Page 4 of Beautiful Liar

“Thorne is pushing into the neighborhood, offering opportunities,” Russo went on. I learned early on in this game that silence could keep you alive. Apparently, Russo hadn’t learned shit.

A slow tingling lifted up my spine, branched out along my shoulders, up my neck. I shuddered in response. The blond’s eyes narrowed. Fuck. If there was a God, please let me have thisone thing. This one part of me hidden. Sweat dripped down my back. I needed the fucking bathroom.

“You and the others are considering your options. You think I don’t know how to run the business.” Tristan hadn’t formed that as a question.

Russo shrugged.

A blur of movement caught my peripherals, and Jacob and I pulled out our weapons as if we’d practiced this a dozen times. In sync, it was a beautiful thing.

Tristan slammed Russo’s head against the side of the desk hard. With a resounding crack of bone, Russo’s body hit the floor. He didn’t move.

The adrenaline spike made my hands shake.

The guys shifted, realized they were fucked and glared at Tristan.

“Where do your loyalties lie?” Tristan asked the two fuckers as if he hadn’t just exerted a good amount of pressure to the back of a fat man’s head to kill him on impact. This was an olive branch. Tristan didn’t kill needlessly, but he wasn’t a pushover either. Apparently, Russo had forgotten that hard truth. “You think my family weak? You think we don’t own this fucking city?” Tristan’s voice took a slight lilt, an accent that only surfaced when he was enraged. Something he had eliminated so that he would be taken seriously in the boardroom only to lose it all. Because of me. Not something I should be thinking about while I tried to control my body. And it wasn’t fucking working.

My hand holding the gun shook. This time Jacob and Tristan caught it too. Tristan wasn’t armed. That meant Jacob was the only one here that could protect him. Killing Tristan would end the family. Maddox was a hot head, not a leader. And Liam knew nothing about the business. His expertise lay in Restitution. In information. And Declan and Imogen were targets.

Fuck. I fucked up.

That’s the last thing I remembered when the world narrowed to a tiny point. I saw the fucker in front of me reach behind him, heard the sharp report of a gun, then nothing.

Chapter Three

Kieran

Thin strands of dark hair covered my mother’s eyes. I moved the strands away, my fingers grazing her cold skin. Her body had once been full of life, now it looked as if all her insides had shriveled up. Her skin sunken, hollowed out. The only prominent feature was her round brown eyes. For a moment, she remembered me, and she smiled.

“You’re such a good boy, Kieran,” she whispered.

The sickness clung to her and wouldn’t let her go. I prayed like Grandma did at night. I prayed for God to heal her. To keep her alive. But even she knew she wasn’t going to survive whatever had taken over her body.

Cancer.

I imagined the cancer like a dark parasite spreading all over her insides. Clinging to her organs and sucking the life out of her. Uncle Roy told Mom to fight. As if somewhere inside her body she had little soldiers attacking the parasite, but they were losing.

Mom was dying.

I nodded, believing that I could be good. I was good. I did my chores. I did well in school. I didn’t fight Fernando when he took my Oreos. I didn’t talk back to Mrs. Butane although she graded my math paper wrong. I was good.

I held my mother’s hand as her lids closed. Her lungs whistled as she fought for every breath until there was no more breathing. No more trying. Silence.

That’s when Grandma came into the room.

Grandma saw Mom and knew, then she screamed. Then Roy started to cry, and Sally hugged Grandma.

More people started to come into the small room, and I snuck outside, alone. I sat on the swing set Mom got me whenwe moved there. She had said that the move would be a good start for us. She said that my dad had bought the house for us, for me. She had said that one day, he’d come back for me.

I waited.

And waited.

Then the men came for me.

They locked me in a cellar. Dark and cold. I wondered if that’s what the insides of Mom’s body had turned to. Dark and cold. Maybe, the cancer had gotten me too.

I cried and slept, cried and slept.

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