Ronan
Ihadgivenup on complaining and accepted the fact I was gonna have to be stomaching a blonde for two years in a row now. How the shit Álvarez managed to find the one Japanese chick in Cove City who was bleaching her hair was a marvel to me. Somehow, I just wasn’t fucking shocked. He was nervously pacing, explaining the reasons he picked each of them and I knew he was doing his best to justify his cause, but I wasn’t having it.
“Oh fuck,” I heard Santo behind me, and the shattering of his glass dropping forced me to raise my head to see what demanded the sloppy reaction. I turned my head to see Mateo standing six feet away from me with none other than the treacherous viper who poisoned my life and stole our future from me. I felt time stand still, completely frozen.
Exactly like that first time I ever saw her when I was just a ten-year-old boy awkwardly standing at her door.
In three steps I cleared the space between us, and I pinned her to the wall, holding her by the throat as her feet dangled in the air.
I wasn’t that boy anymore, and I wouldn’t let her hypnotize me.
“You grew,” her voice scratched through from the pressure of my hand against her windpipes, and she drew a sinister smile that made me want to kill her even more.
“This is a joke, right? Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you,” I roared, letting my grip on her dissolve as she fell to the floor.
She rubbed her throat casually as she stood, “You’re lucky I still like that, asshole.” She narrowed her eyes at me, and I was suddenly reminded of every filthy thing I had ever done to the girl standing in front of me. I had quickly masked my reaction to her remark and hoped she didn’t notice the effect she still had on me.
“Maybe that’s what I’m here for,” she shrugged, and I arched an eyebrow at her confession.
Self-destructive had never been her style, she was too smart of a girl for it.
But she wasn’t a girl anymore either, and standing in front of me was the woman I once thought I’d share my whole life with. She filled out in all the right places, but aside from that she looked almost exactly how I remembered. Her golden skin glimmered in the most lick-able way possible and I had to force myself to remember that she wasn’t mine anymore.
“You came to hand yourself over to the Devil then?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest as I tried to fight the temptation to touch her beautiful soft golden skin.
“You are not my Devil Ronan Zerkos, no matter what you think you may know about how you feel. My Devil goes by a different name and compared to him, you are an ant crushed by the weight of his heel.” She spat the words out at me in anger, like I was the one who threw everything away over a few hundred thousand dollars.
“What’s the con Cecilia?” I asked her, as the whispering and whimpering of the blondes behind me started making my blood boil in annoyance.
“I am and have been many things since we have last seen each other, Berserk. Con-artist has never made it to the list,” she huffed and turned her chin up at me in defiance using the name my men and the city knew me by.
I didn’t speak, not yet. I was completely out of words, and I could barely even believe she was standing right in front of me.
After years of looking, she was finally right there.
“I need protection,” she finally admitted. Her confession was a sudden surprise, and it took everything in me to hide the instinctual part of me that re-awakened, the part of me that told me to protect her.
I bit back the urge to ask her who was after her, but I had to know what kind of fucking trouble she could have gotten herself into. Knowing Cecilia and her ability to attract the strange and unpredictable, I couldn’t even begin to guess.
“Who’d you piss off?” Santo asked from behind me, as if reading my mind.
I gave him a cutting look that let him know this wasn’t his interrogation and my brother sat back down like a wounded dog. I didn’t mean to chastise him but, he didn’t understand how to handle Cecilia. She could walk all over him from the very first time she stepped foot in our apartment all those years ago, and I was honestly not sure if he even hated it.
“I can’t tell you,” she said to him, not breaking eye contact with me in that arrogant style about her that pissed me off to no end. It was the trait that ruled my life for the better portion of ten years, and it was what forced me to accept whatever she wanted to tell me or didn’t tell me as an absolute fact.
“Typical. You show up here in my city, my house, twelve years later asking for protection – after you steal from me. After you steal from us, and you won’t even tell me from who? I don’t owe you fuck Cecilia, get out of my house before I put a bullet in your pretty face,” I shook my head and pointed towards the way she came from.
“No,” she said, lifting her chin up higher. “If you want me to leave, you’ll have to do more than threaten me. What waits for me is death, so unless you plan to kill me now, and put me out of my misery, you’re closer to my salvation than my reckoning. I need your help and you will give it to me, Ronan. I can make it worth your while.” She pulled a small silver key out of her pocket and opened her hand to show it to me.
“It’s a fucking key, so what?” I asked her impatiently, as I teetered between wanting her closer and wanting her as far from here as possible.
“This was in my Mamá’s trailer the day we found her dead. I know this key is the way to my Abuelo’s fortune, and if you give me protection, I’ll help you find it. You can keep it, it’s a thousand times more than what I stole from you, and we can call it even.” She raised her eyebrows at me as she waited for a response. That was a lot of money, even for us, but I wasn’t going to let her see that affect me.
“Your grandpa left your Mamá a hundred million dollars?” Álvarez interjected again from behind, making my skin prickle.
“Probably more but it’s hard to say for sure,” she looked at him and smiled an eye squinting smile that should have been meant for me, and fury began to cloud my mind.
“And what do you need protection from?” I asked again, interrupting their little moment.
“I can’t say,” she whispered this time and looked down.
“Cecilia Gomez and her secrets, coming back to haunt me. I’m waiting for the punchline, but I think the universe forgot to write me one,” I said through flared nostrils. “No deal,” I growled and took a final swig of my whiskey. “Keep your fortune, as you can see, I’m doing pretty well these days, no thanks to you. Maybe you can use it to stay alive.” I was so close to her face I could feel her breath on my skin while my anger boiled through to the surface. I peeled my upper lip back to fight the instinctive urge to kiss the lips that were only mine for so long. I backed up and made my way to my bedroom leaving her with her mouth parted in shock as she realized her lack of sway on me.
“Santo, please. I wouldn’t have come if I had any other option. I just need a little time, just a few months. I just need to get everything set up and legalized to head to Spain.” I heard her beg, her voice full of a desperation I had never heard from her before. I turned on the exorbitant sound system in my room and let the music blast out in a volume that vibrated beneath my feet. Kane badgered me into upgrading my portable Bose speaker when he found out that was how I had been listening to my music. Music was sacred to Mateo, and apparently what I had been doing was borderline sacrilegious.
I headed straight to the small bar in my bedroom to refill my whiskey glass. As I slumped on a nearby chair, I tried to make sense of what the hell just crashed at my doorstep. Once the glass was empty, I shuffled my way across the black marble flooring and opened the door to my en-suite bathroom. I stepped out of my dark blue Prada suit pants and briefs and lazily undid the black button-down shirt before turning the water to an uncomfortably hot temperature.
I let the steam begin to roll out of the walk-in shower before I moved under the cascade of the water that took up the entirety of the shower ceiling. I wasn’t stupid enough to believe anything I said or did was enough to make her walk out of the high-rise. Actually, I would bet on the fact that she was probably sitting on the couch right now, sharing smiles and stories with my brothers like she was an old friend.
I also wasn’t stupid enough to realize that if the bitch hadn’t left me to begin with, I wouldn’t be here right now. After she left, Álvarez gave me exactly three months to drink away my pain, but it wasn’t enough. I had a profound numbness inside of me that couldn’t be remedied, and I needed to feel something other than the void that was left behind when she walked away.
After I self-destructed and distanced myself from everything I ever cared about, I enlisted in the Navy. That’s where I met Mateo Kane. Our ambitions, convictions, and lack of fear for our own lives made us the perfect desirable candidates for the Seals. We made it into the Special Ops team in record time, and at twenty years old we were almost giving Scott Helvenston a run for his money as the youngest ever Navy Seal. Kane saved my ass more times than I had fingers and there wasn’t a day during our time served that I wasn’t pulling him out of the fire. To be honest the guy was a magnet for death, he had a hard-on for it like no one I had ever met before.
One time in Russia, while rescuing a political hostage, the asshole actually jumped out of a twelve-story window. I mean he was trying to avoid a bullet in the brain and got lucky enough that a pool was there to dull his landing – but still. The corner of my lip turned up in a smile as I thought about the years with both of my brothers next to my side. Santo spent the six years Kane, and I were in the Seals solidifying an alliance with his cousin, the leader of Los Muertos, and walking him through the blueprint of the dream we had for Cove City.
We owned it all here now.
Drugs, guns, cars, it all came from us.
Sure, the Russians had their brothels, the Irish had their bars, and everyone shuffled a little product here and there. At the end of the day though, everything they were pushing came from us first, they just didn’t know it.
Once we called Cove City home, we moved fast. We took the city in just a few nights so that the gangs wouldn’t know what hit them. Mateo and I used our time, resources, and skills while in the Seals to find out everything about our future rivals and their leaders. With the help of Santo and his small loaned-out army at our disposal, (courtesy of Guillermo and Los Muertos) we were able to take them out during a few well-planned attacks. We made it look like they had all killed each other over a turf war during negotiations, it was easy as pie. Eventually, everything fell into place, and the smaller street gangs took note of the new outfit in town and instead of going against us they joined us.
That’s when we became The Black Crow Brotherhood.
When you cut the head off, the beast doesn’t die.
It does considerably weaken and allow for a bigger beast to take control while they lick their wounds though. We played the smart game so that we could play the long game – Mafias don’t vanish, they replenish. We would never be bold enough to believe we could wipe them out here, and if anything, we’d be raising alarms by slaughtering a bunch of bosses. Bratvas and Yakuzas would be flying in by the hundreds to put us in our graves early.
No, Cecilia Gomez was destined to be my undoing, not some Mafia piece of shit. Her old man must have been somewhere in hell having a laugh at me. The joke was on him though, because there was no way I was going to let her walk out of here ever again.