Dedication
Honestly, I want to keep this book all to myself. I’m full-on obsessed with it. I’m obsessed with the man and the myth. I’m obsessed with the romance and the spectacle. I’ve never had any character hound me, haunt me, and hunt me the way this unapologetic devil did. I loved every freaking minute of it. So yeah . . . I think I’m going to dedicate this one to me, myself, and I. I had an outrageous love affair with words and writing while telling this story.
Something tells me the man responsible for my fixation would wholeheartedly approve.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
Epigraph
Prologue
Epigraph
Chapter 1: Keelyn
Chapter 2: Nassir
Chapter 3: Keelyn
Chapter 4: Nassir
Chapter 5: Keelyn
Chapter 6: Nassir
Chapter 7: Keelyn
Chapter 8: Nassir
Chapter 9: Keelyn
Chapter 10: Nassir
Chapter 11: Keelyn
Chapter 12: Nassir
Chapter 13: Keelyn
Chapter 14: Nassir
Chapter 15: Keelyn
Chapter 16: Nassir
Chapter 17: Keelyn
Chapter 18: Nassir
Chapter 19: Keelyn
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Stark’s story coming soon in Dignity . . .
Excerpt: Prologue
About the Author
By Jay Crownover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I have a feeling this book is going to prove harder to read than it was to write. I wrote like a demon, which is par for the course when you’re bringing the devil to life. But if you’ve made it this far in the world of the Point, we both know you’re made of pretty tough stuff, open to adventure and willing to read a story that might hurt a little bit on the way to the last page.
As with all my books set in the Point, this one has moments of splendid exaggeration and taking things as far as they can go, but unlike the other books, this one starts in a place so much worse than the Point and gives a backstory to our devil that is, unfortunately, all too real.
When I first introduced Nassir in Better When He’s Bad, I knew I wanted him to get his own story and that he was going to be the actual big bad in the Point. His cunning and quiet brutality were impossible to ignore the more and more the world grew with him at the center of it. I also knew the only way he could exist in the world I was creating, unfazed and unaffected by the darkness and carnage around him, was if he originated from a place that made the Point look like Disneyland. Sadly, there are so many places in our world that have been at war with each other regardless of innocence and loss of life for far too long. I knew that as cool and collected as Nassir was in all the previous books in which he appeared, he had to come from a place that was always bathed in tension and unrest, so I picked the part of the Middle East that has never known peace.
I remember reading about the West Bank when I was in middle school, and then again hearing about the turmoil in high school current events class, and then in college I met people my own age from that area of the world and felt so sad for them, sad that they were never going to know peace because their homeland would never be safe. It was tragic then and it’s tragic now. That area of the world is always locked in a state of unrest that can flare up at a moment’s notice. Nassir needed to be a man born into such violence so that what happens in the Point really meant nothing to him.
I wanted this book to be both current and relevant. It is both those things, but it also managed to turn out achingly romantic and surprisingly poignant. Our devil is full of surprises, and I’m so excited for everyone to finally find out what makes the man with all the plans in the Point tick.
Welcome back . . . we’ve knocked on the devil’s door long enough . . . he’s finally decided to invite us all in.
xoxo
Jay
Epigraph
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future
—Oscar Wilde
Prologue
I was a man born into a fight for things I didn’t understand, things that held no value to me even as I grew into adulthood. Money, oil, land, power, prestige, the right religion, the proper beliefs . . . they were just words. They were the battle cry that tore from my lips before I even knew how to speak in full sentences.
I was a man given life by a woman fueled by rage and anger, in a place that fed on those very things. Her cause became my own, and even though her fight was never mine, I wanted to make her proud, wanted to be a good son, so I let the things that filled her up and burst out of her bleed onto me. I lived inside her hatred and animosity for so long it was all I knew. I took her cause as my own. Only none of it led to my mother’s approval or adoration. I was never nurtured or coddled. Instead I was honed and molded into a thing that barely had any scraps of humanity left inside of it. There was no childhood, only revenge and vengeance. To her, that was how I honored her and my deceased father. It was how she forced me to honor a cause that was never mine.
My mother was a widow and I was a fatherless son caught between cultures and seeking revenge for deeds that I had no concept of. I was nothing more than an instrument of destruction, and often used to obliterate things I didn’t understand, things that mattered nothing to a boy, to any child. Mother knew best, and I followed blindly. I was never allowed a childhood or any semblance of a happy healthy home life. We lived in a war zone and our home was part of the battlefield. We were soldiers, not a family. I played with weapons, not with children my own age. I learned war tactics and how to handle explosives before I knew how to read and write.
Before I grew facial hair or reached my full height, I had already done and seen more than any child—any person—should. And with each new and increasingly violent and dangerous act I committed, with each new violation to my tender soul, I thought I would finally make my mother proud. In my young and untried mind, I foolishly thought that once she was proud, once her burning need for revenge was sated, I would be set free. Once the war was won, I could go back to being a normal boy. It was naive to think like this in a place that was historically unstable and soaked with the blood of the innocent.
There was no end in sight, and as I grew, as I became more skilled, my mother became more feared and ferocious. Her soul seemed to become greedier and more bloodthirsty. Soon it wasn’t enough to go after the people, the men she felt had wronged her, the men and the government they represented that had taken my father away. No, she wanted the entire infrastructure to collapse. She wanted to wage war on an ancient land, which had conflict soaked into every grain of sand that filled its hostile desert landscape. It was futile, but she wouldn’t listen to reason or to the pleas of her scared and scarred son. She handed me off to men who continued to use me to kill and destroy, all before I had even kissed my first girl. My mother never said good-bye or explained where I was going. She never once let me believe that I had lived up to her expectations of me or let me fool myself into believing that I had ever managed to honor the memory of my late father.
The rest of the world hears words like “holy war,” “the Gaza Strip,” “the promised land,” “fundamentalist terrorism,” “infighting,” “genocide,” and can turn on CNN or click on a link to see shaky footage of bombs dropping in the desert, but for me it was my day-to-day. I wasn’t just part of a war . . . I was the war. A man with an American mother and an Arab father and no place that was mine. The men whom I was handed over to, basically a trained
child solider already with bodies and blood on his hands, tried to stoke the blind rage inside of me that my mother had ignited at birth. They tried to take all of the hostile and horrific teachings I learned at my mother’s side and turn me into a machine that was fueled only by the need to fight for customs and country. They tried to fill me up with the same kind of fury that my mother had inside of her because of the loss of my father, who had sacrificed his life fighting for the supposedly right side. Always the cause . . . it was everything to these people, and nothing but words to me. To me there was no right or wrong side. There was no promised land and hereditary right to the sand that blew everywhere and stung my skin. All I could see was the side with the highest body count and the side inflicting the most damage depending on what day it was. By the time I reached my midteens, I didn’t want anything to do with any of it and my loyalty to my mother and her cause was fractured enough that I was starting to see the world beyond it.
I wanted to be a man, not a weapon.
I was over it all, soul-sick and exhausted from living in a war zone, depleted from years of seeking my mother’s approval, and then the acceptance and praise of the men who took me, all to no avail. Right at the moment when I was ready to surrender it all, give up myself for the only kind of peace I would ever know after all the horror I had created, the government came calling.
More accurately, I fell into their hands when they stopped the loaded-down truck I was supposed to be protecting. A truck full of explosives and headed for a primary school in a UN compound. I didn’t want to protect the truck. I didn’t want to be where I was. I didn’t want to be anything or anyone. I couldn’t see any more people die in a war they had never asked to be part of. If Mossad hadn’t intercepted us, the truck would have blown long before it arrived at the school grounds, taking me and the actual devotees to the cause with it. I had my hand on the trigger of a submachine gun and was beyond ready to use it. Kids were innocent in all of this and there were lines, even then, that I would not cross. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—be used anymore, and I was finally ready to make a final and drastic stand.
My plan was to die by my own hand and to take as many of the bastards that had used me, handled me, and controlled me with me on the way out. It was the only way I thought I would be free of the goddamn cause that hung around my neck like a fucking albatross, but then Mossad ambushed us, snatched me up from death’s door, and offered me a chance to vanish if I stayed with the cell I was embedded in as a double agent for five more years. I took them up on the offer without much of a second thought. I had no loyalty left, except to myself. I would dig up all the intel and turn it over with no qualms as long as I was guaranteed a way out. Gaining my freedom became my only goal.
That was my new cause to fight for, my new objective, and I didn’t care that it was entirely self-serving.
All I wanted was out, and dropping bodies for a different, more organized, and better funded organization made the most sense if they were going to give me an exit. They dangled the golden carrot in front of me and I couldn’t say no. Anonymity. Freedom. Forgiveness for every horrific crime they could pin on me. So I chased the carrot that hung in front of my eyes until my legs gave out. I signed on to kill the “right” people for the wrong reasons, from the inside . . . anything motivated by money and political goals to me smacked of immorality, and there was about as much honor in setting up young zealots to die as there had been in killing for my mother’s revenge and shattered heart.
I turned over sleeper cell after sleeper cell. I prevented bombings and bloodshed. I kept weapons out of the wrong hands and led the right people to them. I burned drug fields and turned over more money than I thought I would ever see in one lifetime to the proper authorities. I uncovered secrets and plans for attacks worldwide. I uncovered the location of terrorist camps and led more than just my government to the hidden locations in various hot spots around the globe while I played go-between for my government’s special operations and whoever they were in bed with at any given time. If there was something darker than black ops, that was where I was operating, and I hadn’t even grown out of my teenage years yet. I did everything that was asked of me, got in as deep as I could go, and once my time was up, the five years come and gone with more bodies and blood than I cared to think about, I fully expected the powers that be to keep up their end of the bargain.
I trusted them, like a fool. My mom had taught me better than that.
I should have known better than to blindly believe anyone with an agenda. I knew better than to think a human being ever came before a conviction or powerful people with ulterior motives and deep pockets.
The government wasn’t an extremist organization fighting for a belief, even if their motives and schemes were just as corrupt as any group labeled terrorists by the media. No, they were a massive political empire with their own endgame and motives to retain power and prestige, and I knew I couldn’t just walk away from them without repercussions. It was then that I realized there was more to the war than the winning side and the losing side. I realized there was my side. The side of the fighter. The side of the man going through the motions, not out of passion, but because he had no other choice. There was the side of desperation, and on that side, there were no rules. There was an army of one, and the war he fought was for survival and self-preservation.
When my five years was up, I was barely in my twenties; Mossad came back with more missions, more targets, more things they needed my special skill set to handle. They had invested too much time and energy in me to simply let me vanish into thin air. It became clear that the only way I was getting away, the only way I was leaving the desert behind, was if I did it on my own terms. Even if those terms meant that my blood would end up staining the desert sand. My mother had long since taken her own life, just one more sacrifice for a belief I couldn’t force myself to fight for anymore. I had no one and nothing left to lose.
I blew my cover on purpose. I let myself get caught, and when the bad guys tried to use me as leverage, tried to get the government to barter for me, I said nothing. I let them think I had value beyond my killing hands, and when the government and the military claimed they had no clue who I was, when they denied that I had ever worked for them, I let the men who had molded me and trained me take me back to where it all had started. I knew if I went with them I could finally have a chance at the one thing I had been after since I was old enough to figure out that what I was doing was wrong. Freedom. The chance to call my own shots for my own causes for once in my life. I knew the men who had turned a child into a killer wouldn’t go easy on a traitor, a man who not only double-crossed them, but who willingly went against everything they thought was worth killing for. Part of me welcomed the fury and pain because it meant an end to being nothing more than a weapon.
They tortured me and threatened all the worst kinds of punishment. I fully expected them to go after my head . . . literally.
But I was born into hell, so everything they did to me had already been done.
They wanted a spectacle. They wanted a show. They wanted something that they could put on TV so it got worldwide attention, so that the Americans would have to see what was going on in our little sandbox. I wanted to explain it was futile, that it was a lost cause. No one would care. No one.
I didn’t bother. I needed them to take me into the center of their camp so I could get my hands on what I needed in order to become a ghost. Terror was well funded, and if this war had taught me anything, it was that the side with the most capital had the upper hand on the playing field. Always.
Lifeless on the inside. Empty. I was already a dead man, so they didn’t expect a fight, but a fight was what they got. I could fight dirty and mean like them. I could fight cold and methodical like the government. But what would always give me the advantage over any adversary I faced was the first lesson my mother ever taught me. I had been born and bred to fight and never give up. The fight was in my bones. It was in every breath I exhaled.
It was in every drop of blood that poured out of me and painted the soil.
I left no man standing. I took it all—money, guns, drugs—then I hiked what felt like a thousand miles into a desert that was even worse than the one that spawned me. Money in the right hands, guns in the wrong ones, making deals and promises as I slipped across borders and got myself on a freighter to that other promised land I’d heard so much about . . . America. Land of the free . . . home of the brave. To me it was just one big, sprawling, endless landscape of noise, people, confusion, and clutter that I could lose myself in. I would be another forgettable face in the crowd, and maybe I could finally stop the fight that had been hammered into me so hard that it felt like it was the only thing I was made of.
I bounced around a lot as soon as I hit the shore. I never got comfortable anywhere. I thought it was best to keep on the move just in case my old government or my new one was looking for me. Besides nothing seemed to fit. The glamour of L.A., the glitter of Vegas, the throb of New York . . . all of it felt wrong and made me antsy. There were things in each place that felt familiar, parts of each city that allowed me to sink into oblivion and indulge in all the ways I had been denied my entire life.
So many girls. So much money. So many different vices at my fingertips. I knew if I wasn’t careful, I could easily become a slave to another master. Addiction made men weak and the last fight I wanted to fight, now that things had become so quiet, was one with myself. So I drifted and listened to the people deep in the shadows. People like me.
One place was uttered over and over again.
The Point.
From what they said, the city had apparently been a booming port town, but when the recession hit and the money left, it had fallen by the wayside. Empty shells of buildings were welcome signs to squatters, arsonists, and every denizen of the darkness . . . and so they came, the people that wanted to disappear and that wanted to make their money in obscurity and on the streets. Decades passed, so did hope for rebuilding, and the city—like too many places—had been forgotten by the rest of the country. Or so people said. Forgotten was what I needed, and so I listened to that whispered name. The Point.
Honor Page 1