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By the time Joey died, he didn’t have many friends left. He’d pushed everyone away.
Including me.
When I heard he was missing, I hadn’t seen him for four years.
Oh, I’d heard the rumors about him not being the same kid anymore. How the drugs had stolen his soul and turned him bad. But they were whispered by the very men who killed for our family or were involved in the seedy underworld and lived beneath a skin of lies, pretending they didn’t do dark deeds in dark corners. So I took their word with a grain of salt.
Joey and I were born into crime. We were raised by the sword in a world where only the most vicious survived. He left for college when he got a football scholarship and never came home again.
I don’t doubt he had changed. But in my head, he’ll always be the seventeen-year-old boy who held my hand when our father’s coffin passed us by and whispered, “Don’t you worry, sis, I’ve got you.”
A few feet away, a hooded warbler lands on a grand tombstone that towers above the rest. It’s an ostentatious structure of black Italian marble and crystal, and it’s so ridiculously over the top, it’s almost out of place.
The name blazoned in gold leaf across the marble is hard to miss…
Donnie Hatzakorian
My stepfather.
The man I told Ares I wanted killed.
Yeah, he’s already dead.
His life was snuffed out by three bullets. One to the head, another to his heart, and one point-blank ranged shot to the balls.
That was where I shot him first. His balls. It didn’t kill him. It just hurt like a motherfucker, and watching him suffer was payback for all the evil things he did to me when I was young, all because he could.
By rule, I don’t even look at it when I visit the cemetery. Because the less amount of time I spend acknowledging his regretful existence, the better.
The truth is…
I didn’t hunt down Ares to kill anyone.
I hunted him down because I want revenge for my brother’s death, and I know it was Ares who ended Joey’s life.
I don’t know why.
It was the one question I was going to ask him right before I put a bullet in his head.
No one could ever tell me why.
Not the police.
Not my family.
No one.
For some reason, Joey’s disappearance and death is shrouded in secrecy.
I know he wasn’t a saint. We were raised by the sword, and my brother often let that lifestyle seduce him.
But my mother says Ares killed Joey in cold blood.
And it’s up to me to take revenge.
I’m not visiting Flintlock to fuck Ares and develop feelings for him.
I’m there to kill him.
