My heroine is always strong in her own way. She is witty. She is the type of girl you would want as a friend.
I don’t do instalove unless the main characters have a past together. I don’t do instamine.
My hero will, of course, eventually claim his girl - and aggressively - but his fascination is earned over more than a single encounter. It builds. It eventually bursts.
My page couples will grow together, be overwhelmed by emotion, be confused by it. Each one will fight together against the world more than they will against each other - for the most part.
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More than a cuddle.
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Jimmy Storm - 1979
Controllare le strade; control della citta
(Control the streets; control the city.)
My father wasaladder-manin the late 1940s. In the old country - Sicily. He was the boy the Family trusted with their money, for he was the one with the clearest vantage point. The expressionladder-manhad come about back in the early gambling days when young men would stand on ladders on the casino gaming floors, watching and waiting for misconduct.
My father was the most trusted and feared man in Sicily - a complete oxymoron, I know. But it all depended on who was doing the trusting and who was doing the fearing.
The Family paid him ninety lira an hour, which was good money back then, and so of course, the crooks of the club - the ones on the gaming floor pocketing chips, counting cards, and winning too much of the Family’s money - found death quickly. There was very little chance for rebuttal once my father had them in his sights. He was an adolescent then and rather engrossed in the power bestowed upon him, as would any young man be with the strength of many at his beck and call.
Things were irrevocably simpler back then. If there was a misdemeanour, it was handled quickly, quietly, and strictly; very few people lived to talk about it. Which is how it should be.
According to gossip, my grandfather was a ‘likable type’ and had no knowledge of his son’s activities. Luckily for us, my grandfather had died when my father was sixteen, leaving him without any relations.Luckily?Yes, because there is little I can learn from a ‘likable type’ of man.
After three years of being the boy up the ladder on the most notorious gaming floors in Sicily, my father became an orphan. And an orphan he was for exactly two days before the Family picked him up and officially made him their own. They bought my father. They owned him then. It wasn’t until then that he really understood what he'd signed up for.
He had married the mob.
When you marry the mob, as when you marry a woman, you are contractually, spiritually, legally, and emotionally bound to them. The key difference being, there is no such thing as divorcees - only widowers. That is where it all had started - humble beginnings and a life of servitude to the Family.
When I was a young man, my ego was larger than Achilles’, rivalling my father’s in every way. It would be fair to say I flexed my muscles every chance I could - at the boys at school, at the people on the sidewalk offering me less than obedient glances. . . at everyone. I was asfacciatolittle shit, and partly because of that cheekiness, I learned to thrive on the sensation people’s submission gave me. I’d usually be hard as a rock beneath my trousers in the midst of a power play.
I am Jimmy Storm, son of Paul Storm, and my name is legendary. Storm is not our real name, of course. My father named himself when he became a made-man.
Half of Sicily owed the Family money, which meant we owned half of Sicily and her people. We managed people with ease, for their lives were worthless to us and priceless to them. I grew up around the cruellest, slyest, dirtiest bastards in the country and they set the benchmark for my behaviour as an adolescent; they were my idols.
When I turned twenty-seven, myzuNorris and I left Sicily, taking with us blessings and funds from the Family, with our sights set on a new place of profit.We flew to an area of Australia renowned for its wealthy residents - a secluded section on the coast consisting of four towns: Brussman, Connolly, Stormy River, and Moorup. I recently learnt of an Australian idiom for this kind of unmonitored and isolated area - ‘Bandit Country'.
I was out to prove myself at any cost.
Which brings me to today, and the reason I have my shoes pressed to a man's trachea.
“I amJimmy Storm!” I state. The rubber of my heel presses very slowly on his windpipe, and when he tries to buck away, I know I have found thepuntu debole. He tries desperately to claw at my foot, attempting to relieve some pressure. He can’t, but that doesn’t save my shoe from getting covered in fingerprints, andthatis just so inconvenient.
Myzuand I have been in this miserable part of the world for three god forsaken weeks and have found nothing short of disorganised, disrespectful, and inferior versions of la Cosa Nostra. The young man whose trachea I’m currently crushing is Dustin Nerrock, and he is ‘the name’ about these parts. A slightly hostileparràmunehas taken place and I am simply establishing my dominance.