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And even after all that, all the pain and near death experiences, there’s still this little shimmer, this little spark inside of Winter Chastine that refuses to die. She may be named after the coldest season, but she burns as hot as summer.
And that’s a problem.
Tapping my fingers along my desk, I peer at a photo of Winter. It’s older, from when she was in her late teen years. Even then, she’d been a troubled girl, dealing with a father who didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as her. A father who wasn’t even technically hers.
Her mother had spun the lie, not confessing she’d cheated on her husband with her brother, picking up the relationship they’d had most of her life. She’d pawned Winter off on Paul Chastine. I’ve always wondered how long he knew she wasn’t his.
He’d done so many cruel things to her, but he’d also done the same to Richard, who was biologically his.
Pawning them off for his drugs, their bodies being touched by strange men.
Verbally and physically abusing them, it’d been just like what my father had done to my own brother.
But my father never tried to give either of us away to his enemy the way that Paul did.
Because when she was only seventeen years old, Winter Chastine had been offered to me.
Five years ago…
Heavy is the crown of the son who has to take over for his fallen father.
Sighing, I look into the front of the car at Vito. He shouldn’t be driving me around, that’s the job of a guard, a lower ranking member in the family.
Not the man who would be my second if it weren’t for my little brother. The man who technically still is my right hand man, if even not in title. He watches my back, keeps my brain on the right things, and my head on my shoulders.
He’s more fit for this position than either me or my brother, but he never complains about his position or his responsibilities. Even his father had told him that he deserved my position, which of course had come after I’d relieved him of his own responsibilities.
He’d been my father’s right hand, but father is dead now and I don’t need the old heads he had helping me make decisions.
If that were the case, they’d already be trying to convince me to kill my brother, who was just caught with his dick in a male usher last week in the church.
At our father’s funeral.
Of course, it’d been one of the old heads who was on the worst side of seventy that discovered them. I’m still surprised he hadn’t had a heart attack as he’d spewed on and on about my brother disrespecting our father. I think he just may have keeled over if he saw Maximo piss on our father’s grave after the graveside service was over.
Proof that despite the new promotions, my brother is even less ready than me to run the family. Which is why Vito is a godsend.
In our family, it's typically like the presidency. You almost have to be collecting social security in order to run everything. Our father was only in his sixties, with at least another decade of power in front of him.
But when your guts are cut out of your body, your decision making goes with it.
The thought makes me sick and I twist in my seat. I can’t show any outward signs of weakness, but I was close with my father. He turned me into the man that I am today. He was the first to shake my hand and congratulate me after I took my first life and became a made man.
He was the one who was the first to call me out for being too weak any time I defended Maximo.
He was the one who made it clear that the family would one day be mine.
And now he’s gone.
And I have to keep the family moving forward.
I have to finish this war.
Which is why I’m meeting with some man named Paul, who says he has information on the Seven Quad Gang’s leader, Maddox, the man who killed my father. After they’d called a truce to end all the bloodshed.
That fucking snake Dox had even sent a sacrifice to say he’d been the one who killed my father, some low level gangster. The man had claimed he didn’t know about the treaty or some shit like that, thought the war was still going on when he gutted my father. The old heads had taken that at face value, believing it to be the truth. Another reason why they had to go, they use too much emotion and not enough logic.
I hadn’t believed the sacrifice for one moment, even as I’d put a bullet in him. And I had been right not to, because it hadn’t taken nearly as much searching as I thought to find a video of Dox shooting up my father’s car and security detail before he’d drug my old man out of the wreckage. He and a few of his boys had thrown my father into their car and that’s the last alive footage I have of him.
