was hardly enough time to enjoy what this planet had to offer.
“You know, Cat, I thought about killing you often enough. Every other month, maybe. There is something poetic in taking a life from the person who gave you one,” I tsked, surprised to discover I wasn’t as happy as I thought I’d be about her finally being gone. “But then it all boiled down to the same thing: killing a person is taking a risk. You were never worth the risk. That’s your life story in a nutshell, isn’t it, Catalina? Never more than an afterthought. So many lovers, and fake friends, and fiancés, and even a husband, yet no one has ever visited your grave. Only an eighty-five-year-old neighbor who would find Stalin lovable. I guess it’s goodbye.” I stood up, taking one last drag from my cigarette, flicking it over the tombstone then spitting on the lit ember to snuff it out.
I turned around without looking back.
Another one bites the dust.
“Do not let this spin out of control,” Troy warned the following day while we were sitting in my office in Badlands, enjoying a hot toddy—heavy on the whiskey—and the blissful sound of my workers running around in the hallway, fulfilling my orders.
He rifled through the stack of call logs between Catalina and Gerald from decades ago that I handed him a few minutes before. His fingers were still tinted blue from the outdoor cold, his pale face tinged pink by Boston’s winter’s bite.
“How did you even find this prehistoric piece of evidence?”
“I’m a very resourceful man,” I drawled.
“No shit.”
The first thing I did when I got to Boston was dig deeper into the Cat/Gerald affair and find out more about their relationship. From the calls they’d made to each other, the two had begun bumping uglies when I was four years old and ended on the cusp of her leaving when I was nine.
It was unbelievable and yet completely logical that the first and only time Catalina had said the truth was also the time she confessed to something as appalling as an affair with the man who paid me thirty million dollars annually to make his problems go away—and to never touch his daughter.
Catalina was a fucking headache, even after her death, but Gerald was the real villain of the story because his drug wasn’t crack cocaine. It was pussy, and he should have known better.
“Remember your sister is married to Gerald’s son. We’re family.” Troy smoothed a hand over his blazer, his expression loaded with hostility. Everything about him was cocked and ready to detonate like a loaded pistol.
We sat across from each other, me and my adoptive father, looking like a mirror image of one another. Same black Armani slacks, tailor-made for our gigantic size. Same Sicilian handmade loafers. Same black dress shirt—or navy blue, or dark gray, but never white; pale colors were highly impractical when part of your job description was drawing blood by the gallons.
Even our mannerism was comparable. He had an oral fixation he soothed with a toothpick that he stuck to the side of his mouth, and I used cigarettes.
But what it boiled down to was this: Troy and I weren’t blood-related.
He had frosty, alabaster blue eyes. Mine were gray, like Brock Greystone’s.
His hair was jet-black, peppered with gray at the temples and his widow’s peak. Mine was toffee-brown.
He was pale. I was tan.
He was built like a rugby player. I was built like a rugby field.
And he was born into money, while I’d had to adapt to it.
The phrase ‘eat the rich’ always amused me. I’d learned from a young age that it is the rich who eat you. That was why people hated them so much.
If you can’t beat them, join them.
I was never going to be poor again, which was why touching Aisling Fitzpatrick was unwise. The Fitzpatricks made me richer. A whole fucking lot richer than I was when I started out with this gig, breaking legs for congressmen and stashing mistresses on exotic islands.
“This is not going to touch Sailor, Hunter, Rooney, or Xander,” I assured him, referring to my sister, her husband, and her children. I flipped my Zippo back and forth between my fingers, losing interest in the conversation.
“Hunter’s gonna blow a gasket,” Troy noted.
“Hunter’s too busy creating his own family to give a fuck about the one who turned their back on him when he was in boarding school,” I snapped, baring my teeth.
It wasn’t like the Fitzpatricks were winning