A Kingpin Love Affair (A Kingpin Love Affair #1-5)(69)

Silence settled over us as her chest heaved against my shoulders. For the first time in my life, I had met someone who I didn’t want to hurt, who I had wanted to take the pain from. Even though I wanted all those things, I was bred to kill, to hate, and to make those suffer who had made me suffer. A death for a death made us even. Bree would have to learn the hard way, though my love for her was deep, my need for vengeance was the same.





Chapter Five

Bree

My chest heaved as I held in the tears I desperately wanted to release. Zerro had ripped the last living person from my life. He had shot and killed him in cold blood. It didn’t matter if I had loved him—nothing mattered because he had killed my father.

He placed me on the cold leather seat of the SUV and shut the door, not saying a word. I should open the door, I should run though I knew it would be useless. He would just hunt me down and haul me back here. As I sunk further into the seat, my mind sunk further into the abyss. How could he do something so cruel? How could he kill someone and feel no remorse? John was my father—it didn’t matter to me what he had done. None of it did. What mattered was he was dead, and I had no one. Nothing. I was just like him. Just like Alzerro King.

“You’ll move on,” he whispered to no one. It had to be no one because I wasn’t listening to a fucking word he said. The second I got the chance, I would leave. I would run. I would escape his hold. There was now no doubt in my mind he was a living, breathing monster—far worse than the ones you heard about in fairytales.

“I hate you.” I spat the words at him, hoping they would hit him with the intensity of my fist.

“Get in fucking line,” he spat back at me without remorse in his words.

“He was everything to me. He was my father. My fucking father. You killed the last living member of my family—for revenge? Do you feel better? Does hurting me make your heart red again?” I screamed these words across the center console, tears streaming down my face so heavily I couldn’t see anything. There was a fist-sized hole punched through my chest by the very man I loved.

Eventually the car settled into silence, but I refused to shut up. I refused to be anything but angry and sad. I was hurting. I was breaking and it was his fault. All his fucking fault.

Wiping away the tears so I could see the face of the monster, I stared into a pair of warm honey-colored eyes. “When I look at you, I see a small boy out on a mission to bring the world to its knees. To take anyone and everything out—anything undeserving of your attention. But maybe, just fucking maybe, it’s you who’s undeserving of the rest of us. Maybe it’s you who needs to take a look around and realize the world owes you nothing. And killing people like my father gets you nothing. It doesn’t make you feel better. It causes you to lose the most important person in the world to you—me.”

I watched as his knuckles gripped the steering wheel with strength I had never seen before. Was he going to kill me next, too? Would it even matter? I wasn’t sure I would care at this point.

“This is the life of the Mafia, Bree. This is what happens when someone betrays someone. You knew I was on the hunt for someone. You knew if I found him, I would kill him. It just so happened to be bad luck it turned out to be your father.”

My eyes felt as if they were about to roll out of my head as I listened to him. He wasn’t even sorry. It sounded more like a I’m-sorry-I-Killed-Your-Dad-But-It-Had-To-Happen thing.

“Do you hear yourself?”

“Do you?” he screamed back, his face growing red with anger.

“Let me go.”

“Fuck you, Bree,” he growled, ignoring my comment as he turned the car on, threw it into reverse, and pulled out of my driveway. We hadn’t even talked about what had happened to him, to me. Hours ago, I would’ve been glad to know he was alive and wanted to save me, but now—now I wanted to be the one to put the bullet in his head and bury him six feet under.

“I will never love you again. You’re the dirt beneath my feet,” I whispered my voice dark and unsettling.

For a moment, I didn’t think he heard me, but then a sigh escaped his lips. I directed my attention to the road while I allowed the tears desperately wanting to fall to build inside of me. I would rather drown myself than look weak in the face of someone like him.

“The funny thing about it is you love me anyway.” I could practically see the smile on his face, and it made me sick. It made my insides twist into a hateful rush of anger.

Seething, I refused to say anything else, allowing myself to think more about my father. I wasn’t even given a chance to say goodbye. My heart ached. How could I move on from this?