Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 86768 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86768 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
24
Santos
I take the stairs down to the garage where Val has the SUV waiting for me. The man sitting in the driver’s seat gets out and opens the back door.
“Not necessary. I’ll go alone.”
He’s confused. “Sir—”
“Keys inside?” I glance over his shoulder to see them still in the ignition.
“Yes sir.”
“Tell Val I’ll be back ASAP.”
“But you’ll be on your own.”
I pat his shoulder to nudge him out of the way. “I can handle myself.” He has no idea just how capable I am. I have the Commander to thank for that.
Climbing into the SUV, I take the gun out of my shoulder holster and set it in the glove compartment. It’s late, and where we are it’s quiet, but I head toward a seedier part of town.
The Avery family has a home here in Miami—not where I’m going, but where the wealthy, upstanding citizens live. They also have one in Todt Hill in New Jersey. I lived in both with them during my years of service.
I let my mind wander to that time, to the circumstances that got me there. Blackmail, essentially. I’d been days away from my eighteenth birthday when I’d committed my first murder. I’d have been tried as an adult, especially given the gruesomeness of the act. Never mind that Alexia’s father deserved worse. Never mind that he himself was a violent man, a murderer who beat his own daughter to death and killed his unborn grandchild.
Those details have me gripping the steering wheel harder, and I shove the thoughts back into their box and lock it. Those particular memories will weaken me. Thiago was right. Family and those you care about become a weakness. We both learned that lesson years ago.
So, I think instead of what happened after—of the arrest, of the Commander’s visit to my father at home while I sat in a dark, dirty cell in an abandoned building.
At that time, the Augustine family was a known crime family. Not powerful, and nowhere near the top of the food chain, but we had a reputation. My father’s hands were dirty. Caius’s hands were dirty. And all it took was that one murder to soak mine in blood.
The Commander offered my father an out. A reprieve. He could make the charges go away. Vanish. He could make it so that Alexia’s father had never been. The alternative was a lifetime behind bars because he could arrange for that, too. He made certain my father understood his power.
So, a deal had been struck. I’d left my home to live with the Avery family, and I became the Commander’s most powerful weapon. I slowly destroyed whole families, exerting as much pain as each situation allowed and then some—all to the specifications of the Commander, while he attended this party or other, always being seen in public as the do-gooder he liked to project himself to be.
I had no issues with the men who deserved to die. It was the other side of things that got to me, the part where the Commander felt he needed more. Felt he was due more, or just wanted to send a broader, unmistakable message to his enemies. Fuck with me and this is the consequence. It worked. It kept the Avery family firmly in power.
It’s the collateral damage that steals my sleep. The innocents I left in my wake. They make up that vast chasm of darkness inside me as if their souls linger there still. My beast is made up of their pain. They’re suffering at my hands. They haunt my nightmares and I deserve nothing less.
But there was one thing the Commander didn’t see. Didn’t anticipate. We Augustines are an ambitious bunch, and damn, are we vengeful. An eye for an eye, every single time. That’s the part the Commander didn’t count on—that, and the fact that every single time I went home after a job well done, I reported back to my father.
Together, we built a database. Because for the Commander I killed, but for my father I stole. I stole information. I stole evidence. That’s why we’re at the top of the food chain now. That knowledge has made the Augustine family invincible.
Wiping the Commander from the face of the earth? That was my due.
I navigate the SUV through narrower, dirtier streets of Miami. Up ahead, I see the flashing lights of the strip club. It’s a seedy place, but it’s one that offers privacy. It’s where we used to come after some of the particularly bad nights. Where Thiago and I could get away from under the Commander’s ever-watchful eye.
This is where he’ll be if he’s anywhere at all.
I park at the end of the street under a busted-out streetlamp. Val would tell me to take the pistol, but I know the no guns rule. Besides, I don’t need a weapon. Men have a way of clearing a path when I approach. Instinctively, they sense the danger. Subconsciously, they move away from the plague I carry as if to avoid the devastation that follows me.