Page 17 of Merciful Lies

“And what about Daddy dearest?” Giselle pushes, and my stomach turns.

“What about him, Sisi? This isn’t his business?—”

Something shatters in the other room, and I am on my feet. Giselle grabs me by the hand, stopping me from going inside.

“Wait.” she hisses, and she is already dialing 911.

I hear a groan and a couple of loud thuds. Someone laughs, and the sound is pure evil.

I shake Giselle’s hand off me. Somewhere in the back of my mind I recognize that groan.

Fear trickles up my spine as I walk through my bedroom.

The window in my tiny bedroom is shattered, but I walk towards it and look outside.

I peer through the darkness to where shadows are moving almost out of my line of vision.

I see something. It’s crawling through the trash bags sitting on the sidewalk, waiting for pickup tomorrow morning.

Something scurries between the heavy black plastic. Probably a rat.

My attention flicks back to the huddled mass. It pauses and I think I recognize the brown shirt with the cream letters on the back. I can’t read what it says.

There’s something dark and thick, and it’s leaking all over the mass and it takes me a moment to discern it’s a person.

The liquid pooling beneath them is like chocolate syrup. They finally stop moving just beneath the flickering streetlight.

Then, I scream.

CHAPTER SEVEN-NICO

“What do we fucking know about this?” I bark.

“Warehouse is gone. Staz, the night guard, saw them creeping around with Molotov cocktails and called it in after he got to safety,” Luc answers first.

“And?”

“And Sanchez fucking junior doesn’t care what was mapped out with his father. He’s claiming this is his turf,” Angel explains.

Pure rage leaks into my vision. This fucking punk.

I look at the footage of what’s left of one of my warehouses and I fume. This prick set fire to it.

He’s lucky no one was injured. Lucky it was empty. But that’s not the fucking point.

“Want us to hit him back?” Angel asks.

My gaze flicks to Luc who’s still studying the footage. He is frowning, and I wait for him to speak.

Angel is my muscle guy. My cousin. My best friend. And Luc. Luc is my Council. Looking at him, you wouldn’t think he graduated from Princeton Law.

He’s wiry and tall, but his lean build belies his strength. I’ve known Luc a long time. Since we were both kids causing trouble for the dealers on our block growing up.

His sister OD’d before her twenty-first birthday, which was a year after my mother had done the same. Back then we didn’t know what we were doing. We were just angry.

The cops wouldn’t help, so we did it ourselves. We raided stash house. Chased away customers. Started fucking fights.

My cousin, Angel, joined us after I got my ass handed to me. Then he started training us. We learned to box. To shoot. To fight with knives.

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