Page 22 of Sinful Empire (Mount Trilogy 3)
All remaining color drains from her face, and the glimmer of distress that flashes in her gaze guts me.
I don’t want her fear, but how could a man like me deserve anything else?
Heavy moments of silence hang between us until Keira, the queen I never knew I needed until we were both tricked into something we didn’t see coming, finds her voice.
“Tell me why.”
It’s not a question. It’s a demand, and one I didn’t expect her to make. I didn’t expect her to care about the reason behind it.
“Does it matter?”
Her nod is infinitesimal, but I catch it.
“It matters more than anything I’ve ever asked you. Please tell me why you would do something like that. I have to believe there was a reason.” The threat of tears underlies her tone, and I’d rather take another bullet than hear her sound like that again.
I don’t justify my actions to anyone. Ever. But I know this is one exception I have to make, or I’ll lose her forever.
I look away, not wanting to see her face as I tell the story.
“About ten years ago, there was a boy who tap-danced on street corners of the Quarter, near Jackson Square. I’d see him almost every time I left here. The same boy, day after day after day. People think that when you’re the boss, you don’t notice details, but that’s completely wrong. When you hold power like I do, you know detai
ls are the difference between life and death. This wasn’t one of those details. It should’ve meant nothing to me that I saw the same kid every day, but something about it twisted up my gut.”
I pause, remembering the expression on the kid’s face, and I force myself to continue. “Every time I saw him, he was more erratic. He should’ve been in school, or so I assumed. He couldn’t have been older than six or seven. I wasn’t sure. But he was more skin and bones than anything else.”
Keira sucks in a horrified breath at the picture I’ve painted, but I don’t look at her. I’m too lost in the memory.
“One day, I finally stopped and sat on a bench for six hours, watching him with his bucket in front of him where tourists would toss their dollars. Every couple hours, a man or a woman would crawl out of the gutters and empty it, and the kid would keep dancing. I’ve been around long enough to recognize addicts of every kind. Meth addicts aren’t hard to spot.”
“Oh my God,” Keira whispers, because she’s catching on to where this story is headed.
I keep my eyes fixed over her shoulder on the far wall of the room, because the rage that builds inside me when I remember isn’t something I want her to see.
“Please tell me they didn’t . . .” She trails off, and I wish I could tell her that this story isn’t going where she thinks.
“The high from glass, a more potent form of meth, can last for eight to twenty-four hours. When he’d start to slow down, they’d grab the bucket and carry him off for a little while. I followed them that day and watched as the woman, his fucking mother, would feed it to him.”
A sob tears from Keira’s throat. “No. How could she?”
“There are plenty of parents who do horrible things to their children, and there’s no way to save them all.”
“I can’t even fathom—”
“You shouldn’t have to. That kind of shit shouldn’t fucking happen, but it does.”
“So, what did you do?”
“I called a few of the crew. We grabbed the kid, the mother, and the asshole who was her piece-of-shit boyfriend and dealer.” I drag my gaze from the wall and meet Keira’s horrified expression as I confess just how fucking brutal I can be without remorse. “She made her kid dance on glass, and that’s what she earned for herself.”
Keira holds a fist to her mouth like she’s struggling not to vomit, and I don’t blame her.
“Street justice isn’t a slap on the wrist or a few days in jail. Street justice is more than an eye for an eye. It’s harsh. It’s brutal. That’s who I am, Keira. Harsh. Brutal. Without remorse.”
The disgust on her face makes me wish for a single moment that I had been born a different man. A man who deserves her. But I wasn’t. I was forged in the fires of the hell I grew up in. I survived the streets the only way I knew how, by climbing the ladder up Johnny Morello’s organization.
I tear my gaze away from her, expecting her to run for the door. Instead, she asks me a quiet and unexpected question.
“What was the boy’s name?”
