She nodded.

“It wasn’t just any crash, it was a mob hit organized by the Picolli Family,” I said.

“How could you know that?”

“Some wiseguy came to Wellfort one day and told me.  He showed me a picture of the Picollis’ mark, and I remembered men with that tattooed on them showing up in my dad’s store sometimes.  I didn’t remember much, I was too young, but I recognized it.”

“Who was that guy?”

“I have no idea, never got a name,” I said.

“How do you know he was telling the truth?”

I walked over to the window and pulled the curtain back to look out, checking that my men were alert and watching out for trouble.  It was a stalling tactic.  Inside my heart was racing, pumping hot blood to my head where I could feel it burning on my face.

“At first, I didn’t know.  I just believed him.  I was too young to know any better, but it sowed the seed.  I vowed to myself that I’d pay them back for what they did.  I’d pay them back a million times over for what they took.  I had no plan, then.  All I knew was that I had to turn myself into the kind of person that nobody could fuck with.  That was the only kind of person who could do what I needed to be done.  This was the one thing to hold on to, so I fought, and I fought, and I fought with everybody, with anybody I could find.”

“But how did you make sure?” Kendall asked.

“When I was old enough to figure it out, I went to the library and looked up old newspapers.  I found a story about my family on one of those microfiche things.  There it was, in black and white, a picture of our car, smashed up and with some bullet-holes in the door for good measure.  I read as far as my mom and dad’s names, along with ‘Picolli’ and I couldn’t go any further.  That was enough.”

“What did you do then?”

“I started looking for them.  Back then, if you looked for them, they were easy enough to find.  I still didn’t know shit about them, but I soon learned they were huge.  They owned the city, they networked with other crime families that owned the rest of the country, there’s this whole world that most people never see.  I had this idea of jumping out of an alleyway and surprising the boss, killing him and that would be the end of it, but I learned that somebody just as bad would be waiting to take his place.  It was too big for one kid to take down.  From the outside, anyway.”

Kendall’s brow furrowed.  “But not from… the inside?”

“Yeah.  That’s what I thought.  I had to at least get on the inside to learn about them.  I went up to one of their soldiers and told him to give me a job.  He kicked the shit out of me.  I came back the next day and asked for a job, he kicked the shit out of me again but I got a good punch in.  I thought he was going to shoot me, but then he told me to fuck off.  I came back the next day and asked for a job, he called me a stupid little fuck, but he gave me a package and told me where to take it.  It became a regular thing.”

“Why didn’t you just leave, Jace?” she asked.

I remembered my time in Wellfort and those kids who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fight.  That hopeless look in their eyes.  I knew I was, at most, half a step away from that if I gave up.

“Because the kids that didn’t fight had nothing,” I said, quietly.  “I grew out of the little kingdom of Wellfort and found that the earnings of an errand boy didn’t cut it in the wider world, so one day when one of the guys got shot, I asked to be the one to do the payback, in return for a pay rise.  They said sure, fuck it, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, I did a good job.  That guy never crossed our path again, but he did limp for the rest of his days.”

I turned away from the window and slowly walked back towards Kendall.  She didn’t back away, but the closer I got, the more she seemed to shrink.

Although I was close enough to reach out and touch her, it was like there was a force radiating from her body, personal space that I didn’t have permission or the power to enter anymore.  The possibility that I might lose this fight hit home, and my face contorted with the grief that idea let loose.  It took me a few moments before I could wrestle myself back into some semblance of control to continue.

“I… I took as many of those jobs as I could and built a name for myself, earned some respect.  I learned everything I could about their structure, how similar they were to a large corporation.  I learned who was in charge of what.  I learned who wasn’t happy with the way the Picollis ran things.  I learned who could be bought off, if it came to it.  It was going to take me years to do what I needed to do, and then I literally won the lottery.  It fast-forwarded my plans by a decade, maybe two.  In a single day and night of the most brutal shit you can imagine, I seized most of their cash, killed their key men, paid off the rest, assured the police and politicians that the same arrangements they made with the Picollis were still good with me, and I took their place so they could never come back.”

“Jace… you have no idea what this is like, how crazy this is for me.  I can’t force myself to stop loving you, I tried to just turn it off but it wouldn’t.  I don’t understand how this can work!”

That force around her was weakening.  Maybe just being this close, our love was overpowering it.  I edged a little closer, just about tearing myself apart from the inside with the need to hold her.

“On my way over here, when I was trying to think of what to say, I tried to remember the first person I killed, to see if I could remember what it felt like, maybe something like what you were going through.  I figured out that the first thing I killed was a part of myself.  I didn’t have any room in my life for weakness, for sentimentality.  All that was left after that was pain and so much fucking anger, but being with you was the first time I felt anything like peace.  Can I tell you something, Kendall?”

Her barrier weakened further, and she looked up at me with hope.  Those eyes, oh man, those eyes.

“One thing I do remember about that car ride with my parents was when they looked back at me.  They had love in their eyes.  I didn’t see that look again for over twenty years until you had it.  You still have it, Kendall.  You’re the love of my life, and I need you.”

I could see the turmoil in her eyes and the quiver in her lip.  She held herself all the more tightly, but that barrier came down.  Painfully slowly, she shuffled forward and closed the last remaining distance between us, leaning into me and looking even more timid than the day we met.

My own hands were shaking when I brought them up to embrace her, I was half-scared that she might disappear in a puff of smoke when I did.  Her body was real, warm, and reassuringly familiar when my palms slid across her back and I held her tight against me.

After a few moments, she held me too and I buried my fingertips in her hair, stroking her cheek with my thumb before kissing the top of her head.  Gently rocking from side to side, I almost felt myself melting into her.

“Can we run away?” she asked.

“If I do, then they’ll take over the city again.  I won’t let that happen.”

“Will it ever be over?” she asked.

“They’ll never give up until I kill them all.”

“How do you know?”

“I wouldn’t.  This is who I am, Kendall.  I love you, can you stay with me and make all of this mean something more than revenge?”

“I love you too, Jace.  I… I’ll stand by you.”

Never in all my life had more powerful words been spoken to me.  With Kendall at my side, I could take on the world, keep stamping on the Picollis until their lights went out completely.

I wished I could have stayed in that moment forever.  Instead, I heard engines and wheels on the gravel track and I had to let go of her to rush back to the window.