Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
The Joey situation was a prime example. I’d read over the file Gavin had waiting for me on my desk as soon as we’d gotten back from the gym this morning.
He was twenty-eight and as exciting as a rusty penny. He’d been employed at an Apple store for the past two years and received money from his family over in Texas to help pay his rent. That in itself was highly fucking embarrassing. I needed to know who cleared him to live in my building.
He hadn’t had a girlfriend in years, just a few unattractive fucks that were equally as uninteresting as him. My Rhiannon was a goddess, so I imagined every time he saw her his entire universe shifted.
Now his apartment would be cleared out like Rhiannon’s was and he’d disappear. Not too many people would miss him. His social circle consisted of men trying to re-live their fraternity eras long after college.
All this extra bullshit because Joey didn’t have two brain cells that worked well enough to keep his mouth shut. I knew he could be threatened into silence for a while longer, but why waste my time or someone else’s effort just to eventually kill the man anyways? At least he got me, the nice Barron to choose how his death would go.
My padre would have taken his tongue before going back and finishing him off that same night in some kind of torturous fashion. There were a few times I had to brace myself for what I was walking into once he’d gone in and did what he felt was right. That said a lot when you didn’t have a weak stomach and death was nothing but a mess to be covered up.
You’d never hear anyone say Zacharias Barron was a good man. Cruel, sadistic sonofabitch with a healthy dose of bloodlust was much more common.
With a reputation that had yet to wane, it wasn’t any surprise he and Rhiannon’s father had taken over the underground together. They were still at the top, for now anyways.
Santiago was ready to make peace and finish closing a deal put into play a long time ago. My padre was waiting patiently for me to take over from him so that he could go back to moving in the shadows alongside my madre.
That’s what mattered more to him in this world than the money or the prestige—our famiglia—and at the pinnacle of that was his wife. Their story was one that often preceded his well-earned reputation. Even if you knew nothing of Zacharias Barron, you had better be aware of how much my madre meant to him.
He'd had a respectably savage approach when it came to making sure she would be his in every possible way.
I planned to follow a similar, though far less bloody and traumatic path for Rhiannon. That’s where she and my slight disagreement about all of this would become a bigger issue for me to resolve. My madre was born and raised in this world. She may have been a bit naive to certain aspects, but she was aware of it, nonetheless.
I think meeting someone as elusive as my padre was more shocking to her than anything she went through. I couldn’t speak for her, though. She might have a different opinion entirely. All I knew for sure was that things weren’t remotely the same for my Rhiannon.
Her entire life was a lie.
From the moment she was stolen from her mother to the time Evie killed the man she had considered her father it was all lies. I hadn’t been truthful about my role in this grand charade either, but I was the only authentic thing she’d ever known.
The way I came to feel about her and every promise I made thereafter had been real. Those feelings and promises were still genuine. I wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble if they weren’t. I for damn sure would’ve nuked this maddening obsession and vicious infatuation the second I realized they could one day impede my ability to make concise decisions.
It was with this same realization, that I reluctantly accepted I had a lot more work to do before I could keep her with me indefinitely.
Now, here we were.
You’d think that she would be a little more appreciative of me keeping my word and her alive after all this time. Maybe it wasn’t in a way she interpreted, but why the fuck did that matter? She was getting worked up over nothing when I needed her to start preparing for our wedding.
We could fill in the blanks and angry fuck all over the mansion later. It was going to be her home for the rest of her life so eventually, we’d have to Christian every room a few times before I had to drag her away from our kids to get my fix.