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“I don’t give a shit. That means nothing. What’s important is respect. You’re useless without your reputation. Once you lose that, you’re done. And if others get wind of your failure this weekend, they’ll come after you. And destroy you.”
The fact that I had dished out punishment with a brutal beating instead of a bullet to the head didn’t prove shit. I wasn’t weak.
The other crime syndicates wouldn’t come after me for this. Not when I held their money in my hands. I controlled where it went and how it was cleaned. I then invested it and multiplied their returns without them having to lift a finger.
Whoever controlled the flow of money was the one people respected, the one they wouldn’t dare to cross. I was a fucking King in this city. Every mafioso, mob boss, and motorcycle gang used my services and invested in my firm. I had all the underworld’s cash at my fingertips.
“They can’t destroy me. If they do, they’ll lose their investments. Besides, I still have my reputation.” They all knew what I was capable of, what my father had raised me to be. The monster I was…or used to be.
Regular kids played at the park. I hung out on street corners with my pop as he passed out dime bags to buyers like the preppy Ivy League student before exam time or the homeless junkie with shifty eyes and a gun sticking out of his jeans.
Regular kids opened presents filled with toys on their birthdays. Not me. On my tenth birthday, my pop slid a gun across the wobbly kitchen table. “Here, son. Use it well and watch my back tonight. We have a job to do.”
On my thirteenth birthday, I received the biggest gift of all. A new gun, along with the honor of making my first kill. At least that’s how Pop had described it. An honor. A rite of passage.
His words at the time had seemed so wise. I had believed it all back then. But today, they haunted my soul.
“You’re a man now, son,” he had said as the dead body of my kill oozed blood on the pavement. “Everyone who is anyone will hear of this, and they will fear you. Respect you. Nothing matters more in this life than respect. Once you lose that…” He placed his gun to my temple. “Bang! You’re dead.”
I remembered the pride I felt. Not in the kill, but because my pop was proud of me.
But the eyes staring back at me today didn’t have a speck of pride in them. Contempt glared at me. “You’re turning into a sissy-ass punk, punching numbers on a calculator instead of the enemy. That control you think you have doesn’t exist. It can be taken away from you the minute your brains get blown out. How many times do I have to teach you the ways of the world before you get it?”
I didn’t need another lesson from him. My whole life had been one excruciating lesson after another.
Like on my fourteenth birthday when he sent me to one of his whores to get my cock wet for the first time. I was coming in her—hard and awkward—when my pop snuck into the room, crept up behind me, and put his gun to the back of my head. “Bang, son, you’re dead. What did I tell you about never letting your guard down? Trust no one. You constantly need to be on the lookout.”
I couldn’t stop coming. Once it started, it didn’t fucking stop until you were spent. So, I kept coming while my pop loomed over me, the cold gun barrel digging into my skull. Thirty-four years later and I still couldn’t fuck with my back to the door.
Thinking about sex had me imagining Lila. Actually, that was a lie. Every minute over the past twenty-four hours, she had been on a loop in the background of my mind.
I was so preoccupied with memories of her body that the usual fucked-up emotions raging within me during these visits slowly ebbed away.
It wasn’t just her curves I was thinking about. But the way she looked at me, like I wasn’t something revolting or scary, made me yearn even more to continue my mission to make our business fully legit.
But I couldn’t. If I turned my back on the organization, my father would no longer have protection in prison. It was my duty to protect him…because I was the reason he was in here.
There were many people he’d screwed over in his lifetime. And all those people he killed…well, they all had families and ties to gangs in this prison. Without my protection and the power of my organization, Pop was the one who’d be dead.
Didn’t he realize his life was in my hands now?
“…only thing that guarantees you stay on top,” he said through the phone, “is by making sure no one can defeat you. And the only way to do that is to ki—”
“Pop!” I glanced sideways at the guard and whispered to my father, “Careful what you say.”
“I don’t give a shit. I’m already in here for life. You’re my biggest mistake. You’re ruining everything I built. I thought you were ready to be a leader. But now I know you never will be. And you even ruined the alliance I had set up for you. That Fiona from the Devil’s Eyes MC would have made sure you did what had to be done. You should have married her when I told you to. But you ruined that too. You’re a fucking disappointment.”
Fiona was as evil and twisted as my father. No wonder he tried so hard to get us to marry. But after a few months of dating her, I knew I could never stomach it. And I couldn’t stomach my pop’s insults and guilt-tripping anymore either.
“Enough!” I rose to my feet and peered down at him.
He punched the glass between us. “You little shit.” His voice was low and menacing. “You think you can act tough because I’m behind bars?”
The guard at the end of the room craned his neck to look at my father. “Hey! One and only warning, Slater.”
“This isn’t the time or place to talk about this.” If he wanted to talk specifics, he’d have to do it from his hidden cell phone in the middle of the night.
He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve got all the time in the world, son. A lifetime to be exact.” He put his arms out to the side and looked around. “And where else could we talk? Have you forgotten where I am? Because of you.”
