by Scott, Ada
It was still there now, but since Kendall came into my life and worked her way into my heart like some unstoppable petite assassin, I realized there was pain there too. It had been with me forever, like black poison.
I’d thought I’d felt good fighting, destroying everybody that stood in front of me. I thought I’d felt good fucking my way through a never-ending river of women. I thought that killing so many of the Picollis felt best of all.
None of it compared to the way Kendall made me feel though, because Kendall wasn’t just a distraction. She was my home, the place where I could finally relax and take off the body armor I needed to carry around everywhere else to keep myself alive.
It had never been OK to let any of that poison out before those quiet times with Kendall. If I didn’t fight for her, and win, then that poison would build up inside me again. Who knew what I’d do without her?
I’d fought on so many fronts over the years. Hand-to-hand, with guns, with knives, real poisons, explosives, face-to-face, backstabbing, one-on-one and a massacre. I’d always won.
The problem was, this was a completely different kind of fight and I had no idea what to do. For the first time since I’d bashed that kid’s face in at Wellfort, I was ill-equipped.
We were almost at the cabin when my phone rang. When I looked at the caller ID, I almost managed to choke on my own tongue when I saw it was Kendall.
Chapter 28
Jace
My men spread out around the cabin as I walked up the steps to the front door. To my relief she said she wanted to talk, and asked me to send somebody to pick her up.
She didn’t seem surprised when I told her I was only a couple minutes away, because I owned the taxi company she’d caught a ride with, she only sighed with resignation. I took what comfort I could over the fact that she called me at all.
It must have been shocking for her, walking in on that scene with Lorenzo. I could barely remember the first person I killed, or even saw killed, but death was just the logical conclusion of all the violence I’d been surrounded with for years by then, so it wasn’t so bad for me.
Kendall was from a different world though, she didn’t know what it took to survive in mine. I hoped that, together, we could do more than survive. I wished for that harder than I’d ever wished for anything, even revenge.
A thousand hopes and fears raced through my mind as the door swung open. Would she run into my arms? Had she talked to some law enforcement agent outside of my control?
When I saw her, my heart reached out for her, and my hands mirrored the sentiment. It hurt more than I could have dreamed when she didn’t reach out for me too, instead keeping one arm wrapped protectively around her mid-section.
On the bright side, there weren’t any police officers apparent behind her either. I stepped inside, glancing at her sore-looking red eyes and then looking down.
I hated being the cause of the pain etched on her face, and I was still terrified that she would never be able to accept me for who I was. Unfortunately, the cat was out of the bag, so that choice was gone.
“I… I don’t know where to begin,” I said when she closed the door.
“Why!? Why did you kill him? Why is the Mafia really going after your businesses? What is going on?”
Now that she didn’t need her hand to close the door, Kendall had both arms wrapped around her stomach. By the sounds of it, they might have been the only things holding her together. She was at the breaking point.
“Lorenzo was working for the Picollis, he told them where our car was going to be, and when, yesterday. He led them right to us.”
“Why? Why do they care so much about you?”
“Because I nearly wiped them out. I didn’t do a good enough job, though.”
Kendall’s eyes glanced around the room in various directions, as if clarification might be found in the fireplace or the baseball bat mounted above it. She shook her head and returned her gaze to me.
“I don’t, understand, Jace. How could you do that? How did you get involved in this?”
“I’ve been involved in this since forever. You remember that car crash with my parents?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t just any crash, it was a mob hit organized by the Picolli Family,” I said.
“How could you know that?”
“Some wiseguy came to Wellfort one day and told me. He showed me a picture of the Picollis’ mark, and I remembered men with that tattooed on them showing up in my dad’s store sometimes. I didn’t remember much, I was too young, but I recognized it.”
“Who was that guy?”
“I have no idea, never got a name,” I said.
“How do you know he was telling the truth?”
I walked over to the window and pulled the curtain back to look out, checking that my men were alert and watching out for trouble. It was a stalling tactic. Inside my heart was racing, pumping hot blood to my head where I could feel it burning on my face.
“At first, I didn’t know. I just believed him. I was too young to know any better, but it sowed the seed. I vowed to myself that I’d pay them back for what they did. I’d pay them back a million times over for what they took. I had no plan, then. All I knew was that I had to turn myself into the kind of person that nobody could fuck with. That was the only kind of person who could do what I needed to be done. This was the one thing to hold on to, so I fought, and I fought, and I fought with everybody, with anybody I could find.”
“But how did you make sure?” Kendall asked.
“When I was old enough to figure it out, I went to the library and looked up old newspapers. I found a story about my family on one of those microfiche things. There it was, in black and white, a picture of our car, smashed up and with some bullet-holes in the door for good measure. I read as far as my mom and dad’s names, along with ‘Picolli’ and I couldn’t go any further. That was enough.”
“What did you do then?”
“I started looking for them. Back then, if you looked for them, they were easy enough to find. I still didn’t know shit about them, but I soon learned they were huge. They owned the city, they networked with other crime families that owned the rest of the country, there’s this whole world that most people never see. I had this idea of jumping out of an alleyway and surprising the boss, killing him and that would be the end of it, but I learned that somebody just as bad would be waiting to take his place. It was too big for one kid to take down. From the outside, anyway.”
Kendall’s brow furrowed. “But not from… the inside?”
“Yeah. That’s what I thought. I had to at least get on the inside to learn about them. I went up to one of their soldiers and told him to give me a job. He kicked the shit out of me. I came back the next day and asked for a job, he kicked the shit out of me again but I got a good punch in. I thought he was going to shoot me, but then he told me to fuck off. I came back the next day and asked for a job, he called me a stupid little fuck, but he gave me a package and told me where to take it. It became a regular thing.”
“Why didn’t you just leave, Jace?” she asked.
I remembered my time in Wellfort and those kids who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fight. That hopeless look in their eyes. I knew I was, at most, half a step away from that if I gave up.
“Because the kids that didn’t fight had nothing,” I said, quietly. “I grew out of the little kingdom of Wellfort and found that the earnings of an errand boy didn’t cut it in the wider world, so one day when one of the guys got shot, I asked to be the one to do the payback, in return for a pay rise. They said sure, fuck it, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, I did a good job. That guy never crossed our path again, but he did limp for the rest of his days.”
I turned away from the window and slowly walked back towards Kendall. She didn’t back away, but the closer I got, the more she seemed to shrink.
Although I was close enough to reach out and touch her, it was like there was a force radiating from her
body, personal space that I didn’t have permission or the power to enter anymore. The possibility that I might lose this fight hit home, and my face contorted with the grief that idea let loose. It took me a few moments before I could wrestle myself back into some semblance of control to continue.
“I… I took as many of those jobs as I could and built a name for myself, earned some respect. I learned everything I could about their structure, how similar they were to a large corporation. I learned who was in charge of what. I learned who wasn’t happy with the way the Picollis ran things. I learned who could be bought off, if it came to it. It was going to take me years to do what I needed to do, and then I literally won the lottery. It fast-forwarded my plans by a decade, maybe two. In a single day and night of the most brutal shit you can imagine, I seized most of their cash, killed their key men, paid off the rest, assured the police and politicians that the same arrangements they made with the Picollis were still good with me, and I took their place so they could never come back.”
“Jace… you have no idea what this is like, how crazy this is for me. I can’t force myself to stop loving you, I tried to just turn it off but it wouldn’t. I don’t understand how this can work!”
That force around her was weakening. Maybe just being this close, our love was overpowering it. I edged a little closer, just about tearing myself apart from the inside with the need to hold her.
“On my way over here, when I was trying to think of what to say, I tried to remember the first person I killed, to see if I could remember what it felt like, maybe something like what you were going through. I figured out that the first thing I killed was a part of myself. I didn’t have any room in my life for weakness, for sentimentality. All that was left after that was pain and so much fucking anger, but being with you was the first time I felt anything like peace. Can I tell you something, Kendall?”
Her barrier weakened further, and she looked up at me with hope. Those eyes, oh man, those eyes.
“One thing I do remember about that car ride with my parents was when they looked back at me. They had love in their eyes. I didn’t see that look again for over twenty years until you had it. You still have it, Kendall. You’re the love of my life, and I need you.”
I could see the turmoil in her eyes and the quiver in her lip. She held herself all the more tightly, but that barrier came down. Painfully slowly, she shuffled forward and closed the last remaining distance between us, leaning into me and looking even more timid than the day we met.
My own hands were shaking when I brought them up to embrace her, I was half-scared that she might disappear in a puff of smoke when I did. Her body was real, warm, and reassuringly familiar when my palms slid across her back and I held her tight against me.
After a few moments, she held me too and I buried my fingertips in her hair, stroking her cheek with my thumb before kissing the top of her head. Gently rocking from side to side, I almost felt myself melting into her.
“Can we run away?” she asked.
“If I do, then they’ll take over the city again. I won’t let that happen.”
“Will it ever be over?” she asked.
“They’ll never give up until I kill them all.”
“How do you know?”
“I wouldn’t. This is who I am, Kendall. I love you, can you stay with me and make all of this mean something more than revenge?”
“I love you too, Jace. I… I’ll stand by you.”
Never in all my life had more powerful words been spoken to me. With Kendall at my side, I could take on the world, keep stamping on the Picollis until their lights went out completely.
I wished I could have stayed in that moment forever. Instead, I heard engines and wheels on the gravel track and I had to let go of her to rush back to the window.
Black car after black car was pulling up. My security was scrambling to get to defensible positions, but I didn’t have enough men. The Picollis had followed me.
“Boss!” one of my men called from outside.
“What’s happening, Jace?”
I pulled Kendall to the ground, away from the windows, as the first shots started ringing out. Soon there were a lot more bullets coming in than going out.
“The Picollis. Here.”
Reaching inside my jacket, I handed Kendall my gun. She held it with a look on her face like it was a live snake.
“I don’t know-” she began.
“Listen to me! The safety is off, all you need to do is point the gun and pull the trigger. I want you to find somewhere to hide. Don’t come out no matter what! You understand? The walls of this cabin are good and thick, you stay away from the windows and you’ll be OK. If somebody gets in and finds you, shoot them in the face.”
“I can’t-”
“You can.”
“If I’ve got your gun, what do you have?”
The nearest window to us shattered, razor-sharp shards of glass falling to the floor a few feet away. I looked over the fireplace at the baseball bat with a lightning symbol burned into it.
“I fucking love baseball. Now go. We’re going to be OK. I love you. Go! Stay down!”
“I love you!”
Kendall crouched and ran through a doorway into another room. I blinked away tears. That was going to be the last time I ever saw the woman I loved.
I prayed that it was, because if I saw her again, it would only be because the Picollis found her and wanted to kill her in front of me. That thought almost seized me up and froze me to the spot.
Selfish as it was, I couldn’t bring myself to wish she had never come into my life, but I did wish I’d never existed so she could have been safe. If the Picollis somehow didn’t know she was here then she had a chance, but I was a fucking dead man.
I crawled over to the kitchen area and shrugged off my jacket, leaving it on the floor. I took off my empty gun holster and put it in a drawer as the one-sided battle raged outside. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my phone and looked up at the baseball bat ruefully. I was a fucking dead man.
Chapter 29
Jace
The gunfire quickly petered out to the occasional crack and pop, and then stopped altogether. I stood beside the door and adjusted my grip on the baseball bat, breathing deep and slow, each breath puffing out my cheeks as I listened to my heart booming in my chest.
I could hear voices out there, swearing, calling out instructions. They were getting closer. Then I could hear faint footsteps, people yelling out “clear!” and getting closer still.
A few minutes later, I heard careful footfalls on the steps I myself had walked up only half an hour ago, harsh whispers. I was gripping the bat so tight that the handle creaked as I held it poised, waiting for my pitch.
Soon, they were gathered on the other side of the door. Two low-level goons were arguing about who would go first until somebody higher up the food chain told one of them to shut the fuck up and get in there.
A split-second after I heard them count to three, the door burst open and I swung for the fences. Some asshole Picolli had his face turned to mush by that first hit, but the bat splintered apart just above my hands.
The first guy, already unconscious, fell backwards and became tangled up with the second soldier, who had been rushing forward to follow him. I jumped in with the broken bat and shoved the sharp end through his throat before he could lift his gun up in my direction again.
Blood spurted everywhere when I pulled my bat-turned-stake out, and he dropped his gun to use both of his hands to try and stem the flow of his life as it gushed out of him. He was even more of a dead man than I was.
A third soldier shouldered his way past the stabbing victim, and over the crumpled heap of the first one. He managed to block my first swing, grabbing my wrist to stop himself getting impaled like his friend, as I did the same with his gun hand.
He managed to push me back a step, before I brought my knee up into his nuts with testicle-popping force. His mouth opened wide as he gasped in
air and I sensed a certain limpness in his arms.
Taking a massive risk, I let go of his gun hand and gave him a left hook to his dangling jaw, dislocating or breaking it so it hung off his face at a horrific angle and rocking his head to the side. His grip on my wrist failed, and I shoved the bat into the back of his throat through his open mouth.
As he fell, I had to admit he’d done his job though, because two more Picollis were through the door before I could block that choke point again. I charged forward, lashing out with a kick to one of their knees that resulted in a satisfying wet crack and made his leg bend the wrong way, as I blocked the second’s attempt to pistol-whip me.
It seemed the fucking idiots were under instructions to take me alive, or they would have got a shot off by now. Three more came through the door as I stomped on Mister-Broken-Leg’s head and turned his lights out for the time being.
One of them flew in and tackled me, putting me off balance as I brought the wooden stake down into his kidney area. He sank towards the ground, whimpering, but somebody else punched me just below the eye before I could retrieve my weapon.
I grunted and lashed out blindly in that direction, feeling teeth break and cut my knuckles. While I was blinking to clear my vision, somebody else tackled me, managing to bring me to the ground but also dislodging the splintered bat.
Whoever tackled me ended up falling into my guard, and I used my legs to put him off balance as he tried to rain punches down on me. Twisting to the side, I struck out at somebody else’s knee with the heel of my hand and heard a satisfying, if girly, scream from somewhere above.
On the backswing, I knocked out the person on top of me with a lucky elbow strike and then drove the stake into somebody else’s leg on the other side. Putting my feet on the hips of the unconscious sandbag on top of me, I kicked out, pushing both of us backwards in opposite directions.
As I was getting up, something heavy hit me on the back of the head hard enough to make me see stars, robbing me of the vision I’d only just managed to clear. In a daze, I bunched my fist and lashed out, hitting something. Maybe it was a skull, maybe it was one of the log-walls of the cabin.