| BOOK FIVE | THE LONDON CRIME KING | A DARK MAFIA ROMANCE NOVEL |
This book contains adult language and subject matter, including graphic violence, drugs and explicit sex that may be disturbing to some readers.
This series is NOT a typical romance...
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Life Before
I sat on the floor in my bedroom, the door cracked open, listening to arguments downstairs with acute attentiveness. Opposing views are perennial in the Hughes household lately. If my mother was not accusing my father of extramarital affairs, he blamed her for their disobedient children, and if the siblings were not bickering with each other, they were admonished by their parents for nothing of importance.
Take Miles, for example. He is in his bedroom with our brother, Martin, nursing a hangover subsequent to three hours of parental chastisement. He went to a college party last night and came home at the crack of dawn to find our father, chagrined with bared teeth, by the front door awaiting his return.
Poor Miles. Father hauled him indoors by the scruff and told him to recite the ten commandments in the throes of unforgivable punishments. Mother disenthralled her son once blood begrimed the floor, but it was too late. Miles had already suffered the wrath of our father's fist.
It would not be the first time our father's temper got the better of him, and his children, without fail, caught the tail end. From a very young age, I had learned to conform to the authoritarian ways of our household. It was easier and safer to nod when he spoke and jump to his demands.
Father might throw his weight about and call the shots behind closed doors, but his children misbehave when his back is turned. We are all guilty of what he'd deem condemnable behaviour once freed from the tyrannical havoc within our home.
A floorboard creaked in the hallway.
My eyes jerked up.
Ben slipped into the bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the floor next to me. "I hate him," he whispered, and I nodded in agreement. "Mile's needs stitches. His eyebrow is split open, and blood is all over his T-shirt. I feel bad for him, Emma. I wish I were older, bigger and stronger." His lips tickled my ear as he spoke softly for no one other than us to hear. "I'd kill him."
My brother despised our father. He came to my room once a week to concoct a web of perplexing murder ideas. Last week, he suggested that we bury our father beneath the garden patio. He joked about pushing him down the stairs and locking him in the basement the week before. I take his crazy imagination with a pinch of salt. "Don't say that," I said, low and nervous. "He might hear you."
Ben shrugged uncaringly.
"It's hard enough to witness him hurt the others." Capturing his hand, I laced our fingers together. "But it would break my heart to see him come for you."
"Dad's aggression is unavoidable." His eyes, wide and alert, locked with mine. "We live with him. And it's not like the house is big enough for everyone. I mean, I have to share a box room with two siblings for crying out loud. Do you know what it's like to wake up with Martin's smelly feet in your face every morning? Or Miles' gammy morning breath in your ear?"
