Mallicks: Back to the Beginning (Mallick Brothers 5)

It looked easier when I watched other men rise to the top of their respective empires. Fucking Grassi was living in a mansion bigger than any I had seen before. His restaurant was nearly built. He drove a new car every two years.

He came from mob money, Helen had reminded me when she caught me at a low moment, complaining about the struggle. You can't compare our lives to others. You came from nothing. We started with nothing. I think it is amazing what you've made in such a short period of time.

And, when you put it that way, in terms of what I had earned, not what I presently had in the bank, then yeah, I had made more money than a lot of men would see in their lives. But it needed to keep getting reinvested, earning more interest, securing my reputation of always having it when someone needed it.

It was one thing to turn someone down because you didn't trust them to repay, but it was another to turn them down because you didn't have the cash.

It didn't look good.

It didn't help your reputation.

And in this business, your reputation was everything.

That was why I was splattered with blood more often than I wasn't.

"You should be draped in fucking diamonds," I told her, putting the mug down. "And you're buying bread with coupons."

"Firstly, you know how I feel about diamonds," she said, waving her engagement ring around - an aquamarine stone - because she said it reminded me of her eyes, and she refused to be part of little kids enslaved in Africa. "Second, it is stupid to throw out a coupon. I don't care if you have a million dollars in the bank. That bread was practically free. Only an idiot turns their back on practically free food."

"You know what I mean, baby," I told her, my breath sighing out even if my lips were curved up. Because I could see her. Pulling up to the grocery store in a Mercedes with a handful of coupons, brow raised like she was daring anyone to say something about it.

"I know you need to stop being so hard on yourself," she told me, chin raising, arms crossing, giving me a hint of the hard she usually only showed people outside the house, or Ryan when he was giving her a hard time about eating his vegetables. "And I know we have everything we need. If you want more, it is just that. Want. And it is fine to want things. But don't you dare diminish what we have here."

Her words were a knife, cutting through my bullshit the way only she seemed capable of doing.

My Helen.

Life, time, wifedom, motherhood, they had molded her into a woman very different from the scared girl in the prison she called a life.

And, let's face it, this world we lived in changed her as well.

Starting, I was almost sure, on that night.

The night I wasn't there for her because of the career I had chosen, when a man caught her alone and vulnerable and unarmed.

And she had needed to fight her way out.

It had shown us both a side of her we hadn't truly known before. Or when it had surfaced, when she had turned a gun on her father, had attributed it to survival instinct.

But it was more than that.

It was something encoded in her DNA.

It was something, as much as she hated to even think it, that came from her father.

A ruthlessness.

A determination to be her own person. One who commanded respect, was capable of instilling fear.

And it was fully awoken the night in the motel when that scumbag thought he could put his hands on her without permission.

From that day forward, there was a determination to her, a confidence, an almost intimidating aura she carried around her.

The woman, just an up-and-coming loanshark's fiancé had the attitude of a kingpin's wife.

One of the men who owed me money once came up to us while we were pushing Ryan in a carriage down the street late at night because it was the only thing that put him to sleep sometimes.

I hadn't even been able to get a word out of my mouth before she was around the carriage, stepping between Ryan and the man, in full-on mama-bear-mode, leaning in so that her nose was inches from his, telling him in a voice that gave fucking me chills that he was never going to approach her family like this again if he hoped to see another day.

The scariest part was that she meant it.

And she meant that she would take the rest of his days away. Not me.

He'd paid me back two days later after two weeks of me threatening him.

One talk with my woman, and the man was selling off plasma and semen to get the money he needed.