Sadie's Game (Ashby Crime Family)

“We’ll see.” She smiled, but in those blue depths, I saw doubt. Uncertainty. She thought she had me, but she wasn’t completely sure. As far as I was concerned, that meant she didn’t have shit on me.

Hopefully, Ellison would make it true.

Eventually, the boredom and cold got to me, and I curled up on the hard bench and tried to sleep, but it didn’t come easily.

Instead of peaceful dreams, hopeful dreams, hell, even erotic dreams, I was haunted by them. They were nightmares, but there were no monsters under the bed, no boogeymen. No, these were real-life nightmares of all the things I let slide, doing a disservice to myself as well as my children.

Those thoughts, those nightmares inevitably starred those fucking priests. Perverts, every last one of them. But it was me and their own damn father who’d let those grown men use my boys as fuck toys. If I’d been stronger back then, I would have put a bullet in Colm’s head from the start, prevented years of pain for my sons. But I was weak. A weak-ass bitch afraid of her own shadow. And my sin was much worse than that. I was afraid of being alone. Of being poor.

And what did I do with the power once I had it? Did I transform the world like I planned? Did I make the lives of the people around me better to make up for the way I came into the money? Fuck, no.

I got revenge.

My family would be fine as long as our misdeeds didn’t catch up to them. Kat said I’d given her a life that made sure she didn’t turn out like me. That was a mother’s dream, but was that enough?

What about the people of Glitz? The people in the Green Zone?

Those were my people. They made my organizations run—on both sides of the law. I made money from their labor, and I gave nothing to them in return other than dime bags and titty bars.

But what else did I have to give? The Ashby Organization wasn’t a charity; it was a money-making venture, a capitalist enterprise. And who the fuck was I kidding? Sadie Ashby was nobody’s PTA leader; she wasn’t the type who baked cookies and gave back.

She was a stone-cold boss bitch. She was the CEO.

The head bitch in charge.

But was that all I was? The truth was, that kind of thinking was why I sat in this fucking jail cell in the first place. Jasper warned me that the murders came too close, would draw the wrong kind of attention. Warned me about my obsession with Mueller. With Bonnie. But I didn’t want to fucking hear it.

I let out a deep sigh as the hours passed, and sleep refused to give me any peace. Was I really here, sitting in this cell for no other reason than my son, my posterity, was finally seeing his full potential as head of the family?

“Fucking pathetic.” I growled out the words, and they echoed against the cement walls, the metal bars and benches in the deep recesses of the holding cell.

Twenty-four hours passed and I grew, not anxious, but I felt something as parts of my life flashed before my eyes. It wasn’t the kind of flashes you get just before you die, not happy moments, pivotal moments in your life filled with laughter and smiles, some moments of wistfulness. No, these were the kind of flashes that said a second chance might be possible. A chance to fix all the fuck ups. All the mistakes.

Every face I erased from this Earth.

Owen Byrne. Roman Hargrave. Father Eric. Father Johnson. Some random fucking John. Father Ray O’Leary. Father James Murphy. Father Richard Swanson. Father Sean Sullivan. Bonnie. Mueller.

And there were so many more.

There were too many to name, some I only knew by a first name, and some of them didn’t have a name at all. All that mattered to me was satisfying that thirst for revenge.

And I did. And it was wonderful. Beautiful.

Satisfying as fuck.

But it wasn’t enough.

Not anymore.

Chapter Eighteen

Thomas

“Notorious underworld figure, widow of Irish mobster Colm Ashby and daughter-in-law and rumored protégé of mob boss Cillian Ashby, Sadie Rose Ashby, was arrested yesterday.”

The anchorwoman with her fake plastic smile spoke just outside the gates of Ashby Manor. Her Easter egg-colored blazer had to be hot under the desert sun. “Mrs. Ashby took over the family business upon the death of her husband and proved to be even more astute in the business world and twice as ruthless in the underworld.”

I changed the channel, but it was all the same. Sadie’s arrest played on every local news and radio station. Every fucking podcaster in the state of Nevada had put up a video, giving their take on what the arrest meant. Twenty-four hours had passed since that ginger bitch Fed slapped the metal cuffs on Sadie and took her away. Twenty-four hours and there was no word from her or her attorney.