300k will allow us a fresh start. A good rehab center. An apartment in a decent school district. Do the right thing, Gerald. I have people I know in California who could help me. Pay up and make this nightmare disappear.

With hate,

—Cat.

Gerald,

Fine. 150k it is.

When I pointed out 300k would mean I could take Sam with me, you laughed in my face and said the boy wasn’t your problem. It’s on you that I left my son behind, not me.

You have plans for him, don’t you? You said so yourself. Broken, impressionable men from the wrong side of the tracks make good soldiers. The rich thrive on the poor. Well, think again, because Troy Brennan took him under his wing, and if there is one person in Boston who is stronger than you, it’s Troy. I trust he would protect Sam from you, although I don’t entirely trust you not to get your claws on Sam anyway. Use him and drain him of anything good and worthy he possesses, like you did to me.

I don’t know how far 150k is going to get me, but I know it’s not going to be far enough away from you.

I will never forgive you.

For throwing me back into the arms of drugs.

For making me miscarry Jacob.

For making me leave Sam.

You are a monster, Gerald. And monsters are born to be slayed.

You tore my family apart, and one day, the same will be done to you.

Samuel has Troy now, and Troy is the one man you cannot push around.

For the last time,

—Cat.

I dropped the last of the letters on the floor, raking my fingers through my hair.

Apparently, Cat and Gerald had had an affair. Not only that, but that affair had resulted in a child. An unborn son named Jacob. Gerald objected to Jacob’s birth so badly that when he realized Cat was keeping him, he’d decided to beat him out of her.

He got her hooked back on drugs then paid her off to move away and leave me behind.

There were holes the size of the fucking White House in this story.

For one thing, the woman in the letters sounded nothing like Cat. Catalina was cynical, ill-tempered, and about as motherly as a studded dildo. Either she put on one hell of an Oscar-worthy act for Gerry Fitzpatrick or she really had been on the brink of changing. My bet was on the former.

I doubted he was the one who had told her to drug me. The timeline didn’t add up. There was no way they’d been lovers for that long.

Other than that, it seemed legit. The details lined up.

Cat did have a spell of sobriety a few months prior to skipping town, followed by a few, erratic weeks of binging on drugs and spiraling downhill.

I also had the misfortune of knowing Gerald personally, so I happened to be privy to the fact he was a notorious adulterer who’d yet to find one pussy he didn’t want to stick his cock in.

I didn’t know him to be violent, but I didn’t know him to be nonviolent either. The circumstantial evidence against him was substantial, and I didn’t put it past him to commit a crime of passion if he needed to save his own skin.

He and Jane Fitzpatrick were a match made in upper class hell. They both came from rich families, were of the same cultural background, and had a lot to gain by marrying one another. They also had another thing in common: they were both intolerable—to the point of not being able to stand each other.

Over the years, the old man had cheated on his wife more days than I could count. It wasn’t farfetched to believe that Cat, whose favorite flavor of dick was married, had managed to land herself a fat wallet for a lover in Gerald Fitzpatrick.

The letters were all addressed to Gerald’s then bachelor pad, another telltale sign that they were genuine. I knew all of the Fitzpatricks’ properties like the palm of my hand, and the address Catalina had sent the letters to before they bounced back was the same address Gerald had used to meet his mistresses, before gifting the property to Sailor and Hunter as a wedding gift.

There were also pictures attached to the letters.

Polaroids of Cat perched in Gerald’s lap, kissing his cheek. Pictures of them in exotic locations. On vacations. Birthdays. And a pregnancy test so old the two pink lines were faint and weak.

Not only did all the facts line up immaculately, but I remembered.

Remembered her brief period of soberness.

Remembered the day Cat came home looking like a train wreck, bleeding and bruised.

Her brokenness, so pathetic, so whole, even I couldn’t hate her in that moment.

How she crawled inside her bed, balling up and crying uncontrollably, shaking like a leaf, and I found myself helpless, torn between helping her and hating her for yet again failing to feed me.

How in the middle of the night she had skulked to my grandmother’s bedside—Grandma Maria and I had shared a room the size of a closet—and croaked, “Call an ambulance. I have to get to the hospital. Now.”

The betrayal was overwhelming.

Gerald knew I was Catalina’s biological son all along, and he still used my services.

According to her, he’d been distantly grooming me for the job I was doing today.

He had driven my mother to drugs and alcohol.

Impregnated her then beat her to a point of miscarriage.

Then made her leave me.

I could’ve had a different life.

A better life.

He deprived me of a fair, second chance and wasn’t even man enough to come clean about it when our paths crossed again.

Gerald Fitzpatrick robbed me out of a future, my family, my unborn brother.

For that, he was going to pay.

With his blood.

With his tears.

With his goddamn miserable fucking life.

I’d been Boston’s fixer my entire adult life. Since Troy had decided to retire from the gig when I turned twenty-two and turned to more lucrative and legal businesses. I’d always viewed it as his birthday gift to me. I took over the family business, tackling each problem the rich and influential people of Boston came to me with, no matter how wildly unorthodox it was.

By twenty-two, I’d broken enough bones and crushed enough skulls to be feared and respected everywhere I went, both by the criminals and the law.

Troy was playing house with Sparrow, running their restaurants and staying away from the heat by the time my name hit the FBI’s most wanted list. He knew I was different—a few shades darker with an appetite for blood—and had long given up on taming me.

My whole life, I’d fixed things for other people.

It was time to allow myself the luxury of one, uncalculated destruction.

Kill everything Gerald Fitzpatrick loved and cherished, just as he did to me.

Karma never lost an address.

And I was going to make sure his would arrive in a timely fucking manner.

Catalina Greystone’s tombstone was black.

Irony was a bitch, but it sure had a decent sense of humor.

I didn’t know how or why Cat had been buried in a cemetery in Atlanta but had an inkling my adoptive mother had everything to do with it.

Sparrow was a practical yet inconveniently sentimental person. Even though she wasn’t religious, the vein of Catholic virtue ran thick and full in her body.

She couldn’t bear knowing Catalina would get cremated then thrown into a trash can when no one claimed her ashes. Sparrow couldn’t chance the slight unlikely scenario in which I’d ever want to go visit her grave.

I spent the next couple days in my hotel room in Atlanta, ignoring phone calls, taking discreet meetings with local gang leaders and drug lords, and plotting my revenge on Gerald. On day three, I checked out and went to Catalina’s tombstone. Mrs. Masterson called to let me know they already put the stone up and asked if I wanted to go see it with her. I declined politely—there was only so much shitty apple pie and idle conversation a man could tolerate—but I still decided to make a pit stop at the cemetery before heading to the airport and back to Boston, mostly to ensure the bitch was six feet under and very much dead.