“Ugh,” the girl winces and presses her fingers into her temples. “How are you not hung over right now?”
“I'm Irish,” I tell her. “Drinking is in my blood.” I also think that I drink so much that I've become immune to booze. Plus I've developed a cure for hang-overs. I'm serious. Two aspirin, followed by a glass of water mixed with an alka seltzer, and add a tablespoon of Tabasco sauce, and you've got the best fucking hangover cure ever. If I could ever think of a way to bottle it up, I'd sell that shit.
She rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”
Less than a second later, her eyes go wide, she throws a hand over her mouth, and bolts from my bedroom. Her dry heaves trail down the hall mixed in with the sound of her chucks of whatever she ate last night plunking into the toilet water. Some dudes would be grossed out by this, but not me. When you've seen someone shot in the head and hunks of their brain matter splashed all over the white wall behind them, vomiting and shit like that doesn't phase you.
Pulling my hood over my head, I jog down the hall and rap softly on the door. “Listen doll face, can you hurry it up in there?” I hear her moan through the door. I rush back to my bedroom and grab her stuff. Her clothes, purse, and shoes, then I open the bathroom door and toss them in. “I've gotta be somewhere. The clock is ticking.”
She emerges from my bathroom, half-dressed and smiles. I chuckle nervously and fight the urge to spew word vomit (yes, the pun was intended) because she's got a leftover green chunk stuck between her two front teeth. “So,” she breathes. “Will you call me again sometime?”
“Of course.” No I won't. I take that back, I might. But that all depends on how much alcohol I’ve consumed, where I am at the time, if there are other broads there…yeah the list can go on and on but you get my point.
“Did I give you my number?”
I nod. “It's programmed into my cell.” No it's not. I can't even remember this girls name. Plus, I don't program random females numbers into my cell. I texted her my addy earlier so her friends could drop her off, so if I do ever need her number again, I can find it there.
There's only one girl's number programmed in my cell phone and that number belongs to my little sister, Teagan. Because she's the only member of the opposite sex in my life that matters.
I'd kill for Teagan.
I'd die for her.
Why?
Because I love her. I’m not ashamed to admit that I love my kid sister. And also because she's family and family means more to me than anything.
I grab Blondie by the elbow and escort her to my front door. I open the door and she steps out into the hall. She hesitates, eyeing me up and down apprehensively. I hesitate too, wanting her to leave asap, but not wanting to be a total dickhead to her. Finally after a few awkward minutes of silence she says, “Well, aren't you coming?” She folds her arms across her chest. “I thought you said you had to be somewhere.”
“I do.” But I'm waiting for you to leave so I can go grab my glock that's hidden beneath the floorboards in my closet.
She gets the hint. I want her to leave first. “Oh,” she shrugs nervously, “well I guess I'll see you around then.”
“See you around.” I wait until she disappears down the hall before I slam my door.
Chapter Six
~Hadlee~
Lara is too good to me.
“Sometimes, I swear you’re a saint,” I tell her as she pops the trunk and we walk around to the back of her black Mitsubishi Eclipse.
She glances around in a joking manor and points between us. “You talking to me?”
I sigh and shake my head. “Who else would I be talking to?” Lara removes a few boxes and stacks them one on top of each other on the black top. “I really appreciate you letting me move in with you. I promise you once I get my life back in order, I’ll find a way to repay you.”
She straightens out and pulls me in for a hug. Then backs away from me slightly, gripping my shoulders. “Are you kidding me? You’re like the sister I never had. I’d do anything for you. You know that.”
“Still,” I mutter, casting my eyes downward. “Taking in strays with issues is a huge responsibility.”
Lara gathers a few boxes, balancing them on top of each other in her arms. “Listen to you,” she huffs. “First off, you’ll never be a stray. Second, I know if I went through what you did, you’d do the same thing for me.” She’s right about that. I’d do anything for Lara. She’s the closest thing I have to family.
I never knew my parents. They died in a car accident when I was very young so I was raised by my maternal grandmother. And she died two years ago. “I just hate feeling like I’m indebted to someone.”
“Indebted, please,” she comments as I stack a few boxes in my arms. “Daddy pays for this huge condo, not me.”
She walks up the front steps of her condo and I follow suit. “Then I feel indebted to him.”
“You shouldn’t. He has more money than he knows what to do with.”
Lara’s father, Hank, is an extremely wealthy man. He owns a company that buys failing businesses and sells them off in pieces. I’m not even really sure what the name of the company is. In all the years I’ve known Lara she’s never mentioned it once.
Lara and her father have a tense relationship. They speak from time to time, but there’s never any loving chit chat. He asks her about school and her job and mundane stuff, but he never gets too personal. Mostly he tries to buy her off and I assume he thinks that he’s showing affection. But from what I’ve witnessed through the years, his theory has back-fired.
I’m sure every little girl loves to have lavish gifts showered upon them. But that isn’t all they need. They need genuine affection. And they need a parent that’s around long enough to care. Lara’s father has never been around. He’s always working. Always putting his job first. Their relationship has suffered because of it. And I know because of his stern, proud nature, and unwillingness to lower his work ethics, Lara has begun to resent him.
Sometimes I’d hear her sobbing when we roomed together in the dorms sophomore year. She’d try and wait until I was asleep to cry, but I never was and I always heard her. And if it wasn’t that it was her screaming at him through the phone receiver, “You can’t buy love, daddy.”
She’s right.
You can’t.
“I think it will be nice having a roommate,” she tells me at the glass double doors of the four-plex luxury condos. “We can have slumber parties.”
I laugh. “With pillow fights?”
She glances over her shoulder at me incredulously.“What’s a slumber party without pillow fights?” We share another quick laugh as a blonde girl pushes past us, her head lowered, carrying most of her clothes in her hands. “Somebody is doing the walk of shame,” Lara announces and we both walk inside.
There is a small spacious lobby, decorated modernly. It has a light blue colored carpet. Big, wide windows. And two cream love seats. One on each side of the room. “I think it’s safe to say that you don’t ever have to worry about me doing that,” I mention as Lara inserts a key into the first door on the left.
We set our boxes down in Lara’s sparsely decorated condo and head back out to the car for another trip. “So what can you tell me about our neighbors?”
Lara shrugs then laughs. “That they’re pretty much non existent. The couple that lives across the hall works midnights and then they sleep all day. The guy on our right is never home and when he is, he pretty much keeps to himself. I’ve been here almost a year and I think I’ve only seen him once. Then there’s an elderly woman across from him. She’s actually a hoot. Loves to make tea and talk about sex.”
“She sounds funny,” I say with a laugh.
“Yeah,” Lara says, “If you won’t to hear a ninety year old talk about a time when she was in her former sexual glory.” Lara makes a disgusted face. “Thanks but no thanks.”
After we deposit the second round of boxes in the condo, we make a third trip and
on the way back I see a man. He’s dressed in a hooded sweat shirt with matching dark gray pants. At that moment, my spine stiffens. My heart gets stuck in my throat.
Breath won’t come.
My feet won’t move.
All of the terrifying images of the night of my attack resurface, and as the man brushes past me I drop the box in my hands. “No.” A gasp leaves my throat, but the noise is drowned out by the ceramic plates in the box shattering.
Lara is ahead of me and half-way up the steps, she turns frantically looking for me and when she sees me shaking she cries, “Hadlee!” She sets down her box and sprints toward me.
For a second it felt like I was reliving that horrible night all over again. For a second I could actually smell my attacker’s stale breath as it wafted up my nostrils. I could feel his rough flesh against mine. The man in the sweat suit is jogging away, but my racing heart hasn’t returned to a normal, steady beat. Lara sweeps me up into a tight embrace, trying to control my trembling body. She pets my hair. Whispers soothing shhhs. “Hadlee it’s fine. It was just a guy going for a jog.”
I’m whimpering, trying to regain control of my emotions, but it’s not working. More than anything, I’m pissed off at myself because I never used to be this weak. And it amazes me how one, traumatizing event can slowly break a person apart. “I know,” I say, resting my chin on Lara’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Lara pulls out of the embrace and gawks at me, concern knotting her symmetrical features. “Sorry?” she places both hands on my cheeks and all I can see is her eyes. Powder blue splashed with flecks of navy. “Hadlee, don’t apologize. What happened to you was awful, but it wasn’t your fault. You have to stop blaming yourself.”
I want to tell her that I’ve tried. I’ve tried to tell myself that over and over again, but nothing I tell myself ever works. “I just keep thinking—”
Lara places her finger against my lips. “Stop. I know it’s going to take a long time for you to heal emotionally. But you did nothing wrong. Nothing, Hadlee. Please remember that.”
I honestly don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have a friend like Lara. I manage a half-smile and tell her, “I’ll try.”
“Good.” She smiles in return. “Now let’s finish moving these boxes.” She pats me on the shoulder and dashes back up the steps, scooping up her box.
I pick my box up off the ground as the broken contents inside jingle. I silently curse myself and hope there is nothing valuable in pieces inside. I would hate for the contents inside the box to be in as many pieces as the person who is carrying it.
Chapter Seven
~Sean~
I decide to run to the gym.
Mostly because it’s only a few miles away and because the look on Joe’s face from two nights ago has been permanently branded in my brain.
His pursed lips. Narrowed brown eyes. “You’re two pounds over weight, Sean,” he said with a growl. “You know what that means?”
Yes I do, Joe.
That means a lot of running in sweat suits in eighty degree weather, hot box heaven, and sweaty balls until my fight.
I dodge people on the side walk, but keep my gaze straight ahead. Cars whiz past me on the streets, but I can’t hear the sound of the engines.
Disturbed blasts through my earbuds and bleeds through my pores before infiltrating my bloodstream.
The loud music distracts me.
Puts me in the right frame of mind.
It takes over my whole body making me feel like I’m a machine programmed to knock my opponent the fuck out.
I always listen to music before a fight.
It’s weird really because right before they call my name I get this vision of myself. Arms in the air. Fierce victory cry leaving my throat. And my opponent out cold on the ring floor.
It’s an exhilarating feeling.
The song switches and Invincible by MGK bounces off my ear drums.
Hometown proud, baby.
Hometown proud.
Picking up speed, I turn a corner and pass a café where a group of artsy folks are sitting outside on metal chairs, sipping iced teas that are placed on metal tables. One dude extends his fist to me and I give him a fist bump as I jog by. That’s what I love about Cleveland. And Ohio. They appreciate their own.
The small, square tan brick gym with a black and white sign hanging overhead that reads: Joe’s Boxing Gym fills my gaze and I pump my legs harder to reach it faster. That is until I notice the black Ford Crown Victoria sitting on the side of the road a few blocks ahead of it. And the moment I roll my eyes to their corners to get a look at the driver, nausea coats the lining of my stomach.
But I don’t stop running.
I can’t act like I’m nervous.
Or afraid.
Or fidget like anything is far from the norm.
The driver doesn’t even look in my direction, but I don’t need him to.
I know what he is.
I know why he’s sitting there.
Once I’m in the confined entry of the gym, complete with metal coat racks, I start to panic. I pace back and forth, hold my head in my hands and think about shoving a fist through the plaster wall.
He’s a fed.
The driver of the ford is a fucking fed!
I know how to pick those fuckers out. With their aviator sunglasses. White button downs. Tailored black pants. I’ve been involved in illegal activity long enough to have their looks memorized. And their cars. And their trying to be conspicuous ways. The thing is, they usually aren’t conspicuous, parking out in broad daylight for the whole world to see. Any member of the brotherhood that passes that black Crown Victoria would know the asshole sitting inside it was a fed.
I feel like my whole world has just gone up in flames.
Blown up like a bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Fuck!
The last time the feds were on to the brotherhood I was the one who got arrested. I spent six months in the pen and trust me when I say this; being locked up is worse than torture. Number one, I got shanked by some Puerto Rican prick who had a personal vendetta against Connie. Connie framed one of his brothers for trafficking Oxycontin, and the bastard thought if he and his ese’s jumped me it might send a message.
But he was wrong.
Connie didn’t retaliate like I thought he would. Yeah that pissed me off. And I had to talk myself out of shooting the old fucker more times than I could count. Then my conscience paid a visit just like it always did.
If it wasn’t for Connie you would have lost Teagan.
If it wasn’t for Connie who knows where you’d be?
Probably dead.
It didn’t take me long to learn that the streets don’t take prisoners. They are violent. And brutal. And nine times out of ten send people to an early grave.
That’s where I would have ended up if it wasn’t for Connie.
In a shallow grave.
As much as I hate the man, I respect him too. I have to. Tee and I never wanted for anything. We never had to struggle. And she got to go out with friends, go to prom, pick the college of her choice. She got to live a normal life that every teenage girl deserves.
I owe that all to him.
I gave him my loyalty because of that.
Even though I’m sure that I paid Connie back for everything plus more on the money he makes off betting on my fights.
But that’s beside the point.
Part of me wants to go back outside and see if the pig is still sitting there, but I decide against it. That would look way too suspicious. Instead I make my way toward the locker room to change out of my wet sweat suit and take my piercing out. Joe has a sparring partner for me today and I don’t keep it in when I spar or at a match.
In the locker room, I stand at the sink, eyes cast downward as the gleaming white porcelain blurs in my vision and my stomach bottoms out. The panic is gone, but the nauseous feeling has returned. I lift my gaze, stare at myself in the mirror, and have this ov
erwhelming urge to punch it.
I want to break it.
Watch it shatter into a million little pieces.
I want something to be as broken and as fucked up as I am.
Instead, I roll my head back, close my eyes, and breathe. Joe would be pissed if I damaged the hand that made my right hook famous. And I know breaking the mirror isn’t going to solve anything.
I’m going to wake up tomorrow.
I’m still going to be the middle weight boxing champion of the world.
I’m still going to be one of key members of the Braithreachas Don Saoul.
And I’m still going to be in the middle of a blow fest, aiding the fuckers who toss white powder around on the streets like it’s new fallen snow.
Man up, Seany, I tell myself.
You can’t take back yesterday.
Tomorrow is only a day away.
I’ve got a sit down with the members of the brotherhood tomorrow after training and a brick sits in the pit of my stomach because I know what’s going to go down. The feds are in town because there’s a rat hiding amongst the members of the brotherhood.
And now I know that tomorrow is going to be a last day for someone.
And that Connie will pick them out because the man is like a human lie detector. He says he always knows how to smell a rat. Then he’ll put on a fake smile, walk them into the back room of the meeting spot, and a few minutes later he’ll put a bullet into their skull.
Chapter Eight
~Hadlee~
Wednesday comes and before I know it Lara is parking the car in front of the Joe’s Boxing Gym. She shoves her keys in her purse and looks at me intensely. I don't meet her gaze, but I can feel her eyes burning into my skin. “You ready for this?” she asks and her voice is laced with concern.
“Yes.” I know I need to do this. I know that taking these classes will make me feel better. Stronger. “I'm ready.”
We both get out of the car at the same time and the sidewalk is littered with people. A few are on cell phones and there are photographer's lining the door. Lara comes up on my left and holds the gym door open, and as soon as I walk inside I'm blasted with the musky scent of sweat that's permeating the moist air. There's a small reception desk off to the right and Lara walks over to sign us in for the class as I take inventory in my surroundings.
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