Page 4 of Lawless

I used to know a kid like him at my old school. He was always in the principal's office, but he never got suspended or anything. They called him a vigilante, whatever that means. Mamma said it was like Robin Hood, except instead of stealing money for the poor, the boy was helping people who couldn't help themselves.

"Thank you," I said after he admitted what happened.

"For what? Saving you? It was nothing. Ivan and the idiots think they're hot stuff just because his uncle is low-level mafia. It's nothing like your dad, though. That's probably why they attacked you."

Everything he said sounded like something out of a movie. I didn't know how he knew everything he did. I just wanted him to keep talking, to tell me more. His voice made me feel good and helped me forget about the pain.

"What's your name?"

He smiled. "Me? I'm Lloyd Farrell. And you're Dante Romano."

"I am," I replied. "Would you like to be my friend now?"

Lloyd laughed at my question, though I knew he wasn't laughing at me as much as he was the goofy smile I wore.

"Absolutely. Someone needs to look out for you. Plus, your dad said he would talk to my mom about some stuff. I bet they're trying to figure out a schedule for us to hang out and stuff. Mama has tried to do that with other kids, but they're not as cool as you."

Turned out, a few days later we'd do more than hang out. My father saw something in Lloyd that made him decide he was worth keeping around. He hired his mother to work in the castle-house and moved both of them in.

Little did we all know that it would be the start of everything. Lloyd would become the most important person in my world.

CHAPTER TWO

PREACHER

Thirteen years old

"You've gotto wait for the second click to know you've gotten it," Dante told me. I nodded as I reset the lock to try again.

We were practicing our lock picking skills in the back of his father's mansion. This area was once a place where men trained under the eye of the Cosa Nostra. As times changed and the army of men under Mr. Romano grew, the space no longer worked. They had several large buildings around town setup to be training facilities, one of which was actually a gym. We're only allowed to go to that one because it was open to the public.

That didn't matter at the moment though because my mind was focused on my task. With Dante breathing down my neck to get it done before the timer went off, I was focused on making sure I felt every inch of the lock. I didn't want to let him down. I couldn't.

Dante might have been the one who needed saving originally, but he saved me too. His father got me and my mom out of our crappy one-bedroom apartment a us to this mega house. The move gave Mom better work and it let me live with my best friend.

So, what if his dad is a bad guy? Most people in the world are. They just hide it better.

Mr. Romano once told me that people who hid their ugly were worse than the ones who made it known to others what they truly were. He claimed the biggest betrayal was in the deception, not the darkness itself.

I embraced the same ideas nowadays. Even at only thirteen years old, I knew what I was getting myself into by aligning with Dante's family. I would have to be part of the dark with him.

There was no place I'd rather be. Wherever Dante went, I'd go too. We were ride or die like that.

And in this business, there was loads of death. Like how Dante might strangle me if I didn't get this fucking lock done in the next ten seconds.

Just as I felt him shift forward to stop me, the lock clicked, and I pulled the door open. I grinned over my shoulder. "Told you I could do it," I said, my voice cockier than it needed to be given the number of failures there had been before this one success.

"About time you figured this out. We need to run through it two more times before we move on to the next thing."

I rolled my eyes at him as I relocked the door and set up the timer again. "And what comes after this?"

Dante remained quiet as I began to work. I knew it wasn't because he hadn't heard me. Dante always heard me. Even when I didn't say a word, he knew where I stood on things. This silence was more because he was worried about my reaction to whatever he would say next.

"Weapons training," he admitted after an extraordinarily long pause. "We'll start with knives and move to guns."

I ignored the sirens that went off in my mind at how blasé my friend sounded about it all. His father had been training him for the last two years in these things. It was only recently that Dante thought to bring me into the fold. He figured if he trained me himself, then his father would have no reason to turn me away. That and he planned to vouch for me.

We just had to wait for the right moment — whenever that was.

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