Submission Specialist(Still a Bad Boy #2)(111)

“Lorenzo was working for the Picollis, he told them where our car was going to be, and when, yesterday. He led them right to us.”

“Why? Why do they care so much about you?”

“Because I nearly wiped them out. I didn’t do a good enough job, though.”

Kendall’s eyes glanced around the room in various directions, as if clarification might be found in the fireplace or the baseball bat mounted above it. She shook her head and returned her gaze to me.

“I don’t, understand, Jace. How could you do that? How did you get involved in this?”

“I’ve been involved in this since forever. You remember that car crash with my parents?”

She nodded.

“It wasn’t just any crash, it was a mob hit organized by the Picolli Family,” I said.

“How could you know that?”

“Some wiseguy came to Wellfort one day and told me. He showed me a picture of the Picollis’ mark, and I remembered men with that tattooed on them showing up in my dad’s store sometimes. I didn’t remember much, I was too young, but I recognized it.”

“Who was that guy?”

“I have no idea, never got a name,” I said.

“How do you know he was telling the truth?”

I walked over to the window and pulled the curtain back to look out, checking that my men were alert and watching out for trouble. It was a stalling tactic. Inside my heart was racing, pumping hot blood to my head where I could feel it burning on my face.

“At first, I didn’t know. I just believed him. I was too young to know any better, but it sowed the seed. I vowed to myself that I’d pay them back for what they did. I’d pay them back a million times over for what they took. I had no plan, then. All I knew was that I had to turn myself into the kind of person that nobody could fuck with. That was the only kind of person who could do what I needed to be done. This was the one thing to hold on to, so I fought, and I fought, and I fought with everybody, with anybody I could find.”

“But how did you make sure?” Kendall asked.

“When I was old enough to figure it out, I went to the library and looked up old newspapers. I found a story about my family on one of those microfiche things. There it was, in black and white, a picture of our car, smashed up and with some bullet-holes in the door for good measure. I read as far as my mom and dad’s names, along with ‘Picolli’ and I couldn’t go any further. That was enough.”

“What did you do then?”

“I started looking for them. Back then, if you looked for them, they were easy enough to find. I still didn’t know shit about them, but I soon learned they were huge. They owned the city, they networked with other crime families that owned the rest of the country, there’s this whole world that most people never see. I had this idea of jumping out of an alleyway and surprising the boss, killing him and that would be the end of it, but I learned that somebody just as bad would be waiting to take his place. It was too big for one kid to take down. From the outside, anyway.”

Kendall’s brow furrowed. “But not from… the inside?”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. I had to at least get on the inside to learn about them. I went up to one of their soldiers and told him to give me a job. He kicked the shit out of me. I came back the next day and asked for a job, he kicked the shit out of me again but I got a good punch in. I thought he was going to shoot me, but then he told me to fuck off. I came back the next day and asked for a job, he called me a stupid little fuck, but he gave me a package and told me where to take it. It became a regular thing.”

“Why didn’t you just leave, Jace?” she asked.

I remembered my time in Wellfort and those kids who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fight. That hopeless look in their eyes. I knew I was, at most, half a step away from that if I gave up.

“Because the kids that didn’t fight had nothing,” I said, quietly. “I grew out of the little kingdom of Wellfort and found that the earnings of an errand boy didn’t cut it in the wider world, so one day when one of the guys got shot, I asked to be the one to do the payback, in return for a pay rise. They said sure, fuck it, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, I did a good job. That guy never crossed our path again, but he did limp for the rest of his days.”

I turned away from the window and slowly walked back towards Kendall. She didn’t back away, but the closer I got, the more she seemed to shrink.

Although I was close enough to reach out and touch her, it was like there was a force radiating from her body, personal space that I didn’t have permission or the power to enter anymore. The possibility that I might lose this fight hit home, and my face contorted with the grief that idea let loose. It took me a few moments before I could wrestle myself back into some semblance of control to continue.