Titus didn’t like me. How could he when he was intimately familiar with all the terrible things I had done in my past? I would never forget the way his pretty blue eyes lightened as I told him my sordid tale when I turned myself in after Dovie was abducted. Most men’s eyes darkened, got cloudy and hazy with emotion when they were angry or upset. Not Titus. No, those sharp, intensely blue eyes of his got so light they almost looked silver as I poured it all out. I told him about my baby sister, about how the wrong guy had ruined her. I told him about how the drugs had taken hold of her and how they had led her to prostitution. I told him how it was never enough, so Rissa’s boyfriend started to hurt her. I told him how it killed me because she shut me out, closed the door on me every time I reached out to her. I wanted to save her and I was desperate. As my story went on, his eyes appeared lighter and lighter and the frown on his face harsher and harsher.

I told him about the pregnancy and how Rissa’s boyfriend had freaked out when she told him. He was so upset that she wouldn’t be able to work anymore, that she wouldn’t be able to have sex with strangers to pay the bills. I broke down then, starting to sob when I told Titus about the cops showing up at my parents’ door in the middle of the night to tell us they had found my baby sister’s body naked in a back alley deep in the heart of the Point. I couldn’t breathe around the pain in my chest, and I remembered him getting up and coming around the desk so that he could roughly pat me on the back. He wasn’t a man prone to gentleness but he tried . . . for me . . . and all that did was make me break into even smaller pieces when I told him the rest.

I explained that I couldn’t feel anymore. That I was numb. I whispered that when they put my little sister in the ground they might as well have buried me right alongside her because nothing mattered to me anymore. All I could think about, all I could focus on, was getting back at Rissa’s murderous boyfriend. I was consumed by it, obsessed with it. Nothing else mattered to me. Vengeance was what nourished me. Revenge was what woke me up every single day, and eventually I couldn’t just think about it anymore. I had to act.

He stopped touching me then. He moved across from me and leaned against his desk, much like he had done yesterday while he watched me. By that time his eyes were glittering like diamonds in his craggy face and the metallic sheen in them felt like it could cut through my thin skin with no resistance.

The next set of words trembled off my lips because I knew I was admitting to a crime that could land me in jail at best and on death row at worst. I told him how it didn’t take very long to find someone to point me in Novak’s direction. Of course, the way I looked meant his goons were more than eager to bring me to the now deceased crime boss’s door. All men liked having a pretty girl owe them a favor and what I was asking meant Novak could own me body and soul for the rest of my life.

I didn’t care. Whatever price he asked I was willing to pay. If he wanted me to pay back the debt on my back, I would have. If he wanted me to grind on a pole at Spanky’s, I would have learned to dance. If he wanted me to mule his guns and his drugs, I would have taken any and all of those risks just as long as he guaranteed that Rissa’s murderer got exactly what he had coming to him. I wanted it to be violent. I wanted it to be bloody. I wanted him to suffer in every single way my sister had suffered, and Novak had given me a smile and promised me the bitter satisfaction I so desperately craved.

It had only taken a couple of weeks and then the cops were back at my parents’ door asking if we knew anything about the death of Rissa’s boyfriend. My mom and dad were baffled, and all I could do was sit there frozen in shock. It was supposed to make me feel better. It was supposed to make me feel gratification when he was gone. It didn’t. I was still angry. I was still hollow and missing my sister, and now all those gaping wounds were filling up with guilt and disbelief that I was responsible for another human being’s untimely demise.

Titus growled at me like an animal, and when I braved a look up at him, disgust was stamped all across his handsome face as he got up and put as much space between the two of us as he could. I felt the shame that I made him look like that, felt it all the way to my bones. He inclined his head so that I would keep talking and it took everything inside of me to keep going. I had never claimed to be a good person or woman without faults, but the way Titus was looking at me made me feel like I belonged in a filthy back-alley grave right next to where my sister’s final resting place had been.

I explained that Novak hadn’t approached me for anything for a long, long time. So long that I thought maybe he had forgotten about me and the favor I had asked. I moved out of my parents’ house because I knew I was corrupt, knew I had crossed a line there was no going back from, and went to work in a salon just outside of the District. Strippers paid a lot of money to make sure their hair looked good, and they were awesome tippers since their living was based on the generosity of overly amorous strangers. It was a nice gig and I spent a lot of time convincing myself my actions had been justified, that I had done what any loving, protective sister would do. I wore a mask of normalcy and I kept it on so tightly I almost convinced myself that everything that had happened had been a dream. Then one afternoon Novak’s right-hand man showed up and the mask was ripped away, leaving the vicious, hateful girl I really was exposed to the world once again.

Novak was calling in his favor. I was going to volunteer at a group home for kids and befriend a quiet redhead named Dovie Pryce. I was supposed to learn about her, keep tabs on her, and when the time came, if they needed me to, I was supposed to bring her to Novak with no questions asked.

I thought I could do it. I mean how hard could befriending one shy girl be? Really hard when that girl grew up on the streets and had the same kind of instincts about people as I did. Dovie never let me all the way in, and when Bax entered the picture and I tried to warn her about him, about how bad things were going to get if she didn’t walk away, she shut me out completely. Then came the call I was dreading. Novak wanted her and he didn’t care how he got her. I debated telling Dovie and just forcing her to leave town. I thought about running myself but knew Novak would just come after us both. At the end of the day I took the coward’s way out and called Benny, Novak’s right hand, and let him know Dovie was on her own, taking a bus back to some garage where she had been staying. I knew Novak’s guys would grab her; what I didn’t know was that they were going to use her to hurt Bax, or that they were going to raid the garage and beat her brother half to death and put the garage owner in the ground.