The backhand to the face was unexpected but not unusual. We were often beaten when we disappointed. Belts, burnings, fists against faces or boots into stomachs. My head whipped to the side as pain flared across my cheekbone, my skin splitting under the impact. I felt the blood trickle down my face, felt the thin stream of hot liquid run a river over my cheek and drip off my jaw, landing on my denim clad thigh to seep into the material.
“Then I’ll kill you both,” my uncle spat, “you are nothing without me, boy, when I tell you to do something, I expect you to do it. If I ask you to throw yourself off a cliff, you’ll fucking do it!”
“Then kill me!” I yelled back.
I didn’t care about my life, it was worthless anyway. I didn’t want to inherit this filth from my uncle, I didn’t want to kill people or hurt people, so he could kill me and put me out of my misery.
If he didn’t kill me now, I had to get Isobel out. I had to get us both out.
He didn’t kill me.
He didn’t raise another hand against me, as if a thought settled into his head and he’d planned everything he would do to her, to us, right there and then.
He turned from me, and he left me there, staring out at the water, me forming my own plan.
My uncle was too protected, he was guarded twenty-four seven, and they were loyal men. I would be dead before I even stepped foot into his manor house, so I had to be smart about it.
I formed the plan, it took time, time I didn’t have. Every day that passed was a day closer to an early grave and I worried for Isobel more than anything else. He wanted her erased and he would do it. She was my weakness. I didn’t know what he had planned, and the not knowing was worse than everything else.
The night I planned to put it into place was the night it all went wrong.
Isobel and I still lived together, my uncle rented us an apartment in the city centre, a well secured building that was pleasant and lavish, but we didn’t have security like he did. It was early morning, the sun had yet to rise, and the streets were quiet as the city still slept. A huge bang was what startled me awake, like a wall had been blown out. I jumped from my bed, grabbed a gun from the drawer and raced out to meet a wall of muscle.
I trained a lot, I was building my body, but I was still small compared to these guys. I’d never seen them before. The bang was in fact the door being blown open, it hangs off the hinges in the doorway, a large crack splintering the wood.
I tried to fight. I shot one of them but not before I was knocked out with a swift and calculated punch to the side of my head.
When I woke hours later, the sun now sitting high in the sky, the apartment me and my sister shared had been obliterated, and my sister was gone.
At the time, I didn’t see it. I didn’t see my uncle's plan in this. Why not just kill her and me where we lay in our beds? Why have men break in and steal her away? It didn’t make sense. He wanted her dead not kidnapped, not taken. Perhaps it was naivety and damn hope that made me blind at the time, hope that somewhere deep inside the last piece of our family he cared enough not to do such a thing.
But I was wrong, and he used me.
He used my sister's abduction as a turning point for me. He honed my anger, my rage, my need to avenge her to his advantage. He vowed he had nothing to do with it, that he wouldn’t allow one of his own to be taken this way, but he had no idea which one of his countless enemies could have done it, according to him no one knew about us.
We were his secret weapons, children raised to be monsters and only when he was ready would he unleash his creations onto the world.
I played into his hand, I allowed him to use that rage in me to create the man I am today. The man that kills without a thought, that deals drugs and money and commands an underground army so great no one dares to fuck with us.
For six years my uncle profited on my need to find my sister. He trained me, he taught me everything I needed to know. He whispered his fake plans of taking out whoever it was who had hurt my sister. He told me he was getting close to figuring it out, and I stupidly believed him. No one takes what belongs to him. He would never allow it.
I became everything he wanted me to be. I became the thing he saw in me right at the start. A ruthless leader, a man with no morals, with no fear and a man who was fit to take over from him when the time came.
After a few years I gave up hope that Isobel was alive and everything after that was just revenge. I gave up searching for her.
Right up until I received a note.
A simple folded piece of paper ripped from a notebook and all that was on it was: She’s alive. The words were followed by an address and a time.
Part of me believed it a trick, a plan to take out the heir of the empire before he had even taken the throne, but a part of me, that long lost part of me that had me saying no to him in front of that river when I was eighteen, told me it was the truth. Isobel lived.
Three years ago, I followed the instructions left on that note, I went to the address at the time specified to find a man, covered in black clothing, a mask concealing his face and behind him, looking thinner than a skeleton with bruises and blood covering her skin was my sister. My baby sister.
“You want answers,” he said, “look to your uncle and find the Syndicate.”
Isobel was shoved into my arms, and they left. I didn’t think to ask anything else. My sister was back. My baby sister who I thought dead, was back.
Little did I realize at the time that the sister I knew was no longer alive.
I killed my uncle three days later. I shot him three times in the abdomen and then when he was on his knees, I ran him through with my knife straight into his heart. I kept my hand there, letting his blood coat my skin to remind myself of what had been done. I still feel that blood.
He orchestrated her abduction, he made her suffer for years as a sex slave to this organization, the Syndicate, all to teach me a lesson. All to train me into being as heartless as he was. It worked. I was heartless. I was a monster. And now I was making them all pay.
After I killed him, I took control of London, and then I spread it. I have men in enemy cities, I have men in government offices and in police stations and political parties. I am everywhere.
My uncle did me a favor by not revealing too much about us. Most only know that I am a Heart, but I make it a point not to show my face or wave around my power so that when I finally take down this Syndicate, they wouldn’t even see me coming.
No one questions my authority, the people who matter know who I am and what I will do.
It’s been a careful path for three years, and now we were reaching the end and the only thing on the horizon was blood.