The moment the car hit the tree and I was ejected from it, dying was the last thing on my mind. I’d blacked out either when my body shattered the glass or during the free fall, but somewhere in the darkness, a slow crawl of red seeped through the cracks. It was a mixture of the smell of blood and the sound of a voice.
“If you die, I die.”
That was it. All I remembered. A familiar but foreign voice in my ear. I couldn’t recall if the words came in shouts or the lowest of whispers. If it was a man or a woman. My soul remembered the sound of it because it seemed to be branded on my bones somehow, like a tattoo only my heart could see, but my mind blocked out who it belonged to.
My mind blocked out a stretch of my life.
I was missing somewhere around two years, give or take. It was hard to tell where the memories faded sometimes. I always knew something existed right beyond the void though. Memories that should have come to me in scenes, like the moments before the crash, but I could never fully pull them from the fire of my mind.
Maybe instead of dying, it was my memories that had been ejected and then turned to ashes. The soot had covered my life after, adhering, making it hard to see clearly somedays. I knew with crystal-clear certainty, though, that the voice was real, and whoever it was, he or she had meant those words.
“If you die, I die.”
I sighed, stooping down, running my hands through the grass. It was insane to think that any shards would be left over from the windshield, but I felt anyway, knowing there would be and hoping by some miracle it would pull something out of the wreckage of my mind and help me remember.
One tiny fragment would order my mind to show me all the things I knew were missing.Whowas missing and why that part of my life had pulled a disappearing act.
“If you die, I die.”
Those five words meant more to me than three I’d never heard before: I love you.
Someone had cared enough about me to say that my life was worth as much as theirs. Those words meant that my life had meaning. That someone couldn’t stand the thought of living without me. I’d be missed when I was gone.
It was almost too much for a girl like me to hope for, but there it was. And I knew that my hope for someone feeling that way about me stemmed from who and what I was.
I was orphaned as a baby. At only a couple of days old, my mom had died. That was all I knew about her. I had one, a mother, and that she took her last breath when I was a baby. Either my memories had blocked out more about her, too, or that was all I actually knew about her.
My dad died not long after, but in a hail of bullets. He was fooling around with another made guy’s fiancé, and as far as rules go, that one is strictly forbidden. I didn’t know if my mom was some random woman or if she was the made guy’s “fiancé,” but she was not his wife. I thought about seeking out his wife a time or two, but I never pulled the trigger.
Since no one came to claim me, family wise, on either side, I was placed in a group home until I was eighteen.
It wasn’t a normal group home.
Since my dad was who he was—a wise guy—that “family” took me into a group home they ran for kids like me. Just like they would pay legal fees or watch out for each other’s territories if a man got into trouble, they did the same for their kids. The girls went to one home, and the boys went to another. For as far back as I could remember, a woman named Lady M had been the head mistress of the girls’ home.
We did all the things normal kids do. We went to school. Participated in after-school activities—sports, art, whatever we took an interest in. When we turned a certain age, depending on the kid and the situation, we were all required to work and maintain decent grades.
We always worked at one of their establishments.
By “their establishments,” I meant Murder for Hire, Inc. This was their thing, specifically. Unlike most of this life, they actually came through for other members, at least with this.
A little info on Murder for Hire, Inc.: word was that it was the child of what used to be Murder, Incorporated, or as some called it back in the day, Murder, Inc. They were a group of killers who took contracts on other members of the life.
We were never briefed on specifics, but it was implied that we saw nothing, heard nothing, saved nothing if we wanted to stay healthy. After working for them, I wasn’t sure why it even needed to be implied. It was apparent that nothing they did was on the legit side of things.
My first job was at Joey’s Holes in Queens. It was a donut place that hopped 24/7. It was a little shop that offered a variety of baked and fried goods, including Italian specialties, like cannoli, but Joey was mostly known for his donut holes.
When I walked in on two guys beating the shit out of another guy in the freezer, I knew that more than making donuts was going on. Joey might have been known for his holes, but the shop was a front. Just like most of them were. Members of the organization used places like Joey’s not only to conduct business, but to recruit new meat.
Once I turned twenty, I was given two options: I’d be given a lump sum of money, an apartment in the city or wherever I wanted to go, rent paid for a month, and enough tuition for three years, if I decided to attend college and sever my ties.
Looking up at Club Desolation, I wondered if I’d made the right choice by choosing option two: stay connected.
I’d seen the harsh realities of life to know what comes of people who have no one to count on, and at the time, it was all I ever wanted. A place to live for as long as I lived—the condo was in my name, even though the building was owned by the organization. I had a sleek car. A steady flow of cash. Even vacation and sick time. And the job itself? Felt so glamorous and dangerous.
For all of this security, all I had to do was take an oath.
Whenever I walked into a room and overheard something, I would forget it like it never happened. I would forget faces and names, mostly nicknames, which was all they called each other.
