Blood for blood. Sins for sins. Replacing their echoed screams with the ones I seek to remove.
Flicking open the gold Zippo lighter over and over, the smell of gas reaches my nose and brings a welcome memory to the forefront of my tormented mind. My brother. My hero. My blood.
This one thing that belonged to him brings me a stable sense of anchoring.
To him, to his memory, to his life.
I roll my thumb over the ring that belonged to my father, our family crest on the top. A sense of belonging comes from wearing it; a sense of him and pride. I feel him and it comforts me.
Watching a gruesome murder when you’re a kid changes you. It leaves you dark, tainted and unhinged. It completely fucks with your adolescent mind, turning you into a machine of brutal force and hate.
My mother tried to shield me from that life after the death of our family, she couldn’t though. I had already begun training.
I already knew what this life we lived was. It was a life filled with crime and uncertainty. She moved us from one crime family into another.
Hers.
I was already seeking out the crime underground, and I was already walking in my father and brother’s footsteps.
Watching them get taken from me, ripped from my grip and stolen from my mother in such a violent way cemented my place within the criminal underbelly.
This life.
It was in my fucking blood.
It was always going to be my destiny.
As much as I remember my mother stating that I was too special for that life. That I was gifted, too gifted for it to be wasted on violence and crime, I wasn’t.
My father and my brother were part of the Irish mob. The Boston, Massachusetts syndicate. My father rose fast gaining power and members so fast like cotton candy at a nighttime fair. He became the one man all men wanted to be.
Members of the other Irish mobs in our area and around us didn’t take kindly to the uprising of my father’s syndicate. The power and respect him and my brother alike commanded and were given had even big Italian bosses seeking my father out to tame wild groups where power and money had gone to their heads.
My father had warned me, trained me along with my brother for the day where they would attack, he copied books, diary’s, ledgers and gave them all to me placing his whole operation in my hands. All the secrets. All the information I would ever need to rise higher than they ever thought.
He kept me hidden always knowing the day was coming, and they would want to take me if they knew what I knew. We had planned for their attack, but that day nothing went as planned. Our entire home turned into a bloody massacre, one where I had to watch my father and my brother brutally taken from us. After those men in black (whose faces I burned into my memory, each and every tiny feature, mark and scar) left, my mom made us wait it out for what felt like days, but it was only really hours.
She walked into her and my father’s room taking bags, that were already packed, from underneath the floorboards inside their massive walk-in wardrobe. One was filled with money. I watched as she checked it, my eyes wide and my heart beating fast.
She gathered all the things that were placed and packed all over our home. Taking a few photos from my father’s briefcase I then went to my room, took a few items and then into my brother’s room taking a couple of things to remind me of him for the journey I was about to take without him.
In the car, I watched as she drove us from Boston, Massachusetts - my home - to Chicago where the Ragen family were. Her family, her father.
She made me promise I’d never step foot back in Boston, Massachusetts again. She wanted to shield me, protect me and keep me this side of life with her. Not in the crime family of her and my father’s past. She told me she wouldn’t allow her father, nor her brothers to taint me with their business and that I was far too special to be a thug.
I had seen the pain in her eyes as she worked hard to shield me, protect me, but I was a Walsh at heart.
It’s in my blood.
Chapter Two
The battles of echo’s calling you to sin deeper than the devil resides.
~ Micha Ragen
My name held power. Men hated those that had it.
Especially my cousin, he hated me the most. And he should. Our grandfather saw all that my father and brother had instilled in me.
