Page 163 of Kings & Corruption

That was the thing about Willa, one of the things I’d noticed about her a long time ago: she saw things.

Shenoticed.

Everyone else was too busy thinking about themselves.How does the world see me? What do I look like? Am I getting enough attention? Enough appreciation? Am I getting everything I’m owed?

Myself included. I was the most self-involved motherfucker out there.

Except when it came to her. Because once upon a time, Willa Russo had stepped in to face the biggest baddest wolf of them all.

And she’d done it for me.

She’d been just a little thing back then. I don’t even know if she remembered it.

But I did. I remembered every second of that day. Would go to my grave with it seared into my memory.

It was the day I’d been bound to Willa forever.

The day we all had.

“Okay, you guys know the rules,” Mick, the sparring ref, said, moving into the center of the ring. He looked from me to the other guy. “Neo, Julio, keep it cool.”

Right. This wasn’t the Orpheum. It was the Gym — a seedy warehouse on the bad side of town with no official name. There were rules here, and one of them was Don’t Kill Your Sparring Partner.

Note to self.

The ref moved out of the way and I rolled my shoulders and moved into the center of the ring, my mind still on Willa as my sparring partner and I began our dance.

I landed a right hook to Julio’s face first, just to show him who was boss. He shook it off, then danced to my left.

My feelings — I fucking hated that word — for Willa were… inconvenient.

What did feelings matter? The world was what it was. The people who should protect you were usually the ones who’d stick a knife your back, then use it to cut a sandwich.

I fucking hated that Willa was learning that lesson, that she’d had to see that loser Giordana as Exhibit A. I wanted to kill that animal again for what he’d done to her, for fucking daring to manhandle her, to point a gun at her head.

The memory of it sent a shot of fury through my body, and I feigned right, then moved left and landed a vicious kick to Julio’s solar plexus.

It felt good, and I jogged on my feet while he gasped, staggering backward to put some distance between us while he caught his breath.

Go ahead, Julio. Catch your breath. I’m not going anywhere.

I’d just about lost my fucking mind when Oscar told us Willa had given him the slip. We were on it pretty fast, but she didn’t know how fast things could turn bad, how quickly you could go from being perfectly safe to being dead.

Especially at Aventine.

Especially if you were someone I loved.

I wanted to save her that misery, save her from meeting the same fate as her sister, but she wasn’t making it easy.

Julio moved back into the center of the ring looking pretty pissed off. He tried to land a jab, but I ducked and ended up behind him, then gave him a kick in the ass.

He went sprawling and I got a warning from Mick that I barely heard.

Julio moved back into the ring fast, his eyes blazing. I let him land a punch and gave him a second to feel victorious, then I moved in for the kill, advancing fast, throwing punches with both hands, one after the other until he was stumbling back toward the rope.

I was all over it. What did this fucker think? That the rope was a safe zone?

I punched hard and fast, thinking about the one thing I really wanted but could never have, thinking about what I would do, what I would burn, who I would kill to protect her.

I was barely aware of the fact that I was still throwing punches, that Julio had slumped to the ground, his eyes already swelling closed while the ref tried to pull me off his limp body.

There were a million reasons I could never get close to Willa Russo, and she didn’t need to know any of them. She just needed to stay away from me, and I needed to make her stay away, even if that meant treating her like shit.

Because in our world, feelings were a liability. All that mattered was staying focused on the goal.

On the prize.

And the prize for all of us — whether Willa knew it or not — was motherfucking vengeance.