Sparrow(23)

She was trying to be nice, and I was trying not to resent her.

The truth about our marriage was that I wanted nothing more than to be out of it. But as it happened, my father had made me promise I’d marry Abraham Raynes’s daughter.

Until his murder, I couldn’t, for the f*cking life of me, understand why.

Raynes was a loser, a drunk, a man with no prospects, who never even made it to becoming a real mobster back in the day when every illiterate piece of shit was a legitimate part of the mob. He used to get the shittiest jobs the organization had to offer. My father let him work with the rookies. Abe extorted like a teenager, threatening people who owed us money, and he had some gigs as a bouncer and filled in for our errand boy when the latter was sick.

My father always spoke fondly of Sparrow Raynes, Abe’s daughter. Which didn’t explain why, when I turned eighteen, he invited me to his office (something he very rarely did, despite us being close) and made me promise that one day I would marry her and bring her into the family.

Marry. Sparrow. Raynes. The kid who was so off my radar, I wasn’t even sure I’d understood him right.

But I loved my father fiercely, adored him and would have died for him, so I rolled with the plan. I was eighteen, and she was eight. It was twisted and barbaric, and it was my very first taste of the unfairness of life, but it would be years before I’d have to worry about it. I put that plan on the backburner.

Needless to say, as we both got older the very idea of marrying the Plain Jane down the road sounded about as appealing as f*cking a hedgehog. I warned everyone around Sparrow to stay the f*ck away—guys were not to look, take interest or touch her. Always made sure the bad crowd kept away from her, not that she was drawn to it in the first place.

And always, always pressing my father to tell me why the hell I had to marry the little redhead. He never did.

The day he died, I found out why.

See, I always knew da had a side piece, but finding out it was Robyn Raynes – the runaway mother next door – made sense.

By then, I was older, wiser and colder, after having my heart broken into a gazillion pieces. I knew that the road to success was paved with sacrifices.

Sparrow Raynes was my sacrifice. I promised I’d marry her, and I had.

Truthfully, I would have happily waited a few more years, but my father’s lawyer made it pretty f*cking clear that I wouldn’t see a dime or an acre he had left me until she had a ring on her finger.

And Cillian Brennan wasn’t taking the “all the days of my life” part of the wedding vows lightly. Clause 103b of his will stated that if Sparrow and I divorced, she would get the majority of my inheritance.

The majority. Un-f*cking-believable.

At thirty-two, I was ready to collect what was mine. What had always been mine—my father’s hard-earned wealth.

The money was especially needed, now that my mother had decided to leave Boston in favor of a place in Nice, France. Most folks retired to Florida or Arizona. Andrea Brennan, though? Fucked off with her younger boyfriend to one of the most expensive places on earth. The French Riviera. And she didn’t even have a job to retire from.

Someone had to pay for her fancy shit, for the fact Maria was still needed at her house three f*cking times a week because my mother let her lazy friends stay there every now and again. And despite her lavish lifestyle, my mom was a little strapped for cash. Most of the family money was invested in stocks and properties for tax reasons.

I couldn’t help but think that Andrea and Catalina had a lot of things in common.

Anyway, if Red learned the truth—why my father made me marry her in the first place and how I kept her virginal and untouched just for me all those years, scared all those potential suitors away—not only would she try and kill me, she could also go to the police, and have me locked up. For life.

So I was trying to be civil with my new wife.

Only now I had no f*cking idea what to do with her. Court her? Ignore her? Fuck her against her will? The first and third options weren’t my style. Ignoring her had worked for a week, but left me annoyed. I was sick of hearing she was aimlessly wandering my apartment most of the day and pretending to be asleep whenever I returned home.

And then the shit in the living room happened downstairs, and she was so miserable and vulnerable, I’d spat some bullshit story about seeing her at church and even offered to take her to dinner.

A dinner date. First one since her. I tried to remind myself dates were like sex. You never forget how to do it.





BY THE TIME I finished my shower, Sparrow was already asleep, and not faking it this time. I slid into bed beside her and watched the rise and fall of her chest, but she was far from peaceful. I knew she was keeping a knife under the pillow. It amused and impressed me all at once. Not that she could do anything with that knife if she ever confronted me, but I liked her assertiveness.

She was nothing like her father. Nothing.

My initial expectation after the wedding—that she’d lock herself in a room listening to man-hating Taylor Swift songs on repeat as she cried her eyes out—was proving premature. She might be innocent, but she wasn’t stupid. Hardened by her circumstances and toughened by our neighborhood—Red was no pushover.

I turned my back to her and turned on my bedside lamp, taking my iPad from my nightstand drawer. I went through everything I had to do the next day—a meeting with an asshat who was running for governor and needed to find his bitter stepdaughter and convince her not to talk shit about him; an appointment with a local property tycoon who got into trouble with some Armenian gang members because he didn’t want to pay them protection money.