hand, while we embarked on a new journey right from that moment on. I couldn’t believe just how wonderful it felt to know that we still had so much to look forward to, so much to learn about what we truly wanted out of life, but we got quite good at remembering that we had to enjoy the little moments whenever we could because we’d never be able to know when chaos would erupt yet again.

  It was certainly a night to a remember, a night that changed us all for the better. I looked out into the audience to see a gathering of some of the most ruthless people I’d ever met, all there for the very same purpose, all realizing that we had assumed power at the very top of the country’s crime ranking for now, but I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone tried to take that away from us.

  That is a problem for another day. Now, it’s time to see where we’re really headed, and how long we can go before we’re called back into action yet again. It’s a never dull moment between us, and it never will be.