Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Angel’s warning is going to prove more truthful than I think he realized when he spoke it. This will end with me six feet under because there’s no way I can face them and not seek the vengeance Ellie deserved. Alessio killed her, and rather than getting justice, her father, Patrick, stuck his service weapon in his mouth. My father, rather than getting retribution, drank himself to death, his own grave only a year old now.
Seventeen years ago, Alessio Severino signed his death warrant, and I imagine he had no idea he’d be signing mine with the same date when he did. I’m nothing to him. The man doesn’t know me. He definitely doesn’t fear me, but all that will change.
Walking up and putting a bullet in his head would be easy, but it doesn’t vindicate my own losses. I had a loving father before Alessio picked Ellie. I had a family, connections, and love. He killed all of that the night he decided it would be a fun way to spend two days when he offered Ellie Baker a ride home from school, only to spend the next forty-eight hours raping and torturing her before growing bored and slitting her throat.
I know all there is to find out about the Severino family. I’ve spent countless hours poring over the limited information I can find online about them. One could say I have a plan for their final destruction, but I’ve never set it in motion. I know about their guards and Lucian, the current boss. I know they have branches loyal to them, mostly through force and fear than actual allegiance. I know government agents fear them enough to make them damn near untouchable, as evidenced by the district attorney’s office throwing out the case despite the piles of evidence they had. I know that case was the last one to be written about, despite the trail of missing and dead people in Chicago related to them. Their power, it seems, even extends to the media. Even my mother wouldn’t speak their name after we moved. My father only spoke it when drunk, but despite only seeing him a handful of times after my mother left him, I heard it enough to never be able to forget.
They protected me a lot as a child, and some days, I wished I didn’t know now what they knew then. The crime was gruesome. The crime scene photos I scored from a crooked Chicago cop who needed money more than he had sense were even worse. I’ve tortured myself with them for years, keeping a copy at my home back in Kansas.
I do my best to formulate a plan in the very limited time that I have. I want to cause the most damage, the most pain, to the Severino family before finally putting every one of them out of their misery.
I look at the girl and back to Alessio. He isn’t paying her any mind. He doesn’t dart his eyes in her direction, the way I saw Liam do, the way I notice Angel does. Losing her would probably be no more than a minor inconvenience. He might be mad, but it would probably have more to do with having to waste time finding some other bitch to ride his cock.
Killing his men would give me better access to the brothers, but it wouldn’t really cause that much of an uproar other than the slap in the face of killing some of their men.
My eyes lock back on Marcello. He’s the target. Killing the youngest Severino will bring the most pain because their younger sister is a woman and doesn’t count for shit where the mob is concerned, other than being a token possession.
My hands tremble, anxious to get the party started, but I know my chances of reaching either Severino are slim with the muscle surrounding them. I’ll have to bide my time, something that was much easier to do with them hundreds of miles away in Chicago than it is with them both across the room.
It doesn’t stop the anger from growing as memories of what I had and what I lost because of them come to mind. My father died, his skin as yellow as a flower in a puddle of his own piss last year, waiting for a liver transplant that would never happen, because he never got the courage to face the reality of losing his best friend and partner.
I refuse to think about my mother and what happened to all of us after leaving Chicago. I’ve considered more than once that living with a sad alcoholic father was better than what we went through after, but I can’t focus on that right now. Those losses make me think I can make my way through the crowd with my gun drawn and survive long enough to watch two pairs of Severino eyes widen the second before I put a bullet through their heads.