Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1)

ROGUE

A novel by KaNeshia Michelle

Copyright © 2014
KaNeshia Michelle

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Acknowlegements

It has been close to two years now since I’ve release a project.

It has been a rough journey; one filled with too many ups and down, but I am so thankful to be writing again. Thankful that finally I
feel
like a writer again. I thank God for all that I have learned about myself in these recent years. I thank my family for loving me and pushing me to get back to what I love the most and will always be apart of me; my ability to write and share my gift of story to whoever wants to sit down to read a piece of work I’ve produced.  I thank my editor Susanne Lakin so much. She has been a wonderful person, and a very gifted talent that has helped me along these past years. Susanne, I will forever be in your debt for your compassion and friendship. Thank you.  I thank my mother for still believing in me with as much strength today as she did when I was alittle girl wanting to conquer the world.

I love you all so much. Thank you.

Dena Worrell, this book is for you. Thank you so much for believing in me.

PROLOGUE

It’s a sad life but someone’s got to live it

The inside of my little basement of body dismemberment felt like a sweat box—a personal sauna at best. The vapors were harsh and sticky, and the smell was enough to make you want to gag.

It was the smell of fear and blood. The smell of death at its finest moments.

Every body that lay on my table had a name. Sometimes I knew their name beforehand, before I had to cut into their faces and slice off their fingertips. Other times I didn’t.

This body I had tonight had a name I knew.

His name was Jimmy Ricky, and he had taken another man’s wife for himself. In doing so, he had committed a crime against God, and a crime against the Rogue family.

His crime had cost him his life.

And if you asked me, God would have been more forgiving than my family. God maybe would’ve allowed him to live. Maybe Jimmy Ricky would have gotten a few Hail Marys to say, or a few slashes of a leather whip on the back. But in my family, in the family of the Rogue, he had gotten death—brutal, nasty, and unforgivable.

The kicker—or the work in my throat as I swallowed another douse of whiskey straight—was I had the same nasty demons in my closet, kinfolk to Jimmy Ricky’s. My grandfather wasn’t as pretty with the usage of words to describe what I had done, or what I was to him. He had been blunt, his lips pulling back, working up to produce a sneer as he would say I was a wife fucker.

Why wasn’t I killed for this like the man on my table?

Because my name is Tristan Rogue. I am the illegitimate half-black and half-Italian son of the most powerful, dangerous man in Chicago.

I’m a black sheep who happens to be a mob prince. 

In the life of Rogue, there’s nothing more than prizes and prices.

Dealing with bodies after the fact—after the gunshot to the back of the head, or the torture, or even the quiet kill meant not to raise eyebrows within family—had gotten easier and easier.

This job was my punishment; this job was my price.

My crime took the shape of a very fine, very gorgeous woman.

Katie. 

Katie was a blonde with the purest blue eyes I had ever seen. She had been a model in her previous life before the Rogue family. Like most models that the glamour magazines failed to mention, Katie had seen the ugly parts of the business: the drugs; the catfights that would turn lethal; the jealous nature of the older, more seasoned model veterans; the horny, dirty, seedy photographers—the plain bullshit that no one knows about until they’re knee-deep in shit and drowning.

Katie cut her loses with the modeling career and thought she was moving up by marrying a very “good” friend of the Rogue family’s.

A very good friend
meant he killed people because we told him to.

His name was Harley.

And Harley worshipped Katie like the trophy she was. He was twice her age and ugly, but he treasured her like a
prize
.

For Katie, Harley was her price. He was the price that never stopped charging.

Six months into the marriage, a job got botched; names were thrown around to the police. An election was in midswing, and bribes to hush up, turn your head another way, were a little too high with the cops we had on payroll.

Long story short, Harley took one for the team.

Ten years in prison, but he would be treated like a king because he knew to never speak the family name. Quiet prisoners were taken care of. Rats, who tried to save their own necks, were
taken care of
. Harley had been smart and kept his mouth shut, but that left his pretty young wife at home with nothing but a failed career, and with no kids and a husband whom she didn’t even love.

She was still paying
prices.

My father had expressed that trust
was all that a man had to hold on to when things were dark, and even harder when things were bright. You had to have trust. Trust and loyalty were everything to a man who had nothing, and everything.

I had ruined what my father told me one night in one swift move. My father had thrown an extravagant ball at his home. Katie had every man’s eye in the room with the dress she wore. She was lonely and misplaced in the life of a crime family with no husband to show her the ropes. It hadn’t taken much to lure her in. She had wanted to feel close to a man who didn’t repulse her, and I just wanted to feel loved for a meager night.

Two months into our secret affair, Katie had gotten feelings, but more importantly, she said there was a kid on the way—my kid. 

Before even confronting me—telling me the news that she was pregnant, Katie had cried to my father and grandfather with the news. She was scared at what Harley would think, scared that he would still want to be with her, scared that my father and grandfather wouldn’t let her leave her husband for the man she truly loved: me.

The girl didn’t even know she was scared of the wrong things. She should’ve been scared—no, terrified—of the people she ran to first. The people whom she thought could save her life and give her that happy ending she wanted—and who were foolish enough to think she deserved it—were the very ones who would take everything from her, and later she would take her own life because of it.

“Handle it,” my father had spat at me through his clenched teeth.

In simpler words that meant kill her, but I wasn’t a killer. And even if I were a killer, I wanted no part in the death of a woman.

A wife pregnant with another man’s child was bad, and my father and I both knew it. My grandfather lived in the old world of organized crime, which meant every guilty party needed to disappear. Trust had been broken—a crime committed against a man doing time for the Rogue family.

Only blood could clean this up,
was what was in my grandfather’s mind.

Thank God my father wasn’t the type of boss who could tolerate his child being killed for the sake of
family saving face
. At least, at the time. 

Katie wanted me, and I wanted her to see her husband. I paid and bribed COs in the prison for conjugal visits for Katie to be with her husband. I wanted him to think he had a kid on the way before she started showing. 

See—I had a plan.

If she had sex with her husband, she could announce her pregnancy and everyone would believe it – making babies while incarcerated was a great past time. The kid couldn’t be born, though. In a family filled with Italian men, Katie had gotten pregnant by the mix breed Rogue son. The moment that baby came into the world, everyone would know that Harley hadn’t fathered the child. The kid would have to go, but that was a bridge I wanted to cross later with Katie. Right then I just needed time.

It was the perfect plan. Such a perfect plan that it fell to shit almost at the starting point.

From the way Katie had rehashed the visit with her husband to me, he had kissed her, but she hadn’t wanted it. He had gotten angry—as he should, since he had spent over a year in jail without her—and tried to force himself on her. She fought back with the truth: no she didn’t want him to touch her. Why? Because she was in love and it wasn’t with him and she was pregnant by the man she was in love with.
No, it’s not your child, Harley.

Harley wasn’t a smart man, but I figured he had become an expert in counting. People in prison knew numbers better than most. It took nine months to have a baby. He had been gone for fourteen months and his wife was two months pregnant.

He didn’t need the update that it wasn’t his child.

Harley was devastated and embarrassed.

My father promised retribution—meaning money—but Harley knew what he wanted: my head, the kid aborted, and his wife with some sense
beat
into her. And even if Harley had to take care of a child that wasn’t his, and a wife who thought it was perfectly okay to fuck around on him, he mostly wanted my death. He figured he could get that, at least—despite whose son I was.

To my relief, my father refused to order my hit. My father’s refusal was spit in Harley’s face. Harley didn’t sit on this information of the affair; he shared it with anyone who would listen. He became a bad apple in a perfectly fine bowl of fruit. A rotten tooth in a perfectly healthy mouth. The men surrounding the Rogue family soon knew the betrayal, the broken trust, within the family. If Harley couldn’t get his blood, he wanted justice. Talks of him talking to the feds surfaced, and he was quickly silenced in prison—permanently.

It had all been a fucking mess.

Katie soon realized that a life together with me wasn’t in the future. From the stress, she miscarried. The miscarriage had been my grasp at life when it had been her last straw with it. She ended up killing herself with a handful of sleeping pills and a bottle of wine, and I ended up being demoted to corpse detail.

My grandfather wasn’t exactly happy, but he was content with the results. He was an old-school man, and a racist bastard. His porch monkey grandson had screwed up, and no one could trust him. I was cast aside like trash. I was still alive, but as everything was stripped away from me, I soon felt like my life wasn’t much of a consolation prize.

I had drunk heavily then, but now it was worse.

See, in the life we live, shit doesn’t just run downhill. It just runs. My shit started on the bottom and worked its way up, then got all over the fucking place. I’m not trusted, I’m not considered loyal, and I don’t blame them.

If you confuse a prize with a price, then everything goes to hell, and quickly.

In the life of a price not yet paid in full . . .

“You see him there, darling?” Johnny smiled. In the dank lighting his dark eyes actually appeared intimidating and scary. He almost looked like a man who had no qualms pulling a trigger and getting dirty—or, more or less, bloody.

His wife, Lulina Wells, the world’s version of a walking sex goddess, allowed tears to brim in her eyes. She flinched when he turned to her.

“Johnny,” she said weakly, tears caught somewhere in her throat.

Johnny pounced on her. He pushed me aside so he could get to the body of the man who had been screwing his wife. He grabbed the back of her head, his fingers clawing for a hold of her long, wavy hair. His other hand was clasped tightly to her chin as he tried to angle her head just above the face of the dead man.

“He didn’t have to die,” Johnny whispered. “He was a good man and didn’t have to die.”

“You don’t even know his name,” she said.

She squealed as he tightened the hold on her face, his fingernails digging an impression in her jaw.

“I want this to be a lesson to you, Lulina. You embarrassed me. You embarrassed my family.” He leaned closer to her ear. Kissed it. She flinched and whimpered. “You’ll be next if this happens again.”

Johnny looked at me. With his dark eyes—a deep brown—and his thick wavy hair cut short and cropped in a businesslike manner, he wasn’t much to look at on most occasions. But at this moment he actually looked like a Rogue.

For the briefest of moments he looked like a man you were supposed to fear.

Lulina cried and nodded to his intimidations—she being smart enough to know that this performance would mean the difference between having her young husband feel safe enough that he had gotten his point across or whine like a bitch because no one respected him. And Johnny was dumb enough to not know the difference between a feared stare and the stare of determination to make him feel like he was getting what he wanted.

He released her. “Get in the car and wait for me.”

Lulina took a moment to wipe the tears and her running mascara. If she wanted to give one last glance at Jimmy Ricky, my brother and I would have never have known because she nodded and turned away. We both listened to the clink and clank of her heels as they descended. The heavy swing of the door slammed closed when she had left the room before Johnny looked at me.

“Get him done,” he said.

“You know my rates, Johnny.”

“You’re my brother, Tristan.”

And that meant absolutely nothing to me. I didn’t press the issue. My attention fell on the bloating man who had been beaten savagely for the woman who didn’t even grace his corpse with a good-bye glance.

I felt my brother rest his heavily ringed hand on my shoulder. “What’s with the gun, Tristan?”

The glock tucked in the back of my jeans was more like a uniform attachment to the life we lived. Every Rogue knew that. Every organized crime man understood you never failed to have a gun on you. Johnny was digging at something. He had sniffed some exposed blood that laid the groundwork for a wound underneath my armor.

He laughed. “You just cut up bodies, Tristan.”

“I know what I do.”

He squeezed my shoulder. “You were lucky, you know that?” He jutted his head toward the dead man on the table. His little problem taken care of by men he had our father send out. “At least Jimmy fucked up on the ladder. And what did you go for? A hired thug’s old lady?” He laughed the kind of laugh that implied he was inviting anyone to partake in the good fun he had found.

Jimmy Ricky’s dead body, and I allowed Johnny to have the humor all by himself.

“Get him done, Tristan. I’ll get you your money. You just get him done.”

****

I poured another helpful drink into my already brewing concoction. The liquor burned every single time it went down. I liked the burn. Told me I was alive.

Poor Jimmy Ricky.

His face was a fucked-up mess that told horrors of his final hours. The bones in his face had been broken and looked sunken in. One of his eyes was missing. The other was covered in a layer of bruises and discolored, swelled skin.

I lit a cigarette and let it dangle from my lips. I was, in a way, fascinated with the work the boys had did on the man. I wanted to know if they were sleeping well, eating without a bit of queasiness, after what they had done. Did they feel repulsed by any of this? Or were they conditioned by now—conditioned monsters who were too stupid, and confused the word
monsters
with
mobsters
?

I hadn’t been these men. I hadn’t had the time. I wasn’t a killer—yet. But part of me envied the men because at least they were working, doing Rogue business, when I was here cleaning up the Rogue mess. The fascination came from—or more or less took the form of—a question: Could I be this cold, this brutal?

Yes, I believed I could if given the chance again.

With these thoughts running around my head, spinning about me just like the smoke from my cigarette, I almost didn’t hear the distinctive sound of heels tapping against the cement floor. Amid the smell of death, I almost didn’t recognize the smell of the woman who sometimes seemed to have bathed in roses and dried off with gold.

I almost didn’t feel Lulina Wells, my brother’s wife, sneaking up on me.

“Tristan,” Lulina whispered from behind.

I didn’t turn around when I asked, “What are you doing back, Lu?”

“I forgot my purse,” she answered.

“Did you really?”

Lulina wrapped her arms around my midsection, and I felt my dick swelling in my pants almost immediately. She leaned her head on my shoulder and sighed in relief. She pressed her full lips to the back of my neck and allowed her lips to linger before speaking.

“I’ve missed you, Tristan.” She gave another kiss to the back of my neck. “You missed me?”

I had forgotten how to respond with actual words. I nodded in response and prayed she didn’t move her lips from my skin. It had been two weeks since she’d touched me. Now it seemed like it had been that long since I’d held my breath.

“You got it hard for me, Tristan?” She whispered this in my ear. Her heavily coated lips pressed barely on the tip of my earlobe.

I remained silent. My heart was slamming against my chest, begging to burst out. I felt her perfect fake tits on my back through my wife beater. She kissed my ear, took my earlobe into her mouth, and started flicking it with her tongue.

There’s a hint of caution that I know I should be taking because her husband, my brother, is in the car most likely wondering why getting a purse is taking so damned long. But that fear, or caution, slowly slipped away as her tongue—warm and wet—moved against my skin. 

She demanded between flicks on my earlobe. “Tell me you missed me, Tristan.”

“I missed you.”

“Tell me you can’t breathe without me.”

“I can barely breathe with you.”

“We need to end this for now, Tristan.”

I heard her, but it took a minute for it to register. And when it did, reality slammed back into the room. At the mere touch of her hands, I had been hovering over my body in another world of pleasure, but now even that was gone and I’d crashed back into myself.

I turned to her, my mouth quivering, my tongue thick in my mouth. “Wha . . . what . . .”

“I’m protecting you from Johnny. He’s watching me.”

“I can handle him.” And this was a lie but it was real to me now. I’d almost reached out for her, but remembered the blood on my gloves and stopped.

She has practiced this speech, and I was slow in seeing this until most of it had been given and she was wrapping up. “I want to be a good wife, for once, Tristan. There can’t be an ‘us’ right now.”

“Lu, please, don’t do this . . .” I’d come to begging, and she had come to taking lengthy but healthy steps back. At this I wondered if I was acting like a madman, but dismissed the thought.

No, I’m acting desperate; I’m acting this way because I am desperate.

Lulina came closer to me again. She leaned in and kissed me sweetly on the mouth, then backed away.

My tears were slow, but they were visible. It hurt because I was trying to stop them, and at that, they came even faster and harder. If she was sad about this, I didn’t get the pleasure of seeing it.

“It’s space, Tristan. Not the end of the world.”

She touched my face, traced my jawline, and gave me a slow, lingering pat on the cheek as if I were her child and had given her decent report card. She turned and left, and part of me walked out right with her. It wasn’t the end of the world—not hers anyway. Just mine alone.

Katie had been an affair that hadn’t lasted more than three months.

Lulina, on the other hand, had been an affair well groomed, well nourished, that began when I was nine years old. She was the first woman I had ever had, and the first woman I had actually thought I loved. 

I briefly wondered if I should be thankful that she was at least smart enough to end our affair when I was not. I was
only
about to hack up her boyfriend, and her husband had
only
opened his eyes and ears a little bit wider just in case he hadn’t dealt with all the loose ends pertaining to his wife’s loose legs. Maybe cutting my losses was best if I wanted to live to see past the age of twenty-four. I just couldn’t afford to be caught again with another woman who had a ring on her finger that I hadn’t put there. Caught once with another man’s wife had cost me dearly, almost my life. Caught again—this time found sleeping with my brother’s wife—would mean deeper horrors than I could possibly imagine.

I didn’t want the men that had killed Jimmy Ricky knocking on my door.

But Lulina Wells was a woman who knew how to bury herself deep under your skin. Being a man about this and trying so hard to be strong had failed me.

When I breathed, it hurt.

When I wiped my eyes, there were tears.

When I thought of her wet, warm tongue catching my sweat just below my Adam’s apple, and the thought of her never doing it again, there was pain.

And when I thought of Johnny holding her at night when I couldn’t, there was rage.

I leaned against my worktable and breathed—focusing on the ins and outs of my breath, trying to push back the tears. Pining over a woman who was almost twice my age was not how I wanted to spend my Saturday night. Neither was working a body as a favor for a brother I didn’t like, and sure as hell didn’t love. There were more important things to do, like drinking till I forgot how to hold the glass, and trying to get my cock wet.

When I felt I had collected myself, I picked up the pliers, breathed deeply, tried to find that happy
place when I had to work a body, then started pulling out all of Jimmy Ricky’s teeth. After the teeth were out, his fingers and toes would be next. And after his fingers and toes, I would have the wonderful next step of searching every inch of his body for tattoos, blemishes and birthmarks. Anything that could make it easy to identify him had to be cut off—the cutting of the head usually the last step of the job. And that was in case the body was found.

Getting rid of the body wasn’t my department; it was my cousin’s.

When working a body, it’s best to keep the head clear and the mind focused. Johnny’s little invasion to show his wife who was boss, and later his wife ending our affair, had punctured a hole in my focus, and my mind was now muddled piss that I was surprised didn’t leak from my ears. Now my head hurt and my throat was dry, itching toward being sore.

After finishing with Jimmy Ricky, I grabbed for my glass off the counter but missed it. The glass tilted slightly, then plunged to the hard ground but somehow didn’t shatter.

For some reason, I was disappointed.

Life is full of disappointments.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and exhaled. The lock clicked as the dead bolt that held me hostage in my little horror-filled hole with shitty lighting retracted, and the door creaked open. It was Zander, another mutt from the Rogue family—another man who had fucked up within the family and now was paying prices just like me. He was half Italian and half Puerto Rican. He had black eyes and wavy black hair that he kept short, but long enough for the thick waves to push through. He always sported a five o’clock shadow on his face no matter how close he shaved without cutting himself.

Alexander Rogue was thirty years old and was more of a drunk than I was.

If I had to measure a person’s downward spiral, then I would say that Zander had been falling longer than I had. He had given up on the world, and the world had obliged. I loved my cousin, but a part of me hated him because he posed as a mirror for me—a few more years and I wouldn’t be able to tell where he started and I ended. 

Before he even acknowledged me, he went for the bottle on the table. He took a long drink, finished it, then poured another.

He glanced at what was left of Jimmy Ricky on my table. “He done?” He poured himself another drink, finishing my bottle, then quickly produced another from his coat.