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He fell.

I kept smashing.

And smashing.

And smashing.

This was before messes like that sent my brain into full-system failure.

When I was done, the phone shattered in my bloody, sticky hands and the guy’s head a stomped-in watermelon, my mom was crying and screaming.

Cenzo was, too.

I did feel pretty terrible after that. Again, not guilt, but awful for making them cry and for making them watch that. I could recognize that other people were bothered by blood and violence.

My dad and ten of his guys were there in less than five minutes: he’d been tracking us ever since we ditched our guards. I remember him hugging me tightly and then squatting down in front of me and looking me in the eye as he held my shoulders.

That was the night he told me he’d do everything in his power to help me with what I had inside me. That as long as it only happened to bad people who would hurt my family or the weak and innocent, then I was doing nothing wrong.

Anyway, that’s my potentially toxic relationship with guilt. Or maybe my toxic non-relationship with it.

“Where are we going?”

My Aston Martin is still in a shop my family knows from way back, slowly being “de-dicked”. So instead, I'm sitting behind the wheel of an all-black Mercedes G-wagon when I turn to glance at Bella in the passenger seat.

I really wish she’d worn pants tonight. Because right now, her feet are on the dashboard—probably just to fuck with me—which pushes her knees up.

…And she’s wearing a skirt. With thigh-high fishnets.

And a black thong with pink skulls printed on it.

And I know that because every time my eyes wander from the road ahead, they find their way on-so-quickly to that flash of bare thigh. To that peek of ass. To the slip of fabric barely covering her pussy…

I force my gaze back forward.

“To Lester DiPapas’.”

Bella’s brow furrows as she glances out the tinted windows at the neon and amber streetlights cutting through the night outside.

“We’re in Queens.”

I don’t respond.

“Lester lives in Greenpoint.”

I nod. “He’s got another place.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

My shoulders lift. “Now you do.”

We keep driving, turning off the main road and down a side street. Then another, until I pull to a stop outside a dark, run-down piece of shit building.

“Lester lives here?” she mutters, wrinkling her nose.

“Yup.”

She shrugs and pulls a professional chef knife roll from under her seat. She unrolls the thing right there on her lap, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t amused by the careful way she selects two knives.