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A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel Or, not feel Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with the a person be what he really is and loving him for it

~Jim Morrison

Prologue

Leo – Age Eighteen

Tucson, Arizona

There are few emotions that I experience with any intensity, and fewer still that are what ordinary people would consider “nice”, but of those occasional bouts of negative feelings I have to endure, sorrow is by far the worst Once it sinks its poisoned claws into you, it debilitates your body, steals your will to function, drains your life, and leaves you hollowed out and blistered raw inside The only thing I’ve found to corief at this point is so absolute I couldn’t fatho but pain

Usually I’d bebase with the various ed to as ent about our daily business and shit like that But within a room not too far from me in this barren h to breathe

My sweet, gentle, kind mother, who always sers’ blood in a vain atte and replace the liters she’d lost as I’d held her into th

Guilt and sorrow battled for supreainst the injustice of it all

If it wasn’t for enerous nature, Ino idea what it felt like to care for another person, to have any form of compassion If that had happened, I’m sure I would have become a monstrosity in the truest sense of the word Instead, I’ve ives iven my mom the kind of life she’d always dreamed of

Tears burnedand closedthem away

My dad had died not long after I was born, andthe world like everyone else would be a challenge to anyone, let alone a single h school education Still, she’d always been there forme understand people and their en language It was through her that I learned to mimic the unspoken rules of our society, how to blend in At least as much as I could ever blend in I’ is wrong, different Nothing overt, nothing you can put your finger on, but when people aze, soerous

And I areat violence without balking If I had any respect for authority, I one into the military; they tried to recruit rown up in, violence was a fact of life and boys aspired to work for the biggest drug cartels, not the government It was survival of the fittest, and I was born a predator, so it didn’t take h the ranks, even when I’d joined the Cordova cartel at the tender age of fifteen

I’d grown up poor, but over the last few years had ed to move us into a decent house north of Tucson, the result offor the Cordova cartel as one of their enforcers Turns out they had a use for asadistic would never servein never-ending lines, it did allow me to flourish in the deep underbelly of society The ood, but the release of tension I felt after killing soruesome ithout a blink, for the first time in her life, my mom didn’t have to work two jobs to support us

Unfortunately, my activities had blown back on me—and my mother had paid the price So directly in the line of fire, getting ready to go bowling with her girlfriends

She’d been so excited to show off the two-carat diaotten her for her birthday, hadn’t been able to stop touching and adal, but she allowedas an errand boy for a local construction company the cartel owned My mom was brutally practical, and I’m sure she knew better than anyone I wasn’t meant for the nine-to-five world