Prologue
Jaxon
Here comes the bride, all dressed in white…
I hummed the catchy, cliché tune as I attempted to make the perfect Windsor knot in my black tie. Black because weddings were just fancy funerals; a ceremony of marrying the wrong person and letting that person constrain the rest of your godforsaken fucking life by only doing what they want, slowly smothering you until you pray to finally be alone in that casket.
“Fuck this damn tie,” I sneered at my reflection in the mirror and, with a jerky motion, loosened the knot until I yanked the tie off from around the collar of the white button-up shirt.
“Need a hand?” Sebastian, my best friend, who was more like a brother to me, leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, smirking. I hated it when he smirked because it meant he could do something that I couldn’t. I didn’t like not being able to do something. I was the kind of man that made sure he knew how to do anything and everything.
But a tie? These damn things were my worst enemy, and that was saying something considering my profession and past. No matter how much I practiced, a tie always defeated me.
“No, I decided not to wear one. For your information.” It was a lie, and he knew it, but I didn’t like to admit weakness. He also knew that, so he never made me feel bad about that less than amazing quality about myself.
“Right.” He ran his fingers through his thick head of black hair and lifted his hand from his pocket to look at his Rolex. “We need to leave in five minutes.”
“I’m nearly ready,” I said, not admitting that out of all the jobs we have done together, this was the one I was nervous about.
We weren’t stealing art. We weren’t stealing diamonds, drugs, or money.
We were stealing a woman.
Someone who I have considered mine for an awfully long time.
Quinn Taylor. The only woman who has ever had my heart.
She was going to walk down the aisle today and marry the wrong man, the man who set me up and was the reason why I had to spend ten years of my life in prison for committing third-degree murder— something I did not do.
I got pinned for killing my pregnant sister. Tracy was my best friend. She was good. One of those people you could always count on. She was a much better person than I was. She didn’t deserve to die.
Ten years ago, I still got into shit I wasn’t supposed to, but I never killed anybody. I met Brian Marks, a guy around my age who wanted to get in the drug industry together and make a fortune. I didn’t do drugs, but selling them? A man could make millions. We decided if we went into business together, we would split profits fifty-fifty.
Everything changed when he met my sister. Brian got her pregnant, and when Tracy told him, he was high on cocaine and flipped out. She called me crying, and I got in my car and hurried over to calm her down, but when I got there, it was too late. She was dead.