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Chapter Three
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As disappointed as Lilly must have felt, Jack felt a hundred times more disappointed that he had to leave his date with Lilly and Payton. He enjoyed making Payton wiggle in her seat. He laughed out loud at how easily Payton could be manipulated. He knew that Lilly was her sister; it wasn’t by chance that they went on a blind date. He enjoyed knowing he could blackmail Payton if need be. Lilly could be quite useful to him, seeing as she was a lawyer. He was heading over to meet a document forger, who happened to work at a land records office. Once the documents were in his hands, the next house would be ready for an alleged sale.
Thinking back to his childhood, he had only been caught once, and then sent to juvie. Such a silly ordeal, he thought now. He was the victim and then he was punished. He and a bunch of his mates were out for a nice Saturday night joyride when one of them decided to hold up a liquor store. It was not his fault he dared the guy. So ludicrous and unfair.
His friend walked into the liquor store and he followed a few minutes later with a lit cigarette in hand. He knew this guy was a pussy and wouldn’t actually do it; he enjoyed snickering in the shadows. Then his friend pulled a water gun filled with vodka on the clerk, asking for all of his fucking money. He ran out to tell the other guys to get the car going because the motherfucker actually did it. Before they could get out of there, the clerk pulled a real gun on them. In an instant they were surrounded by cop cars.
Remembering his first night behind bars made him shudder. Being marched into his cell, all delinquent eyes on him, trying to get a glimpse of the new prey. The guard had to hold him up since he was tripping over his own feet as he tried to take in his new surroundings. Thirty days, just thirty days, he kept telling himself. It shouldn’t be that hard to survive…
Looking at the cellmates staring at him, he gulped. His neighbor had a pale face with prominent scars that made him look like an older man. He knew there was an age restriction in this ward, but if he didn’t know better he would think this man was in his thirties. His arms looked about twice the size of Jack’s legs, and he had a toothless grin. How would he defend himself against something like that? He was a man of talents, not a man of strength. Before he knew it he was on the cold cement ground on all fours, the shiny steel doors slamming shut behind him. The warden had tossed him in the cell like he was a child’s doll. Looking back, he realized he wasn’t all that different.
Jack vowed he would never again get caught. The connections he made in juvie though proved to be useful and informative for further ventures as the years passed. He liked to think that he lived by the motto: what doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger. How those thirty days didn’t kill him he didn’t know.
It was his first and only cellmate that helped him survive. Like Jack he was an artist, one who was able to reduplicate any document. At the time he was forging personal identification—licenses for underage teens. His cellmate taught him basic self-defense, and by the end of the thirty days it was even hard for Jack to recognize himself. He went from a scrawny boy to this man who began to have upper strength and definition of muscles throughout his body. This was his start to becoming incredibly fit and muscular. He enjoyed the side benefits that went along with his new image, namely the intimidation factor and being able to beat people up to catch the ladies’ attention. There were a few incidents that left their scars on him, both mentally and physically, but this all added to his newly created persona. He saw himself as a confident, bad, sexy cowboy; women found him irresistible. He liked it. He slowly realized that the more he ignored and insulted the girls, the more they threw themselves at him. This was the beginning of his womanizing. He developed such a god complex that he began to think women were beneath him and were all just nameless whores.
It nearly broke the bank for Jack’s aunt to send him away to a European boarding school. She worked so hard and tried everything she could think of to keep him out of trouble. But being as she was Jack’s only family, she realized she couldn’t keep doing it on her own. Jack hated her for it; he thought she just wanted him out of the picture. It was shortly after arriving to the school, his new residence, that he met the young Bernard Castle Junior. He was a look-alike to his father, both were short, overweight, with bushy eyebrows and a cunning personality.
Castle being sent here was a bad joke on his father’s part. He had challenged him—a quality he got from his father, a quality his father admired. But he had made the mistake of challenging his authority in front of his entourage. The youths had both been banished and sent to what they considered a hellhole. Although the boys had grown up very differently—Castle from a privileged background and Jack from a lower-middle class family—their bond was immediate and as strong as if they were true brothers. Unbreakable.
Utilizing their talents, Castle the businessman and Jack the talent, they began trying to establish their own branch of the family business, hoping to bring more variety and money their way.
Here he was, some twenty years later, doing what he loved with a family that backed him and loved him like a true son.
