Petting her head, I said, “She better fucking hope I don’t go to her because everything I touch, I ruin.”

With that, I gave her a peck on the cheek, leaving with a playful smile on my face.

Nothing could stop me from getting what I wanted, and what I wanted was to destroy Gerald.

Not even a like-minded monster with eyes like jewels.

It was a short distance from Sparrow and Troy’s place to my apartment block.

So short, in fact, after ten minutes of driving, I was starting to wonder why the fuck I wasn’t home yet. I looked around and realized I was heading straight to the clinic where Aisling had operated on my soldiers a little over a week ago.

God-fucking-dammit.

This wasn’t in my plan, but I was already halfway through Boston, heading toward Dorchester, so there was no point turning around now. Besides, it had nothing to do with Aisling. I wasn’t in the habit of not knowing things about my clients and their families. If Aisling was up to something stupid, I had to stop her.

I parked in front of the Victorian building, surveying it.

It was Sunday evening, so it was most likely empty. Then again, it was an underground clinic, so visiting hours may vary. When I was sure the place was deserted, I got out of the car and proceeded to break in. The front door was embarrassingly easy to tamper with, and when I descended the stairs to the actual clinic, there was a second flimsy door I only needed to shake a little to pry open.

I went for the third door—the door leading to the surgical room, where Nix treated Becker and Angus. This one was a breeze, too. Once inside her office, I started throwing drawers open and took note of the medicine they kept there, typing the long names of them on my phone so I could conduct a deeper research once I got home.

I checked every piece of furniture, examined every nook and corner until I hit the jackpot.

The patients’ files.

The first telltale sign something was wrong was the fact there was only one folder. Yellow and razor thin. What kind of clinic only took six to seven patients?

The kind that has very specific requirements to accept people in the first place.

I began flipping through the files, reading the patients’ records, their test results, their consultation recommendations.

Something didn’t add up. The drugs. The number of patients. The setting. I knew a scheme when I saw one, and this was so fucking fishy it gave the Atlantic a run for its money. One thing was for sure—whatever Aisling did, there was a good reason why she wanted to keep it a secret from her family and friends.

It wasn’t kosher.

It wasn’t good, or innocent, or fitting for the angelic Fitzpatrick. The Mother Teresa everyone knew and loved.

I tucked the folder back into the cabinet.

I was right.

She was a monster.

A terrible monster.

A sweet, beautiful Nix.

Now I just had to find out what her sins were.

I made a pit stop at Badlands and slipped into one of the card rooms, downing three stiff drinks to take the edge off what I saw at the clinic. Nix was a doctor, all right, but she didn’t work at the hospital or any of the registered clinics around town. Whatever she did, it was secretive, illegal, and had nothing to do with people without insurance.

Stop thinking about Nix. She is just collateral.

Collateral and an inconvenience at best and a complication at worse.

I needed to get my head out of my ass and be ridden by someone who wasn’t my niece. It was time for a diversion. A reminder there were other pussies out there. Just as good and warm and tight as Aisling’s and not half as troublesome.

Pent-up lust.

That was all it was.

I was a busy man ruling the underworld of one of the seediest, dirtiest places in the country. It’d been a long-ass time since I drowned myself in a woman. Aisling was the last, and the woman before her happened so long ago I forgot her name, her hair color, and the setting.

A good fuck would make all of this go away.

I moseyed out of the card room and into the club, ignoring the enthusiastic claps on my back and conversation starters, and scanned the mass of sweaty, dancing figures melding together. I pressed the tumbler of whiskey to my lips.

Humans appalled me.

Despite my reputation, I didn’t just fuck anything with a pulse. I had dry spells of the self-inflicted kind since fucking ultimately required talking to people, and talking to people was a punishment even a good pussy wasn’t worth sometimes.

There were always whores, who didn’t demand meaningful conversation, but I wasn’t a fan of shoving my dick where so many others had been.

I immediately decided which woman I wanted to spend the night with. She had bleached blonde hair, a fake tan, long legs, and a pink mini-dress so tacky removing it from her would be my Christian duty.

Most of all, she looked nothing like Nix.

I snapped my fingers in the bouncers’ direction, pointing at her.

“I’ll have that one,” I clipped then proceeded to turn around and go up the stairs to my office, past the card rooms.

In my office, I busied myself by flipping through the betting books, tugging at my hair and not thinking about Nix.

A knock on the door made me drop the fat book on my desk.

“Open.” I sat back, sprawling out in my executive chair.

The blonde pushed the door open, giggling excitedly as she shut it behind her, and pressed her back against the bullet-chipped wood.

“Hi! I’m Dani,” she squeaked, tossing her hair to one shoulder. “Your bouncer showed me up. It’s my first time at Badlands. Honestly, my friends are, like, kind of freaking out about all this. You calling me here, I mean. We heard about you a lot, obvs. But we didn’t even know you came to this place, like often …”

I tuned her out, focusing on how her lips moved, fast and eager. Everything about her was wrong from her juicy, probably enhanced lips to her definitely penciled-in eyebrows. Her fake eyelashes looked like a shredded semitrailer tire. Her heavy makeup and dry hair full of split ends grated on my nerves in a way that felt personal. Nothing about her felt right.

Or good.

Or delectable.

Complex, dangerous, maddening.

I wanted Aisling. Aisling’s demureness. Her sharp little nose and aristocratic, well-proportioned lips. Her natural hair and skin and teeth. She didn’t succumb to modern beauty standards, and there was something irresistible about it. Aisling had that blue-blooded look of a woman you couldn’t imagine on all fours, getting fucked rough and dirty from behind. Men were simple creatures, so that meant it was precisely what I wanted to do—plow into her Royal Highness, rough and dirty, from behind while she chanted my name.

The girl in front of me continued blabbing. Hell if I knew about what. It occurred to me, now that I looked at her up-close, that she was young. Legal, yes, but much younger than me.

“… kind of down for anything, really. And, like, I know you only do casual, so that’s totally okay—”

“How old are you?” I cut into her stream of words, already in need of two fucking Advils and one bullet to put me out of my misery.

“What?” She looked startled, her brown eyes widening in panic. “What do you mean?”

“Your age,” I jeered, irritated with myself for apparently growing a fucking conscience somewhere between Aisling’s clinic and Badlands. “What is it?”