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Fate.
She just needed time and a strong hand to show her what she couldn’t see for herself. That she was better off without her father. Better off without The Crows. Better off with me.
It would take time and patience to show her. To smother her fire and teach her obedience.
I would do it for her. I would do anything for her.
But first, there were three problems to deal with.
Well, more than three, but I would start with them just as I’d always planned to. The Crows.
It would be to both my personal benefit and my advancement in the gang to decimate them, and after all the recon I’d been doing I was finally ready.
I’d do it for Ava Jade.
But I was also going to do it for me.
We deserved Thorn Valley and all the territory between. It should’ve been ours from the start. If our leader had half a brain, it’d already be in our hands. But no one seemed to understand that a man’s greatest weapon was his mind. Not his gun. Nor the number of bullets inside it.
His mind and what he could do with it. The things he could make happen simply with knowledge and know how.
I reached for the new papers resting in the print basket atop the desk and tucked a few into Ava Jade’s file from Briar Hall to inspect with a closer eye when my head stopped throbbing. The others I placed on the board, tacking them on, running red thread between every other thing they could be connected to.
The connection formed immediately between two items and I grinned. Gotcha. Snatching a permanent marker, I wrote does daddy know? Beside the gps location I just pinned. A concert venue.
I grabbed a burner phone from the basket next to the printer and slid the cheap plastic backing off to shove in a prepaid SIM card, powering it on. A message waited for me there. One I hadn’t expected.
Unknown: This ends now. If you have even a shred of dignity, meet me in person. I want to see the face of the coward who tried to drug me.
I smiled.
Not yet, my love.
But soon. Sooner than you think. Once they’re gone, and it’s only you.
I quickly powered off the phone and pulled out the sim. I couldn’t use it now. Too risky.
I’d have to get a message to the boss another way. Let him know I was alive. Still undercover.
And Becca. After what I saw and heard from my surveillance, she would no longer be of use to me. A shame. She’d proven great practice for the real thing. A testament to my ability to control my darkest urges. It wasn’t without great difficulty at first, but once I began to look at it as the game it was, it became easier. Easier still when it was a game I kept winning.
I’d take this minor loss and learn from it. As I had every other loss before it.
The Crows wouldn’t catch me off guard again.
I unpinned the single sheet of paper containing my false identity next to Becca’s photo and tore it in two.
For Becca, I was Jericho.
But I had different names for others.
None of them my real name.
I couldn’t stand the sound of it spoken aloud.
All I could hear was my mother’s voice in that name. Her threats. Her dominance. Her manic commands to do it more, do it better, do it, or else.
My self reckoning happened the day I turned the tables. The moment I took the control from her hands and put into my own. Wrapping those hands around her pale throat. The transference of power flooded me like a drug. And I couldn’t get enough.
I wouldn’t ever get enough.
It was time for a new persona. A new face. A new way in.
And I had just the thing.
They wouldn’t even see me coming.
