The Monster (Boston Belles #3) - L.J. Shen Page 0,30

I remembered.

Remembered her brief period of soberness.

Remembered the day Cat came home looking like a train wreck, bleeding and bruised.

Her brokenness, so pathetic, so whole, even I couldn’t hate her in that moment.

How she crawled inside her bed, balling up and crying uncontrollably, shaking like a leaf, and I found myself helpless, torn between helping her and hating her for yet again failing to feed me.

How in the middle of the night she had skulked to my grandmother’s bedside—Grandma Maria and I had shared a room the size of a closet—and croaked, “Call an ambulance. I have to get to the hospital. Now.”

The betrayal was overwhelming.

Gerald knew I was Catalina’s biological son all along, and he still used my services.

According to her, he’d been distantly grooming me for the job I was doing today.

He had driven my mother to drugs and alcohol.

Impregnated her then beat her to a point of miscarriage.

Then made her leave me.

I could’ve had a different life.

A better life.

He deprived me of a fair, second chance and wasn’t even man enough to come clean about it when our paths crossed again.

Gerald Fitzpatrick robbed me out of a future, my family, my unborn brother.

For that, he was going to pay.

With his blood.

With his tears.

With his goddamn miserable fucking life.

I’d been Boston’s fixer my entire adult life. Since Troy had decided to retire from the gig when I turned twenty-two and turned to more lucrative and legal businesses. I’d always viewed it as his birthday gift to me. I took over the family business, tackling each problem the rich and influential people of Boston came to me with, no matter how wildly unorthodox it was.

By twenty-two, I’d broken enough bones and crushed enough skulls to be feared and respected everywhere I went, both by the criminals and the law.

Troy was playing house with Sparrow, running their restaurants and staying away from the heat by the time my name hit the FBI’s most wanted list. He knew I was different—a few shades darker with an appetite for blood—and had long given up on taming me.

My whole life, I’d fixed things for other people.

It was time to allow myself the luxury of one, uncalculated destruction.

Kill everything Gerald Fitzpatrick loved and cherished, just as he did to me.

Karma never lost an address.

And I was going to make sure his would arrive in a timely fucking manner.

Catalina Greystone’s tombstone was black.

Irony was a bitch, but it sure had a decent sense of humor.

I didn’t know how or why Cat had been buried in a cemetery in Atlanta but had an inkling my adoptive mother had everything to do with it.

Sparrow was a practical yet inconveniently sentimental person. Even though she wasn’t religious, the vein of Catholic virtue ran thick and full in her body.

She couldn’t bear knowing Catalina would get cremated then thrown into a trash can when no one claimed her ashes. Sparrow couldn’t chance the slight unlikely scenario in which I’d ever want to go visit her grave.

I spent the next couple days in my hotel room in Atlanta, ignoring phone calls, taking discreet meetings with local gang leaders and drug lords, and plotting my revenge on Gerald. On day three, I checked out and went to Catalina’s tombstone. Mrs. Masterson called to let me know they already put the stone up and asked if I wanted to go see it with her. I declined politely—there was only so much shitty apple pie and idle conversation a man could tolerate—but I still decided to make a pit stop at the cemetery before heading to the airport and back to Boston, mostly to ensure the bitch was six feet under and very much dead.

The mossy earth sank beneath my loafers as I buried my fists inside the pockets of my black pea coat, strolling toward the tombstone—smooth, fresh, and shiny, a memorial to my broken childhood.

I stopped when I reached it, smirking grimly when I noticed Sparrow had omitted the word ‘mother’ from Cat’s short list of titles. Guess it was petty o’clock when she placed the order for it.

The air was bitingly cold, unusually so for Georgia, the wind lashing against my face. I lit a cigarette between numb fingers, smirking around it as I used the tip of my loafer to smear a smudge of mud over the glossy stone, dirtying it up a little.

“Good riddance, sweetheart.”

I crouched down, touching the gravestone with the hand that held my cigarette, marveling at how brief human life was. One century at best