“Oh, Aisling, I won’t be able to sleep at all tonight. Mind stroking my hair until I do?” Mother moaned, when after hours of tending to her, I’d said I needed to hop into the shower.

I smiled tightly, sitting myself back on the edge of her bed. “Yes. Of course.”

I stroked her hair for hours. When she finally fell asleep—by that time, my fingers were numb—I retired to my own room, took a quick shower, slipped into my bed, and started crying.

Crying for Mom, for all the suffering she had to endure in her marriage.

Crying for Mrs. Martinez, whom I’d left in the middle of an important meeting to try to extinguish another Fitzpatrick fire created by my selfish, self-centered parents.

And crying for myself, because I wasn’t like my brothers or their wives.

I didn’t have my happily-ever-after. My destiny was to fall in love with the monster in my story, the character most likely to be slain.

But most of all, I cried because of Sam.

Because he was the only man who could break my heart.

And because he chose to do it. Often.

The first bullet I shot pierced straight through the man’s chest. A clear shot into his heart.

The second bullet flew to his friend’s forehead, making the man snap back like a bowling pin and land on top of his fellow soldier with a cry.

There were very few people who were as good marksmen as I was.

A retired veteran once told me I’d have made a great sniper. Joining the army was never in my cards. I was a selfish man who liked to wage his own wars and didn’t have the time or patience for anyone else’s.

Silence hung in the air, the echoes of the gunshots still buzzing in my ears. The faint scent of gunpowder and blood hung heavy in my nostrils.

I didn’t get into gang fights often, but when I did, I relished the hell out of them. Violence calmed me. Made my blood run cold rather than stir hot and restless.

Calmly, I tugged a cigarette out, lighting it as I sauntered toward the place where the two men were lying. We were in a Brookline attic, just above the deli where a massive drug deal had taken place just a few weeks earlier. Vasily Mikailov’s territory, which I’d conquered in recent months.

Back when Troy Brennan ruled the streets of Boston, the gang crime rate was low to nonexistent. Everyone had their own corner of the world to rule, to reign, and to hold. Troy was a fair underboss. He didn’t have a severe case of megalomania—something you couldn’t say about his predecessors—and had no trouble sticking to Southie, an area which he ruled with an iron fist.

I, however, had different rules, different aspirations, and an entirely different approach to life. You either bent or snapped for me. There was no middle ground, and I wanted it all—every nook and corner of the city and everything inside it.

From the moment I took over, there had been bloodshed. I didn’t settle for a finger. I took the whole fucking hand and built an empire on the ruins of bones and blood.

The Italians had been the first to bow down. They did so immediately. The majority of them ran to New York and Chicago after my first round of massacring their top bosses. The event was marked in the local newspapers as Night of The Long Knives, where I killed no less than ten mobsters in their beds.

The latinx had followed suit, scurrying to the edges of illegal betting and drug-dealing after I struck them.

The Russians, however, put up a fight. Brookline belonged to the Bratva, and I had to pry it out of their hands, using a lot of force and raising the body count on the streets. It had been an ongoing, uphill battle with many casualties, many assassination attempts—on both sides—and a hell of a lot of headache.

Bending down on one knee, I drew a black plastic glove from my back pocket, slapped it on, and pried the first bullet from the man’s chest. Next, I moved to my other casualty. Thankfully, the bullet wasn’t smeared in too much brain matter, which would have been a bitch to clean.

I wiped both bullets with the men’s shirts and pocketed them, sighing as I straightened back up and proceeded to deal with the rest of the situation.

“How bad is it?” I clipped, my annoyance loud and apparent.

“Bad,” Becker, one of my soldiers, wheezed behind me like a fan, shifting on the floor of the dusty attic. “I think they got my lungs.”

“Pretty sure I broke my arm,” Angus, beside him, added.

Both assholes didn’t even have a high school diploma yet somehow managed to medically assess themselves. I walked over to the two useless oxygen wasters I’d hired to do my dirty work, surveying them coldly.