Objects of Obsession

Chapter 1: The Empire We Built

TRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of suicide, and murder.

Preface

Stone

My name isn't odd.

At least not once you get to know me. I can be cold and unyielding. I can be hard headed and irregular.

My father was the same. My mother too. And it was that fucking woman that gave me my drive and ambition.

And even a few of the scars on my back.

I was never like her in any positive ways. I would never put my hands on a child, even if I despised them and I really do despise children. My parents were both angry people who refused to take shit from anyone, even if it meant we lost our house and had nothing to eat.

I never realized my hatred for them until I ran away at eighteen.

The world opened my eyes to the disloyalty of my father and the way my mother would just sit there and take it. They hated each other almost as much as I hated them. So the moment I scammed my way into a new apartment in an entirely different state, I never saw them again. I heard nothing for ten fucking years and it was only because my father had put a bullet in his mouth after putting one in my mother's skull.

Assholes.

It hadn't affected me in the least. I was glad to be rid of them.

At this point in my life I had made my way in the world. I had built a kingdom for myself.

Yes, a kingdom with an absolute lack of legality, but it did me well.

At nineteen I had been picked up for vagrancy in Los Angeles. At the time I was spending time with a small crowd of drug dealers in the area and was close with the boss, Mickey Tricks.

Mickey was the father I never had. He taught me everything. How to shoot, how to fight, how to weigh, pack, and sell product. But, most importantly, he taught me how to be a business man. He took care of me. Taught me how to take care of myself. Treated me like family and when I was arrested he bailed me out with a few of the goons I had met in the clink.

He made us a family.

Mickey, our father. Issac Malice and I his golden sons, and fifteen or so little rats that he kept around.

Together we pushed product, sold arms, and made cash hand over fist. No one could touch us. We ran the underbelly of LA with fists of iron and piles of money.

And when Mickey was killed in a robbery gone wrong, Malice and I were forced to step up and take his place.

And we did.

We began selling arms for the rich and murderous of LA, Miami, New York, Chicago, all over the country. Soon after, Mexico became involved. Cartels wanted us. Gangsters and Mafia bosses. We even sold some gorgeous katanas to the Yakuza,

But we were always on our toes.

We were never safe.

If you didn't want to be us, you wanted to kill us. And a few almost did.

So we relocated.

We fired our rat boys, picked up shop and planted across the pond in London. For a country where guns were made illegal, there was sure a market for them there.

And that's where we've been ever since.

Fucking kings of an empire, the government was involved with. They knew who we were and what we did and they were some of my best customers. As contradictory as that was.