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So, if I seemed like a pushover, I was.
I’d been trained to be a pushover when it came to the Five Points.
We all were.
Meggie O’Leary had let one of the Pointers rape her, for fuck’s sake, because no one went against the gang.
Of course, Aidan O'Donnelly had blown out her rapist’s brain when he’d found out one of his men had raped a fifteen-year-old girl, but that didn’t take away Meggie’s pain, did it?
And when you saw the Pointers doing anything in my neighborhood, you looked the other goddamn way and hoped to Christ they hadn’t realized you’d seen them.
I couldn’t even begin to count how many damn drug deals I’d seen going down. I’d witnessed a stabbing, which might even have morphed from assault with a deadly weapon to murder, and I’d even seen someone being shot, too.
Had I gone to the cops?
Did I look crazy?
Of course, I damn well hadn’t.
We all knew to stay out of Points’ business if it was feasibly possible. Sometimes, it just wasn’t. Their work meshed with our lives, but we had to ignore it, and remember that they worked to their own weird code.
It was half Catholic, half Old Testament, and half Aidan-O'Donnelly crazy.
In fact, the more my conditioning came into play, the more centered I became. I was doing this to protect my father, but I was also doing it to please a Points’ man, because that was what we did.
We pleased them.
My mom had told me once that if I was unlucky enough to come to the attention of one of the runners, she’d forgive me if I gave my virginity to them.
Yeah.
Fucked up, right?
Mom was devout Catholic though, and she was naive enough to think that I was willing to wait until marriage before I got laid.
Of course, things had worked out in her favor until now. But unintentionally.
Still, that was how it worked.
She’d known I couldn’t say no. That if I did, I’d get hurt, and being hurt wasn’t worth closing your eyes and thinking of England for however long some punk with a gun pumped between your legs.
To be honest, the only advantage to my plus size had always been, in my mind anyway, that I’d always coasted under the radar.
Jenny hadn’t, but she got off on the bad boy thing. She liked being a gangster’s moll as she teasingly labeled it. I always told her she’d watchedOnce Upon a Time in Americatoo many times.
But here I was, my time had come to lock horns with the devil, and there was no way I wasn’t about to do exactly as my mom had taught me all those years ago.
I’d just never thought I’d be close to Finn O’Grady when it happened.
I’d never thought he’d be the one extorting me into his bed, and I’d sure as hell never imagined that I’d be going somewhere where Aidan O'Donnelly, the head of the terrifying gang that ruled the roost that was Hell’s Kitchen, was in the same vicinity.
By the time we made it into the elevator, I was freaking out. Then, Finn touched me, and it was—no lie—like the sun, the moon, and the stars had suddenly come into alignment.
I’d never felt anything like it before, had never thought I’d experience something that I’d only ever read about in books or seen in movies. And yet, when I’d stared into those eyes of his, wide blue pools that I could drown in—how apt—everything had centered itself again.
I’d taken a moment to calm down, to breathe, and had known that just as was the case with my mom’s dictates, if I followed Finn’s, I’d be okay.
Of course, as we were spat out into a very impressive foyer, things went to shit almost immediately.
