Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Should I have deemed this deplorable? Absolutely. If I had morals, I’d walk out of the room, refusing such a mission.
If she had to be persuaded to say yes, this woman, his bride, was probably not someone who had chosen this life.
That should go against my code.
Criminals had codes, fucked-up belief systems that gave justification for what they did. That helped them sleep at night, deluded themselves into thinking they were heroes of their own stories. They didn’t touch innocents, women.
No one in life was innocent.
And women could be murderers, criminals just as well, if not better, than men could.
I hadn’t killed one that wasn’t deserving, but that didn’t mean I had a code. It just meant I hadn’t happened upon an innocent woman I was ordered to kill.
I didn’t delude myself into thinking I was a hero. I knew exactly what I was.
“Don’t kill her, hurt her or fuck her.” Stone’s eyes twinkled. “Not that I have to worry about the latter with you.”
My teeth gnashed together as my blood suddenly turned to acid. I stayed placid outwardly. Stone knew me as well as anyone could, which wasn’t at all. But he did notice things, and he obviously had me followed or watched closely enough to know that I didn’t fuck. Women or men. He’d offered, plenty of times, both women and men, seemingly nonjudgmental of my sexual orientation—he just wanted me to have one. If I fucked someone, had an appetite for something, it was something he could use to control me, manipulate me. But I didn’t take any of his offers, uninterested in the variety of people he’d either threatened or paid to throw themselves at me.
He’d eventually given up on trying to make me fuck something.
He’d considered that a weakness, my lack of sexual appetite, assuming it must mean there was something wrong with my manhood.
Probably why he chose me for this particular task. I wasn’t a threat.
Not that he thought, at least.
I was always a threat.
He watched me carefully, eyes narrowing. “Is there a problem?” There was a challenge in his question. He was daring me to refuse. Not that I’d face repercussions. It would be a show of weakness for me to refuse.
I didn’t trouble myself with archaic shows of masculinity and mind games within this world. I didn’t need either to show who I was. I could easily say no to this. Stone would likely try to punish me in some kind of way, but he wouldn’t succeed. No one could hurt me or punish me as profoundly as I did to myself.
This was the fork in the road, one that I’d been waiting for. I’d known Stone would eventually challenge the boundaries of this relationship, ask things of me that I didn’t want to do. Kill... That’s all I wanted. None of these benign tasks that made things messy.
It was time for me to part ways. This was a sign. For me to disappear into the ether and find a new path.
“No,” I said slowly. “There’s no problem.”
In a split second, I decided against walking down a different path. Disappearing at this juncture in my life would be complicated. One job outside the norm, one job to continue to delude Stone into thinking his leash was unbreakable... Then it would be back to regular scheduled programming.
I didn’t see any reason to make him stop believing I was anything but his loyal beast.
Four days later, I was in Central Park, following my target.
If I was the kind of person to smile, I would’ve grinned at the dark irony of her heading into a dense part of the park, me following her, her clothed in red.
Like some kind of fucking fairy tale. The monster following her into the woods.
Except this wasn’t a fairy tale. And she wasn’t going to triumphantly defeat me. Or outsmart me.
Piper Matthews was doomed the second I laid eyes on her.
Piper
I didn’t mean to get involved with the mob.
To be fair, I didn’t think anyone really meant to get involved with the mob.
Sure, there were the select few who watched The Sopranos and decided that’s exactly what they wanted out of their life then dove headfirst into the world of organized crime. But I’d bet that most people tried their hardest to avoid it, beyond enjoying arguably one of the best television series to be written.
I was one of the latter people.
My sister, unfortunately, was one of the former.
She did not want to be a ‘Made Man’—was it still a Made Man if the person in question was a woman? Did they even let women fill that role? I’m guessing not, since the patriarchy was still going strong, but maybe the mob was progressive. She did, however, get tangled up in the ‘romance’ of what it would be like to be with a morally- gray man who looked tough and didn’t live by the word of federal law. An outlaw. The ultimate bad boy in an Armani suit.