Prologue
Sean
The Altered Compass
“Today you take the first step to becoming a man, Sean.” My father grips the back of my neck, giving me a pat with his bloody hand, his chest heaving. I look at the man on the floor and swallow down my own rage, because that man tried to steal from us and he hurt my mother. She’s being taken away now by my aunt Theresa, a bloodstained rag to her face. Switch and Ray, my dad’s VP and president, stand behind us. I shouldn’t be in here, I’m only fifteen years old, but I needed to make sure my mom was okay when I heard her crying out for my dad.
“I won’t be here forever. One day you’ll inherit this family, and youwillneed to protect yourself and your mother. So, it’s time, son.” I look up at him, unsure and afraid, but I can never admit that to him.
“For what?” My voice cracks and I swallow down my fear. There’s no sense in being afraid, it doesn’t change the outcome.
“It’s time to alter your compass.” He pats me on the chest and walks me closer to the body on the floor with his arm around my shoulders. The man lying in front of me is barely breathing.
“See, son, morality only exists in a man’s mind.”
“W-what do you mean?” I ask as my heart thuds in my ears.
“I mean that only you can decide what is truly moral and what isn’t. If you decide the world is a better place without your enemy, then I believe you were put in his path for a reason. It’s up to you to decide, no one else. In this case”—he nods to the man on the floor—“I would say it’s up to you to finish him off. For your mother, for the club. But the choice is yours.”
A rush of fear and excitement that I can’t explain vibrates through me with his words. I know my father—when he tells me to do something there is no arguing, so I don’t try to think of a way to get out of this. Instead, I sharpen my focus, trying to evaluate the most effective way to complete my task. I can’t use the floor to crack this fucker’s skull, and I can’t break his neck. My father won’t respect that. He has to die by my fists. It will show my strength.
“You use your fists,” he orders, like he’s reading my mind.
I take a breath and focus on the man’s face, remembering the way my uncles have taught me to fight. Pressure points, where to hit him, what will kill him the fastest. I swallow my fate and drop to my knees, pushing down every ounce of fear I feel, and I go to my thinking place. The part of my brain that solves my problems. The part that makes sense to me when I have to analyze something.
I quickly calculate my body weight and the force needed for a punch directly to his temple. In his deteriorated state, I should be able to do the job in five punches or less.IfI hit him with everything I’ve got.
“Go ahead, Sean,” my father encourages from behind me. I roll my sleeves up to my elbows, twice evenly on each side, and take a deep breath. I picture my mother after he bounced her face off the concrete wall. I can’t let my father down. I close my eyes, still mentally calculating, and I swing. I think I cry out but I still keep swinging. Again, and again. I swing through nine punches, until my knuckles are busted up and bloody.
Then rage mixed with a need I can’t push down suddenly bubbles up and I keep striking him. I don’t know for how long, but I know I don’t stop until my father pulls me off him. I fight back against my father’s hold, thrashing. Ineedto make sure I’ve done my job and my task is completed.
“He’s dead, son,” my dad says, pulling me from my haze. I relax and blink back tears so he doesn’t see me cry as he lets me go. What kind of a pussy cries? I’m fifteen, for fuck’s sake.
When I look down at my bloody hands then back to the man’s face, I know my dad is right. I check the imaginary box in my head and breathe a little deeper when he says, “Atta boy,” and wraps his strong arm around me. “Your moral compass will be different now. It’s still intact, but altered.”
“How?” I sniff, resisting the urge to look back at the man I just killed.
“Well, it’ll still help you navigate, but it’ll never point true north again. From now on your path will be different from that of a man who hasn’t handed out death. This will be your truth, and that’s okay as long as you know why you took his life. As long as you know it was justified, and itwas.”
I nod, feeling proud of myself, stronger. Feeling likehim. My father squeezes my shoulder and kisses me on the top of my head.
“You did good. The kill doesn’t have to be perfect your first time, son. There’s room to improve … Now, let’s get you cleaned up …”
The altered compass is a piece of my father I’ve remembered every single day, in the desert and in the streets.
The things I’ve seen and done would horrify most men, but there isn’t a single thing I regret. I don’t think about my choices after I’ve made them, or look back, because time can’t be changed, and it never stops. At the end of my time on this earth, the only man who has to live my truth is me. A truth that runs through my head repeatedly because I never, ever stop thinking.
I was dubbed a prodigy, a genius, at a young age. I suppose I could have been an epidemiologist, or I could have gone to MIT and become an astrophysicist, developing technology NASA hasn’t even dreamed up yet. But that was never my future for two reasons: One, I don’t follow the rules of any other man well. And two, by my twenty-fifth birthday I’d killed so many men that I knew I would never fit inside the box that is the norm of society. And I carry on my back the memory of every single man I’ve killed. I remember the way each man’s pupils grew as they filled with fear while the last glimmer of life drained from them.
Those memories and a compiled stack of double standards are one part of my truth, because when in combat, death is justified by fighting for my country. For those deaths, society tells me I should be proud and they call me a hero. They give me medals for those deaths, for Chrissake.
But the lives I take on the streets, in a different kind of war—those earn me a different title.
Outlaw. Criminal. Monster.
The double standard is that death is only allowed when you’re granted permission from a rich man behind a desk who can’t wait to measure his dick against those of his enemies.
Death because some scumbag thought he could hurt the woman who would surely be my wife? Illegal. Unfortunately for the scumbag, death for my country and death in the streets is all the same to me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that.
