Live For It

|48|

{ZHARA}

"My dad used to beat the shit out of me," Isaiah continued, helping me pry open the safe. I glanced up from the crowbar in my hands, looking him in the eye. When I saw that he wasn't facing me, I went back to digging the bar under the hatch. 

Yeah, the keys didn't work.

To pass the time of welding the fuck out of the metal box, Isaiah was telling me how he met Zion and how he got so good at what he does. 

Ren looked up from the computer at Zion's desk and finally got distracted from the database searching he was doing with the initials. 

"My mother left before I turned seven, I didn't really give a fuck about her," he said. "It's not like I had a choice to care, either. Never knew who she was. I think that's what made him a terrible father in the first place. He didn't want to raise me by himself, let alone be a father in the first place."

"I grew up trying to get out, escape every chance I got."

"I got confident and stupid, thinking I was able to survive on my own. I got sucked in with bad people, and it made me a bad person by association."

I reached for a screwdriver. 

"And I fucking loved it."

I pursed my lips. 

"It was like an addiction, and I always needed something more. Something worse. At first, it was dealing, then it was gun trafficking, and I kept moving up. I got to the point where I worked for no one. I did jobs across the world for money, and for dangerous people."

I raised a brow subconsciously. 

"Like, as in...you were a hitman?" I questioned. 

He groaned, the noise caught me off guard. "It was fucking great, Bird. It made me a bloodthirsty man. I was a whore for killing." 

I smirked, repressing a full smile. 

"You still are," Cobra popped in. 

I guess Isaiah really was an addict. Like...he got off on killing. That's odd, but not surprising. 

"I never did good research on the people I killed. I was ignorant. I was greedy, and I didn't try to stop myself when I got too deep."

Ren got up to print off a piece of paper. 

"Once, I was assigned to take out Ronnie "The Ghost" Mutti," he glanced over at Zion, who was reading through some paperwork. 

"It was set at one of the annual charity balls, and I was disguised as a regular attendant. Mutti was the only one I ever did research on because of the amount I was being paid. He was a rapist and a sex trafficker. It made me realize that I had never fully thought through every last decision I had made to take out someone. What if I had killed someone innocent?"

"To be honest, I didn't care about it too much. But I was aware some things had to change if I wanted to make it to my 18th birthday without having a bullet in my skull."

My lips parted; he had still been a teenager during all of this.

"I stabbed Ronnie Mutti twenty-six times, one for each reported person he raped."

"I had left the room after I knew he was dead and didn't know I had been followed. Zion had trailed my ass all the way back to my hotel room."

I watched as Zion looked up at us before returning to his work.  

"He confronted me and told me he knew every detail about my life from the second I was conceived. I had heard about the Armani family, and I was more than aware of their hierarchy. So, I made my next decisions very carefully."