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Nope, not that either.

I’m just kinda nuts.

Again, I know my parents love me to bits and that nothing about what I am and what I do will ever change that. But I’ve seen the worry in their shared glances sometimes. And when a psychiatrist finally gave them the anti-social personality disorder diagnosis, I think they knew they were out of their depth.

Enter: Cillian.

Cillian also figured out what he was at a young age. He'd had the same impulses I was starting to have, the same fascination with blood and death. He’d felt the same need to hunt, destroy, and cut open, which made him a great person for me to talk to in those early years. He was someone who could show me that I might be damaged, but that didn’t mean I was broken.

What Cillian also taught me was a code.

Cillian grew up in the Irish Mafia during The Troubles in Belfast, so his urges to kill were relatively easy to satiate.

But those were different times. I couldn’t just run around New York looking for throats to cut. And honestly, I wasn't interested in slaughtering good people.

Always nice to have some evidence of a moral compass, right?

Maybe I was too young to have my eyes opened to the evils of the world, but I’m grateful that Cillian did. He showed me how truly vile and unrepentant bad people could be to the weak and unprotected.

Some of what I am, I learned from Dad: how to handle, break down, clean, reassemble, and shoot a gun. How to drive a car like you stole it. How to be un-fucking-afraid and to face the world exactly as you are.

But Cillian taught me how to hunt. How to kill. How to butcher a body.

He’d take me on these awesome camping trips or hikes where we’d hunt deer together, and he’d show me to field-clean a whole animal with only a knife.

He’s the one who taught me that the trick isn’t to hide who and what you are, because you’ll always eventually slip up. The trick is knowing how to live openly with both parts of yourself: the regular person and the monster.

But more than anything, he taught me that code. Cillian drilled it into my head that what we’re capable of makes us different from most people, but that comes with a certain responsibility. We are the clandestine arbiters of society. We’re the ones who recognize the wolves hiding amongst the sheep, and it’s our job—perhaps our duty—to root those wolves out and eradicate them before they can harm the flock.

Which is why I’ve only ever gone after rapists, child molesters, predators, human traffickers, and the other bottom feeders of society.

“Right, Tinker-Bella,” Cillian drawls in his Irish brogue as we hug in the foyer of his sprawling home. “How and when am I killing the bastard?”

I giggle into his embrace.

We’re keeping this whole thing with Damiano on a “need to know” basis. I completely get the secrecy. Uncles Ares has tons of business that could be screwed if it came out that we were marrying into the Barone family. Bonus: I don’t have to deal with bullshit from the likes of Achilles, Lochlan, or Ronan, since they’re also being kept in the dark about this whole thing.

But needless to say, I made an executive decision that Cillian would be in the “needs to know” group.

If nothing else, he’s probably the one person on Earth who could talk me out of murdering my future husband.

You’re welcome, Lamiano.

“Hey, girl!”

I grin even wider as I pull away from Cillian and turn to another familiar voice. Una, Cil’s wife, floats down the stairs of the open-concept penthouse in a black, ankle-length skirt with a big slit up one leg, and this super-cute black tank top with lace across the bodice made to look like spiderwebs.

I mean this woman is fucking goals, across the board.

The two of us hug tightly as she rocks me side to side.

“Okay, I know we hate this fucker, and it’s such shit that this whole situation is happening. But…” She pulls back, barely able to contain her excitement. “Holy shit, you’re getting married!”

“Yeah, awesome,” I grumble.

She smiles wryly. “I get it.”

She really does. She and Cil were forced into marriage too, after she tried to assassinate him by sticking a knife between his ribs.