Page 3 of Bittersweet Revenge
“Let’s get you strapped in, big boy.” She tries to smile, but her chin wobbles.
All I can do is nod.
Mom takes us to a house I don’t recognize. It’s tiny…and empty, except for suitcases and bags hidden in the closet.
“We’re going to play another game now—the name game. Your new name is Dean. If anyone asks, you must tell them you’re Dean, okay?”
I nod. Why can’t I talk? Did my words get lost?
“We’ll be okay, Dean,” Mom says.
I nod again, and we drive away, getting as far away from Boston as we can.
*
Dean
Fifteen years later
I’ve been stalkingthe O’Sheas for as long as I’ve been able to be on the internet by myself. Mom spent most of my life being overprotective, hardly letting me out of her sight, but she couldn’t keep the internet from me. It became my only friend, in a way, because we moved too much for me to find any real friends—not that I want to. Fuck that. To have friends, you have to trust people, and I sure as shit won’t ever do that. Dad had trusted the O’Sheas, considered them family, and look what happened to him.
So yeah, I’ve spent a lot of fucking time online. There’s not much I can’t do with a computer. It comes naturally to me—coding, hacking—but so much of what I do is watchhim, watchthem. The people who used to say we’re family, who said they loved us, then killed my father in cold blood, simply because he wanted a different life for my mom and me.
And I’ll kill them just as coldly.
I was fifteen when I chose my way into the O’Shea family.
Tiernan.
Sloan’s son.
I have fragmented memories of him from when we were children. We played together until that day when I was four years old and everything changed. When Riordan died and Dean was born. I haven’t been the same since, and I never will be.
I scroll through Tiernan’s photos on social media. I’m surprised his father lets him have this page. Or maybe I’m assuming his life would be anything like mine, though I don’t know why. Sure, his dad is the boss of one of the deadliest crime organizations in the country, but Tiernan didn’t grow up in hiding like I did. He didn’t have a mom who spent her life sad and alone because she lost the only man she ever loved, and working odd jobs so as not to draw attention to herself.
Now she’s gone too, and it’s just me.
My skin heats like fire is licking up my skin, so I close out of the site before I end up throwing my phone against the wall and busting it. I have a bit of an anger problem, at least that’s what Mom used to say. I’ve gotten into boxing, hoping it’ll help, but all it has done is make me a better fighter and showed me I like hitting things. Reading and drawing help and are probably better alternatives to deal with shit. And I do love both, but they aren’t always what I need.
“You’re so angry, kiddo. I want better for you. I want more. Your dad would too.”She said that to me countless times over the years.
What my dad would have wanted was to be here with me, but that didn’t happen, did it?
All because Sloan O’Shea discovered my dad wanted out.
I pace the apartment that’s decorated the way Mom left it six months ago. A stroke, they said, but I think she died from a broken heart.
I should go to my high school graduation. She would want me there, would have cheered and cried and told me how proud of me Dad would have been.
There was a time when I think she doubted I would finish school. I started a year late, and I didn’t begin speaking again until the third grade. But I did well in school. No matter how many times we moved, I studied hard because I knew it would be my way out. College had been our plan, but what she didn’t know was that all the schools I applied to were a facade—all except Ashford University.
All that matters is getting into that one place. Where Tiernan goes. Where his father had gone. Where I’ll find a way to get close to him, the boss’s son, then take his father away from him, the way mine was taken away from me.
CHAPTER ONE
Tiernan
The familiar soundof organs playing drifts around me in a way that should be comforting but isn’t. It always feels wrong to be at Sunday Mass, but it’s something I’ve been doing all my life, pretending the many sins we commit on a daily basis don’t exist within these walls unless we’re in confession—even when they don’t know the truth of it all. Because how could we admit to everything we do?
