Chapter 1: The Devil’s Bargain: Prologue

I always remember to lock my front door when I’m home alone, but tonight it must have slipped my mind.

How else could my ex have let himself in while I was busy in the kitchen, putting my dinner dishes away before I went up to bed?

I wasn’t with Joey Maglione long enough to get to the “exchanging house keys” stage of the relationship, let alone moving him into my house. I never even visited his place, and considering our three-month relationship consisted of dinner dates and that was about all before it fizzled out toward the end of the school year, he’d barely been to mine.

But there he is. Sitting on my couch, legs spread, arms crossed over his chest, he’s staring at the swinging door that separates my kitchen from my living room as though he’s been waiting all night for me to notice him.

I’m used to seeing him in casual wear. Polos. Button-downs. Khakis or pressed pants. He told me he worked in sales, and he dressed like did. His tight black t-shirt, dark denim jeans, and construction worker books aren’t what I’m used to, but I know that handsome face with his steely blue eyes and sandy brown hair.

The smirk, though? That’s new, and I stop a few steps past the threshold.

The door swings into my back. I barely notice.

“Joey? What are you—”

Then I see the gun perched on his thigh and my heart just about stops.

Gun? I don’t know what Joey’s doing here, but I have no idea why he would have brought a gun with him.

My eyes fly up to his face, and his smirk widens. He knows I saw his gun—and, for some reason, that amuses him.

“Hey, Ava, baby. Good to see you again.”

I pointedly refuse to acknowledge his weapon, almost as though I could make it disappear by pretending not to see it. “What are you doing here? It’s late.”

It’s almost eleven o’clock at night. Normally, I’m in bed before ten. I have to be up early to get ready for school, but we’ve been out for two weeks now. During summer break, my schedule gets a little off, though I’m still an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of girl whether it’s September or July.

Joey knows that. It’s one of those little things that added up to the point that we both had to admit that we were incompatible. Despite being in his mid-thirties like me, he enjoyed the night life while I’ve never been a fan. He had to have thought I was sleeping, and yet he’s here—he’s here with a gun—and I have no idea why.

I try to ignore it. That’s impossible when he snatches it up, holding it easily in his hand as he gets to his feet.

“Oh, I know it’s late. Saint Ava… just can’t stomach the idea of having a man in your house after dark, huh?”

It’s the tone of voice that catches my attention first. I remember Joey as having a kind yet undeniably suave manner of speaking. A gentleman. He always respected my pace, never pushing me for more than I was willing to give, and was sweet about it.

Not now.

He has a dark edge to his words, part sneer, part scoff that’s only highlighted by the way he looks me up and down.

I’m in my nightclothes: an oversized t-shirt, no bra, and a pair of sleep shorts. I’d changed earlier while I was snuggled up with a blanket on the couch, watching some mindless television. When I was ready for bed, I turned off the TV, went and put away my dishes from dinner, and was just about to head for my room when I found Joey waiting for me.

His lip curls when he sees the outline of my boobs against the thin fabric. My nipples are poking through, courtesy of my air conditioner being on full blast, and he can’t take his eyes off of them.

Me? I’m staring back at him, too.

“What did you call me?”

Saint Ava… long before Link left me for a life of crime, I was always the goodie goodie to his bad boy rep. Only we knew the truth about the other, and while those school-age teases proved pretty apt—Link, with his criminal empire, and me, teaching first-graders at Springfield Elementary—when he called me ‘Saint Ava’, it was my first boyfriend’s pet name for me.

My ex says it like it’s a curse… but he shouldn’t know that nickname at all.

Joey doesn’t answer me, though his smirk develops a cruel edge as his expression darkens.

My stomach twists. Oh, I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit.

I cross my arm over my chest. “I think you should go.”

“Go? So soon? Oh, Ava, baby, that’s not gonna happen. At least, I’m not leaving on my own.” Lifting his gun, he aims it dead at my covered chest as he takes a few pointed steps toward me. “When I leave here tonight, you’re coming with me.”

Looking down the barrel, I go absolutely still.

When he grabs his dick through his jeans with his free hand, I start to tremble.

“Gus said I gotta bring you to the boss. You just gotta be breathing, he said. He didn’t say a damn thing about me taking my cut a little early.” One hand still on his crotch, Joey wags the gun at me. “You never let me fuck you. You ate the food I bought, and sat next to me in my ride, but, oh, your precious pussy was too good for me. Is that it?”

What the hell is going on? He looks like the sweet Joey I knew, but he’s not acting like him. When I explained to him that I didn’t have sex with any of my dates until I felt comfortable with them, he told me he agreed. That he didn’t mind waiting.

My mouth is suddenly dry. I swallow, trying to bring some moisture back before I say, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but this has gone on long enough. I want you to leave.”

Despite fear rushing through me, I thought I sounded pretty firm. Maybe I did, but Joey proves just how much I don’t know what he’s doing—or him—at all when he makes a move for me.

He’s too quick. Breaking for me, he’s in front of me before I even have the chance to scream.

“Saint Ava,” he sneers at me, collaring my throat with one hand, squeezing my tit with the other. “The virgin who isn’t.”

“Let go of me.”

He twists my nipple, reaching up to dig his fingers into my cheeks when I can’t help but scream this time. Using his palm to jam my jaw closed, my scream is cut off as he forced me to very nearly choke on my tongue.

Shifting me in his held, his hot breath on the shell of my ear has me whimpering through my clenched teeth. “When Damien gets a hold of you, you’ll be glad to have something to look back on. Because I’m not going anywhere until I get inside that cunt, baby, but once Damien has you? You’ll wish it was just my dick you gotta ride… if you survive, that is.”

Damien—

Damien.

Even in my panicked brain, I know who he means: Damien Libellula. A name only ever spoken of in whispers, but once that nearly everyone in town knows because it’s dangerous not to.

In Springfield, there are two rival organized crime rings: Damien Libellula’s mob-run ‘Family’ set on the East End of the city, and the Sinners Syndicate, ruled by an enigmatic figure known only as Devil—but who I still think of as Link.

If Joey came on Damien’s order, he must work for the Libellula Family. I haven’t had any contact with Link for years, so I know I haven’t been targeted by the mafia because of him, but somehow I have been.

And if I can’t get away from my ex, he has every intention of fucking me, then turning me over to his boss. Both are awful fates, but put together?

He’s right. I won’t survive.

I have to get away from him. That’s all I’m thinking about. Get away, get some help, and then get the hell out of Springfield. My whole life is here—my job and my friends, and my parents’ graves, too—but if Damien Libellula has a bullseye, I have to go.

I never get the chance. Before I can try to escape, Joey shoves me away from him, hooking his boot behind my bare foot. I trip backward, landing roughly on my ass as I hit the floor.

As he looms over me, his expression goes dark. With a flick of his finger, Joey unbuttons his jeans.“Make it good for me, baby, and maybe I’ll stand up with you in front of the boss. Instead of being Family puss, I’ll see if you can go back to being mine.”

“No—”

He’s on top of me before I can finish my shout. After he has my writhing body on my back, Joey shoves his knees between my legs, keeping me from closing them to him completely.

Before I can claw his face, he sets his gun next to him and takes my wrists in an iron-tight hold. His weight presses against me, trapping me on the carpet as he shifts my hands, taking both of mine in one of his. Now that he has a free hand again, he jams it up my shorts, fingers stabbing into my pussy. One of them finds my entrance, penetrating me while I shriek.

Screaming as loud as I can, hoping one of my neighbors will hear me, I wiggle beneath him, trying to break out of his hold and gets his finger outside of me.

Joey digs his elbow in my gut to kill my scream and my escape attempt. As I gasp, choking on the fear and the pain, he lets go of his hold on me before leaning back on his heels, tugging on his zipper with the hand that was just up my shorts. The zipper catches on the material of his boxers. For a heartbeat, he’s distracted, trying to get his pants off, and he lets go of my hands so that he can fix the zipper.

I guess he thought I was resigned to my fate when I stopped screaming. Yeah, right. The second he lets go of me, I see my chance. Bracing myself on my hands, I scoot far enough away from him that I can back rear my leg, then kick him right in the dick with the heel of my foot.

Joey howls as I connect. The shock of the pain has him falling to his side, curled up on the fetal position as he realizes I basically just tried to mule-kick his hard dick off of him.

I scamper to my feet.

“You fucking bitch,” he snarls when he gets his breath back, cupping his groin with one hand. His other beats against my floor, eyes blazing with hate as he watches me try to desperately put some distance between us. “I’ll make you pay for that!”

He can’t kill me. Right? He’s supposed to bring me to his boss, and that means alive. He can’t kill me—

He climbs up to one knee, hand slapping the ground, searching for his gun. It didn’t get too far, only about three feet across my living room, and he sees it once he takes his eyes off of me.

He’s quick. Terrified for my life, I’m quicker.

Next to my couch, there’s an end table with a side drawer. Racing for it, I have it open, my pistol in hand before he’s halfway to his gone.

“Hey, asshole.”

His head shoots up. A low chuckle escapes him when he sees the gun.

“Please, Ava,” Joey scoffs, his voice raw from his howl. “You can’t honestly think I believe you know how to handle one of those.”

He’s right. I have no idea what I’m doing past what I looked up on Google when the gun first showed up at my house.

It was five years ago, when I finally traded my last apartment for a house of my own. About a week after I finished unpacking, an unmarked brown box showed up in my mailbox. The gun was inside. With it, a white card that had a single minimalist drawing of a devil on it: red horns and a pointed tail curved beneath it.

Link sent it to me. I hadn’t spoken to him since I was twenty-two and saw him staring at me from across the midway at the Springfield mall. All the same hurt, rejection, pain, and love hit me then, and I called him, begging him for closure, even though he walked out on me two years before. He hadn’t been able to explain himself anymore then than he had when he first left—just telling me that he’d come back for me when he was “worthy”—and I’d… I’d given up.

I’d moved on.

And then, eight years later, the Devil of Springfield sent me a handgun when I lived on my own for the very first time.

Protection? I’d decided it was, and after researching the make and model of the gun he sent, I shoved it in my side drawer and tried my best to forget about it.

It’s loaded. With a determined flick of my fingernail, I disengage the safety. My Colt Mustang is a pocket pistol, barely a pound, and I lift it up so that Joey can’t miss it.

“Leave.” My voice is as shaky as my hands. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

“You want me to go, baby? You’ll have to shoot me first.”

I will. If that’s what I have to do, I will. “Just go.”

He doesn’t.

Instead, pushing off of the ground, he launches himself at me. The last glimpse I get of Joey Maglione is his handsome face twisted in a vicious sneer, and I know that, if I let him get his hands on me again, he won’t be satisfied with just fucking me because I never let him before. If he reaches me, I’m dead.

I’m fucking dead.

So I can’t let him get his hands on me, can I?

Closing my eyes, praying to whoever will listen that I don’t miss, I squeeze the trigger.

Shooting a gun in real life is nothing like what you see on television and in the movies. I have my Colt positioned between both of my hands, and the reason I don’t slice my palms open when the barrel slide recoils is because I’m terrified of the thing so my grip isn’t as tight as it could’ve been. My arms jerk with the recoil, though, and the explosion of the actual shot has my ears ringing.

I’m not expecting the smoke that floods my face. It stinks like rotten eggs, making me choke and cough on it. My arms don’t just ache, either; they tingle from the vibrations. I can feel myself gagging, though it takes a few seconds before I can hear it, too.

And that’s when I realize that that’s all I can hear.

“Joey?” I drop my arms. “Joey?”

No answer. Not a curse, not a sneer, not even his yowl of pain.

It’s quiet, and for a few seconds more, I stay in the darkness before I finally open my eyes.

I immediately wish that I hadn’t.

My stomach turns, from the sight and the smell, and I just manage to take a few frantic steps away from his body before mine folds over. With my hands on my knees, Link’s gun still tight in my grasp, I throw up all over the floor.

Because I didn’t miss, did I? With Joey so close, I didn’t really think I would, but I wasn’t trying to kill him. I just wanted to get him to back off, and if I had to shoot him to keep him from getting on top of me again, I would.

He’s on the floor. Crumpled, half of his face blown away from the bullet’s impact, I know that I won’t have to worry about him touching me again. He’s obviously dead—and I’m in big, big trouble.

I killed him. I killed my ex.

Groaning, heaving, eyes stinging with sudden tears, I lob the gun as far away from me as I can, tossing it lightly so that it doesn’t accidentally discharge. My mouth tastes vile. I wipe at it with the back of my shaky hand, barely aware that I’m doing it.

He’s dead. My ears are still ringing from the gunshot, and I know one of my neighbors had to have heard it. If they come here, if they check, they’ll find what’s left of Joey on my floor.

I run over to my TV. It takes me a few seconds to snatch the remote from where I left it on the coffee table. My fingers don’t want to work. I’m muttering something under my breath—come on, come on, you stupid thing, he’s dead, oh my God, he’s dead—but all I can think about it getting the damn thing on.

Any channel, any streaming app, it doesn’t matter, whatever it loads on is fine. I press buttons until sound comes through the speakers. Cranking the volume up to fifty, it’s loud enough now that maybe—just maybe—my neighbors might think the gunshot came from my television.

Will that work? I don’t know. Despite being familiar with a few players in Springfield’s seedy underbelly, I’m not a criminal. I only had a gun because… because…

Link.

For fifteen years, I tried not to think about what kind of man my childhood sweetheart became. It’s hard when even the sweet, innocent school teachers in Springfield can still hear rumors about how wicked Lincoln “Devil” Crewes is, but if there’s one man who might know what to do with a dead body in the middle of your living room, it’s my Link.

I need his help. Somehow, without ever meaning to, I found myself mixed up with the local criminals. If Damien Libellula sent Joey after me for some reason, the head of the East End crime family isn’t going to be happy when he finds out that I killed him.

It was self-defense. I had to protect myself. If he hadn’t tried to get my clothes off… if he hadn’t threatened to rape me… I would never have gone for the gun in my side drawer.

But even if I could claim self-defense, would Damien believe me?

Would the crooked police—who everyone in the city knows act like a private force for the Springfield syndicates—believe me?

Wrapping my arms around my middle, trembling as I realize the answer to that, I have one more question: will Link believe me?

I don’t know. The boy I loved when we were both twenty would have, before he broke my heart and walked away, never looking back. The thirty-five-year-old man he’s become since then? I honestly can’t say, but I do know that I don’t have any other choice.

Phone… phone… where’s my—

Ah, there it is.

His number isn’t in my phone. I did that on purpose. It would’ve been too, too easy to call him on those long, lonely nights if all I had to do was pull up his name. But, unless he changed it, I have it memorized by heart.

No way he didn’t change it, I tell myself even as I tap out the number. He had to have—but what if he didn’t?

I have to try. If it’s possible to reach Link, I have to try.

Ring.

Ring.

Ring…

I lose track of how many rings it takes before voicemail picks up. It’s automated, spitting the number back at me, so I can’t tell if it still belongs to Link or not. I have to hope that it does, and despite the late hour, I call him again.

Before I can dial a third time, my phone rings. Caller ID shows the same number I just called.

I answer it on the second ring.

“Hello?” I gasp out. “Link? Is that you?”

Please, please, please…

“Yeah.” The voice is gruff, deeper with age, but recognition sings within me. “It’s me.”

It’s him.