Savior Read online

  I was never a violent person by nature. If you fucked with me or mine, I handled it. When pushing came to shoving, I was a mother fucking fighter. But I didn't enjoy it. I didn't get off on it like some of the other guys did. Maybe that was why I was picked, for my control. And as addicted as I was to the money lining my pockets, there was no way I was fucking up my standing in the gang by refusing an order. That and, well, roughing up a woman who had very little control over her own safety in the first place, that was some pussy-ass shit and the fuck deserved what he got. Which included eight stab wounds and a busted jaw. He lived, just barely. But he never went anywhere near one of our women again.

  I moved up in favor, given power over the new bloods on the street, despite being the same age or even younger than some of them.

  During this time, me and Enzo, we started drifting. He was the good kid. He kept up his grades; he kept his head down and his nose clean; he respected his mother's wish that he never fall into the streets. He had his jock friends and wanted nothing to do with his drug-dealing, pimping, fist-fighting, knife-wielding half brother. It was a wish I understood, even as young and cocky and money-hungry as I was, I got it.

  I graduated at eighteen, just barely. Enzo recovered from his surgery and went to work at some pathetic nine-to-five that was eating away at his soul little by little. Each time I saw him, he seemed just a little bit more run down and hopeless.

  I had a top of the line Mustang and a five-thousand dollar watch on my wrist. I also had a reputation and a squeaky clean rap sheet.

  When Darius took three to the chest during a drive-by and bled out right at my feet, I decided it was my time. I was stepping up. I was calling the shots.

  It didn't happen as effortlessly as it had for Darius. I was young. I wasn't as experienced as some of the other guys in the gang. But I was power hungry and still headstrong enough to think I was untouchable. Anyone who questioned me got a reminder of why Darius used me to handle his problems. If they didn't bend, they were broken.

  Older, wiser, I didn't look back on those days fondly. I didn't look at the things I had to do to hold my power for as long as I had with a smile. It was cold, brutal, and lonely at the top. I understood why Darius was so paranoid, why Terrell turned to the drugs. You lived your life under the weight of the constant realization that you were always one backstabber or one police raid away from a coffin or a cell.

  So I became hard.

  I ran shit with an iron fist and a loaded gun. My women were kept clean and safe. I traded in crack for heroin when the time came and the demand switched. I got contacts from South America. I brought the operation to a whole other level. My men were smart, discreet, and ruthless. No one stepped in on our turf. All things considered, it was one of the bloodiest reigns the Third Street gang had since the early nineties. The power struggle in Navesink Bank was a delicate balance of respecting the right organizations: The Henchmen, The Grassi family, The Mallicks, and Richard Lyon. Later, Hailstorm, V, and Lex Keith; but also knowing who needed to be tamped down before they got too powerful. The Mexicans, the small time MCs, the Irish. They weren't full blown wars, but only because I got wind of something I didn't like the smell of, I attacked hard and early. No one got the chance to dig in their roots and threaten our control of the streets.

  Ten years. Ten years I called the shots. Ten years I spent lining my pockets, tagging women, growing my empire, listening to my mother and aunts and sisters and grandmother lecture me about not wanting to bury me or visit me at the penn.

  Eventually, they all moved in together, pooling their money, and refusing one cent of my 'bloody money'.

  Just shy of our twenty-ninth birthdays, an old shadow darkened my door. I wasn't sure how long it had been since I'd seen Enzo. Annie had died of cancer three years before and I had covered the cost of the arrangements and been present at the funeral. He had too, but I didn't pay him any attention, too wrapped up in myself at the time.

  The last time I got a good look at him must have been a good five years before.

  If his eyes and face weren't the same as what I saw in the mirror, I wouldn't have recognized him. He'd dropped a good fifty pounds he didn't need to lose, making him look sickly.

  "Fuck don't tell me you're on rock or ice," I said, shaking my head as D let him in my office which wasn't an office at all but a ostentatious living room inside a housing project that was our headquarters. I could have afforded a nice place in a decent part of town, but when you ran the streets, you had to live in them too.

  "Call off your boy," he said, jerking his head toward D.

  "Take a walk," I agreed and D excused himself.

  "I want in," he said, taking a couple steps into the room, not even bothering to look around at the TV that took up most of the wall or the sound system that cost the down payment on a mid-size car.

  "In on what?"

  "This. What you got. I want in. I'm fucking over slaving away to make pennies. I'm sick of swallowing the shit men feed to me just because they have a salaried position. I'm done. It's over."

  "Annie wouldn't want..."

  "Mom's dead. Mom has been dead a long time. I respected her wishes when she was around to care. She's in the ground and all I got is myself. And I want better."

  "She ain't all you got. You got me too."

  From that day on, he did.

  He worked his way up.

  He got his own reputation. If possible, somehow meaner, bloodier, and crueler than mine. He had, after all, ten years of feeling under-appreciated, overlooked, poor, and weak to draw anger from. Not to mention the loss of what looked like a promising career in basketball. He threw every bit of disappointment and rage into earning and keeping the respect of the men. He put in hours that made everyone else in the organization look like they were slacking; he made it possible to rise up in the ranks in under a year. He put on sixty solid pounds of muscle. He protected the girls. He watched over the new blood on the streets. He helped balance the books. He went with me to meetings.

  Then one night, we got word of one of our girls getting roughed up and raped by one of our own. First, it was against the rules for any of the guys to get anything from any of the girls whether they gave it away for free or they paid for it. It wasn't done. Second, there was no fucking way you put your hands on them at all, let alone force yourself on them.

  So me and Enzo, we grabbed knives and guns and we headed out.

  See the thing is, we knew the important members of our crew. We knew the men who kept an eye on things, who handled our big clients, who enforced the rules. But we didn't know the names or reputations of every punk on the streets handing out bags of smack. So when we showed up at D'angelo's house, we had no idea he was just a kid. Meaning, no more than sixteen. He was big and heavy, having the body of a grown man, making it easy for him to overpower one of the girls, but in the face... just a boy.

  Enzo pounced.

  Because age didn't matter. You were old enough to live through a beat-in and possibly offer up a nice chunk of your life to jail for the gang, then you were old enough to take your punishment when you earned it.

  I froze.

  I froze because I saw for the first time what I was doing. Not necessarily in that moment, because even free of the gang and older, I don't regret that shithead getting his face bashed in. Rape was rape, didn't matter if you were of legal age for a beat down or not. But, all the arrogance and power fell away as I stood there and watched the boy I had grown up with, the one with fucking potential, with the grades and skills to get out of our shit upbringing in a straight-up way, bash into the face of a street kid I had employed to sell drugs, a position that ultimately gave him access to our women.

  And it wasn't just the two in front of me. It was the dozens of men, and the smattering of women, that I employed. Yes, I gave them a way out of poverty like Terrell and Darius offered me when I needed it. But in exchange for that, how many men died at my hands? Rival gang member
s, sure, but my own too. Ones I had ordered to be taken out, ones who had caught a spray of bullets during a drive by, ones that went away to jail and got shivved and left out the back door in a casket.

  In that moment, slumped back against the wall in a house that obviously didn't belong to the kid getting his jaw busted, I was done.

  It was over for me.

  The problem being, it didn't work that way.

  If you wanted out, you got out by death and death only.

  Leaders especially didn't get the luxury of walking away.

  Maybe they would have let me run. I could have rounded up my family and went to the West coast. But it wasn't just about my family at that point. I liked Navesink Bank. It was all I ever knew. I'd made friends outside of the gang that I didn't want to lose. I wanted out, but I wanted to stay in the area.

  And, well, that meant my options were limited.

  And the options I did have, yeah, they were bloody.

  "Enough, Enzo," I snapped, dragging him backward by his shirt as the kid rolled to his side and spit out blood on his mother's carpet. Enzo shook me off and stormed outside, needing a minute to calm down. "You're out obviously," I told the kid. "We see you anywhere near our operation and especially our women again, your mom will be picking out funeral flowers. Got it?"

  It took me three weeks to build up the nerve and steel my stomach to do what needed to be done.

  Half of the men in Third Street ended up with knife wounds or bullets.

  This included Enzo who spent two nights in a hospital bed recovering from a shot to his shoulder.

  It was all bravado and it only worked for about a week before some of the men I attacked came at me in my new life in the industrial part of town. But I had been expecting them.

  I spent two years fighting before they got tired of losing and left me alone.

  Enzo never came after me, but I also lost my brother the second I put a bullet in him.

  By the time I was thirty-four, I was fully free. No one messed with me and I got a following of ink lovers who kept me in business. I still had my nest egg that I earned illegally that allowed me to have the nice things I liked, the car I liked, the spending money I liked.

  Enzo had a bloody fight to get to the top. A couple of the other guys who had been around longer kept him down and called shots until either he, or someone else, took them out. Things had been crazy since I left them, but had finally started to shape up once Enzo got in power. His men still needed some reining in, but he was doing better. Things were more controlled, less paranoid. People respected him, maybe partly because he reminded them of me in my younger days, but also because nothing about Enzo invited questioning or disrespect.

  Things between us were fine for a while, both of us ignoring the other, pretending there wasn't history.

  That all stopped when I found out Third Street sold H to my little sister, a girl who had once been like a sister to him as well. Granted, it wasn't him directly, but it happened under his watch. I handled my sister first, shipping her off to rehab even though she had only been high twice. Then I grabbed my gun and sneaked into Enzo's place, walking up behind him as he sat on the couch and put then cocked a gun against the back of his neck. "Sell my sister smack again and you won't live to regret it, Enzo."

  The next time I saw him was when my friend Shooter had his girl kidnapped a year back by the Third Street gang's heroin supplier. It wasn't a warm reunion.

  It was a sick thing, but I missed him.

  I missed the boy I grew up with, the man I did business alongside, the face that used to sit across from me at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter dinners.

  But there was no going back from what we had done.

  In general, as well as to each other.

  Nine

  Elsie

  "You shot your brother?" I heard myself ask when he stopped telling me his story.

  It wasn't an easy story to hear. Worse yet, I imagined, because I came from such a privileged background. That kind of dark and twisted didn't happen in my world. In my world, the worst that you'd suffered through was someone talking behind your back, destroying your image. Maybe a little drug addiction thrown in here or there- alcohol or cocaine mostly, high society drugs. But there were no beatings and backstabbing and shooting and killing.

  But the way Paine told it, with a sort of detachment, was a testament to how normal it was in his life. Like that was just how life was where he grew up.

  "Yeah, baby. I shot my own brother."

  "Wow," I said, sitting down on my couch and looking down at my hands for a second.

  "Wanna run screaming now?" he asked and, if I wasn't mistaken, there was some kind of vulnerability in his tone. He expected me to reject him because he had a past. Maybe a wiser person would, but nothing about Paine said he was a bad person. He had done bad things to get what he wanted and needed out of his life. The same could honestly be said about men like my father. He'd sunk smaller businesses to build his up, laying off thousands of families that needed paychecks, throwing them into financial uncertainty. He did this without a thought, without a flinch. He never stopped to think about what his actions did to others, what they did to himself.

  Paine did.

  So I wasn't going to fault him for having a sordid, ugly past.

  "No."

  "You should," he said, coming over toward me, sitting down on the coffee table in front of me, our legs touching. He reached behind him and put the jewelry box down.

  "Probably," I agreed. "But I don't want to."

  Paine's head cocked to the side as he watched me for a minute. "Pretty rich girl wants to go slumming?"

  I felt my eyes lower as I stiffened. "Don't turn me into a trope. I'm not a God damn trope. I don't want you because you are a bad boy tattoo artist who used to run a street gang. I think you're a good man. You've been good to me as a whole. So don't you dare try to pull the 'oh the poor little rich girl can't get fucked right by the rich guys so she needs some back street guy' thing on me. I deserve better than that. And, quite frankly, so do you."

  Somewhere along in my speech, Paine's lips tipped up and by the time I was done, he was full-on smiling. "You want me, huh?"

  I felt my eyes rolling. "Of course that was all you heard."

  "You want me," he repeated, his hands landing on my knees as he slowly moved to stand, raising one hand to rest on the couch behind my head to balance his weight as his body curled, forcing me to press my head against the couch to tip my head up and look at him. His other hand slid up my thigh, over my stomach, over my breast, then cradled my jaw. "Say it," he demanded, his voice low.

  I wet my lips, swallowing hard.

  "I want you," I admitted because, well, I did. I wasn't the kind of woman to play coy and evade when it came to sex. I knew what I wanted; he knew what I wanted. What was the use in denying it?

  "Fuck babygirl," he said, fingers stroking up over my cheek slightly. "Any idea how good that is to hear?"

  "How good?" I asked, head tilting, smile teasing.

  His hand left my cheek, going down the side of my neck and sliding down my arm until he found my hand, grabbing it, pulling it up, and placing my palm against the crotch of his jeans over his hard cock. I heard a low, needy sound escape me as he curled my hand around him. "That good," he said, his voice getting deeper as I grasped him and did as much of a stroke as his thick jeans would allow.

  I looked up into his light eyes, mine a challenge. "You know what I find with you?"

  "No, what?" he asked, his hand digging into mine as I did another stroke.

  "You're all talk."

  "Is that a challenge, babygirl? Because, let me tell you, you open up for me, I can make you scream louder than any man or battery-powered device ever has before."

  My free hand went up, snagging the back of his neck and pulling him down toward me, kissing up the side of his neck. "Maybe I'm quiet as a mouse when I come."

&nbs
p; "Not for me," he promised, his hand moving off mine, tagging me at the waist as he simultaneously dropped down onto the couch beside me and hauled me up and over until I was straddling him. I adjusted my legs and sank my hips down, feeling his hardness press against my heat and throwing my head back on a silent moan. His hands sank into both my hips, using them to stroke me over his length and the silent moan became a not-so-silent one. "Barely touching you," he said as I leaned forward and rested my forehead to his.

  "Yeah, what's up with that?" I asked and was rewarded with a small chuckle as his hands shifted around and down until he was cupping my ass, his fingers squeezing in hard.

  "Did I tell you yet what a fucking phenomenal ass this is? Been thinking of it since that first night in those jeans. And in that purple dress... fuck me."

  "Yes please," I invited, getting another chuckle before I pressed my lips to his and the sound disappeared on an erotic little growl.

  A current passed through my entire system at the contact, making every inch of my skin feel electric and buzzing. I sank lower against him, my chest pressing hard into his. One of his hands snaked up my spine and curled into the hair at the nape of my neck. The other released my ass but only so he could pull back and smack it hard enough to make my body jump unexpectedly. My teeth sank into his lower lip in retribution, earning me another smack that had my thighs and lady bits contracting hard. His hand curled harder into my hair and tugged backward, making me release his lips and pulling me far enough back so he could look at my face.

  When he could see me, he smacked again, harder. My body jumped, my mouth parted, and a small whimper escaped me as I stroked over him again, trying to get relief from the pressure low in my belly, begging for fulfillment. "Oh, babygirl, we're gonna have fun," he said with a sexy half-smirk. He released my hair. "Arms up," he instructed and up they went. The material of my sweater felt scratchy and uncomfortable on my heated and overly-sensitive skin. His hands went to the hem and snagged the material, pulling it up slowly, exposing me one inch at a time. I said a silent 'thank-you' to early morning hungover-me for choosing the pretty tan and black lace balconette bra and matching panties and not the plain white 'fuck this shit' bra and panties I almost put on. The material went over my head and Paine flung it across the room. "You wear this shit on the daily?" he asked, hands moving to my ribcage just under my bra line.