Harry’s POV – This will only happen once more in this story.
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I shot and killed for the first time when I was fourteen years old; it was a deer. My father taught me how to hunt. He taught me how to pick my prey and how to execute with pure precision. Two years later I shot and killed a human being for the first time.
I felt nothing.
I didn’t feel remorse for what I’d done. I didn’t have nightmares over it. The only stress I had had been over whom was going to clean up my mess; I take responsibility for nothing, and that’s the only thing I’ll take responsibility for.
He deserved to die; he double crossed my father and sent him into an early grave. So I double crossed him and sent him right into his.
Fast forward five years to the present, my mind-set has changed not but just a bit. I don’t in-fact believe anyone “deserves” to die (although I do feel it sometimes); everyone’s just trying to survive. I’ve done some shitty things to survive, just to cling onto sanity and just to keep the property and empire my father had built up and running. I’m a shitty person with a lot of friends and that’s what makes me good at what I do, but that’s also what gets me into situations like this.
Dennis was an old friend of my fathers who introduced me to Don Brinkman a year ago. I took Dennis’ word that Brinkman was a decent guy, and by “decent guy”, I mean “decent businessman”, that’s all that really mattered. I had no intentions of getting to know Don Brinkman personally, no intentions of anything but making deals and making money.
December 2012 is when I made my first - and what would be only - deal with Brinkman; it seemed solid. I wanted to start selling blues to broaden my horizons a bit and Brinkman was the go-to man for those specifically. Things were looking good at the time; money was piling up with hardly any effort, the house was back in shape, I trusted all my men with my life, I stopped getting high off my own supply, I started running again, and I was so in love with Rachael. There wouldn’t have been a better time to expand my business.
I met Rachael at a house party in November of 2011. “Stunning” should have been the original word that came to mind when I first saw her, but I was too cocky, so at that time Rachael looked to be the best fuck in the house. Not surprisingly, she approached me first. I’d been through my fair share of women, I’m not sure if it was the money or my cock, but they threw themselves at me.
We talked about nothing for almost two hours, knocking back drink after drink, she asked me about my car, I excused myself to take a piss and I was zipping my jeans back up when lo and behold, Rachael pushed through the door. We were both really drunk; I fucked her on the bathroom counter for almost a whole hour. Just a minute or so before we both climaxed, her dress was crunched together in the middle of her torso – breasts out, thighs wrapped around mine – she said my name. She moaned my name in the most delicate, genuine way I’d never heard it. I looked up at her, and I mean, I really looked. I noticed her freckles and how her long dark hair was sticking to my sweating arms, and how her eyes weren’t brown but more of a hazel and how she had a small scar on her left shoulder. Her body was perfect and in that moment everything about her seemed beautiful.
She called me two days later after I texted her seventeen times. I took her out, she moved in with me in February 2012, I knew for sure that I loved her by March when she started sitting in on deals I was making. By May we were one hundred percent sure we were committed to this life together and to the relationship and by June I knew for sure that there was no one else like her. I stopped getting high when she came into my life. I didn’t need to drown my sorrows anymore because there were none. Rachael knew all about my lifestyle and she fell in love with me anyway. She loved the life and she loved the thought of danger. She didn’t just come into my life as a girlfriend, she came into my whole life, every part of it and she loved it and she never asked for anything except for some tea and to cuddle by the fire. Which I gave her a hard time about sometimes and now I regret it. I would give up everything to talk to her for ten more minutes. Just to talk to her. I would give it all up, everything I’ve ever worked for just to tell her I love her and that I’m sorry I didn’t come home on time.