Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 78236 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78236 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
She is definitely the only one who can uphold the Monti name and take her place as my wife.
I hear light chatter outside my office. My mother and Angel fluttering about the baby. Since the news of Angel’s pregnancy, my mother reminds me daily of my responsibility that it’s time I provide an heir.
By my age, my parents had already had Dominic and me. Not that it mattered. They needed an heir out of obligation, but my father never wanted kids. It was obvious in the way he looked down on us and treated us. Dominic saw less of it because my father’s attention was mostly on me as the oldest son.
I knew what my father did for work. He’d taken me into many rooms with him where he shot people dead without so much as a warning. He’d even killed a waitress for bringing my mother the wrong type of soup once. No one in the restaurant so much as screamed, let alone went to the body. And we were forced to continue casually dining as blood pooled inches away from my dangling feet. I was five at the time.
How he could do the things he did to make me the best and at the same time try to justify his cruelty, I will never know. I was twelve when I made my first kill. He brought me into a spare room in the house. One I’d studied in multiple times as a child. A man was chained to a seat, hooded, gagged, and bloody.
But that time was different. I could feel the change in the air as my father slapped his sausage fingers on my shoulder and puffed on his cigar.
“It’s about time you make something of yourself, boy,” he demands as he walks past me and whips the bag off the muscled man’s head.
Blood drains from my face.
Curtis.
He’s served my family for ten years and was Dominic’s and my personal bodyguard. And now here he sits, a half-broken mess. His eyes go wide as my father slips a gun into my hand.
He places his hand on my shoulder again. “Like we’ve practiced. Shoot him in the head.”
“What did he do?” I ask, my voice devoid of any emotion. I knew better then to show a tremble of weakness around my father. Or anyone, for that matter.
“He betrayed us,” my father says matter-of-factly. “That’s all you need to know. This is an order.”
My eyebrows only knit together slightly. I’d seen plenty of people killed. Some of them because they tried to kill me. But this would be the first time I’d be the reason why the life left their body. I saw how it fed my father. In the way that he sometimes took cruel delight in it and in others he was indifferent. That the person was no more than a roadblock in his way to bigger and better things.
How will it make me feel? Will I be the same as him? That’s what I was being raised for, right?
“Or do you want your knives?” my father asks, irritated, as if that’s the reason for my hesitation.
Curtis is trying to yell something through the gag. I find it strange that such a strong man who had protected us and even showed us kindness was so easily broken.
“I’m going to count to five,” my father says.
“One.”
I raise the gun and shoot before he even counts to two.
I know the consequence if I don’t comply with his demands.
My aim is spot-on and Curtis slumps in his chair, his head hanging as blood oozes down his face.
Without so much as a word, my father leaves the room, taking a small part of me with him. I don’t know what part of me it is that he takes, but I know that I feel… nothing. No regret, no pain, no heartfelt goodbye. But no pleasure either. Not like my father. But maybe I’ll grow to enjoy being a killer.
It was only a few years later when I turned twenty that I realized the threat I’d become to my father. He’d sharpened me so well that his men began listening to my orders, some even directly disobeying his. And once it was reported to me that he put a hit on me and Dominic with the intention of taking my mother out in the process so he could take another wife and force a much younger heir, I knew it was time to act.
Killing him had been the first time I found any pleasure in taking a life. And I found it almost poetic as I dragged his half-beaten body into that very same room where he’d once forced me to make my first kill. I’d never despised him for introducing me into this world so young. It made me who I was. Strong. Feared.