Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Callum- A Prologue to the Madness
Shannon
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Shannon
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Amya
Shannon
Callum
Art
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Once he has gone, I am stranded with strangers as they deal with reliving whatever happened. They don’t like me or want me here. I can tell.
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Rowan
Callum
Shannon
Callum
Shannon
A note from Ashleigh
About the Author
Playlist
Copyright © 2015 by A.Giannoccaro
All rights reserved
Cover Design and interior formatting by Cassy Roop Pink Ink Design
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author or publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use the material from this book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, are coincidental.
This one is for my very special book friend Karen. She kicks my butt and protects me from weird stuff, but most of all she believes in me even on the days that I don’t. We may be continents apart but without this lady I don’t think either of my books would have made it to print. She also shamelessly enables my book buying addiction with her reviews. Book friends are the best friends!
There are so many people to thank for making this book happen, I hope I don’t forget anyone! I appreciate every person who helped me out, big and small you all are amazing.
To Ricky, my unbelievable and amazing husband for all his support. He puts up with the late nights, the fictitious decision-making and hours of my writing madness. Not only that he supports me all the way, encouraging me when I am down and enjoying the highs right beside me. Thank you, my love , you are the best. xxx
To my two little girls for being so good that I am able to write all the time. And for being the cutest writers block on earth. Mom loves you.
To my Beta’s you ladies are my voice of reason. Tracy, Karen, Tbird, Bri and Jennifer thank you for your time, your notes, your criticism and praise. They are most appreciated.
Then the beautiful bloggers who pimp, promote support and share my work. You guys never get enough credit for the amazing things you do! There are too many to list you all but if you are a book blogger, Thank you! I appreciate you.
Cassy Roop from Pink Ink Designs for my stunning cover and formatting and for your patience working with a newbie like me.
Mom & Dad for being there, helping me when I’m drowning and believing in me.
Dylan for reading a story book just for me. Thank you little brother.
To my friends and family who have supported, encouraged and surrounded me with love thank you.
To the other authors out there, the ones I fan girl over and read till all hours. Thank you for being inspirational. Some of the support and tips I have got from you ladies made this process so rewarding.
To the girls in the Twisted Sister group – yes you lot! The ones, who distract me with new reads and give me a place where my twisted mind fits in perfectly, thank you for all the support, distractions and fun.
Lydia from HEA book tours and promotions. This lady is rock star! Thank you for your well organised professional tours and support. I always look forward to working with you. Keeping doing what you do, because you are amazing
To my readers thank you for investing your time in my stories.
I cannot believe I can put a hundred thousand words on paper but writing the thank you’s scares me to death! I hope I haven’t forgotten any of the terrific tribe that has made this all come together.
This is a dark, twisted disturbing story. It contains graphic violence, sex and themes of rape, murder and abuse. These characters are not going to turn into soft mushy reformed good guys, they are bad. If you are looking for hearts and flowers with rainbows ridden by unicorns, this book will upset you. If you are easily offended or slightly prudish, it will probably offend you too. This is not a love story, it is the story of how disastrous the wrong kind of love can be. If you are slightly twisted and enjoy the darker side of love this will be right up your alley.
MY HEAD IS POUNDING AND MY mouth feels like I ate a bowl of cotton wool for dinner. As I pull my naked self up on the couch, I can see the carnage of my night all over the apartment. The glass coffee table that should be in front of me is shattered into a million tiny pieces on my carpet that is now blood stained. I look at my hands and I just know. I swallow the dryness in my mouth and stand slowly my bare feet crunch and slice open on the glass. I don’t feel the cuts and splinters because my mind is racing full speed to what will await me when I find the person I brought home last night.
Why do beautiful girls seek me out? Do they not sense the danger? I thought girls had a sixth sense about these things?
The morning sun fills the room as a soft breeze blows in off the bay and through the open balcony doors. I can see the one glass door is shattered and the light is fractured as it shines through the cracked pane. The ocean air is cleansing and fresh in my lungs, and it eases some of the heat that sweats out of my naked skin.
I slowly step over the debris that litters my home and the dread becomes worse. I stop when I find my cell phone on the passage floor and type a text to Rowan.
I know whatever I find will not be good, the absolute destruction around me is worse than I have ever seen before. What have I done?
I step over womans underwear that is shredded into pieces as I walk down the dim passageway into the aftermath of my actions. I step over more glass and the contents of a ladies' handbag, her lipstick, tampons and credit cards scattered across the white tile floor of the passage. Every step I get closer to facing the reality of what I did. Again. I step on her key chain and pain shoots up my leg. Fuck me that hurts. I kick the offending keys out the way they skitter across the floor and land against the wall.
My phone vibrates in my hand, I don’t look at it, I know it is Rowan with a slew of curse words and a message that he is on the way. Again.
I can feel my heart beating in my chest and my hands are shaking, this has to be the worst I have ever woken up to. I see the blood spatter on the wall outside of the guest bathroom and the first flashback crashes into my pounding head and consumes me.
My hands on her throat, as I slammed into her against that wall, her head
hitting it over and over. I raped her sinful little body. The wailing cries that escaped her as she begged me, pleaded with me stop. I didn’t stop abusing her body or her mind. The blood smeared down the wall as she sank to the floor and sobbed before I dragged her to my room by her arm.
I cannot control it when this happens. Sweat beads down my chest as it heaves with apprehension at what I am going to see in my room. What I did? This blind rage towards woman, the lack of focus and the fact that I lose touch with reality completely is making me worry for the first time ever. I know I have something wrong with me, but no idea what or how to fix it. I am fucked up, broken and useless. I need help! Where the hell is Rowan, he needs to get here.
I slowly push the door of my bedroom completely open and brace myself for what I will see. I blink my eyes closed and open them slowly to take in what the monster within me has done – this time.
Draped across my white bedcovers that are now spattered and soaked with blood is the body of a beautiful young woman. She isn’t moving and I instantly run to see if she is alive. Please tell me I haven’t murdered her. I don’t want to start killing them. I just hurt them, hurting them helps. It fixes me. She is facing down in the sheets and her back, thighs and ass are a bloodied mess where I took to them with my belt. Her hands are still bound behind her back with a cable tie and the blood has dried where it has ripped into her delicate skin.
I try to breathe in and out, but it feels impossible the smell of blood is ripe in the air. I roll her limp body over so that I can see the face I have destroyed. She is unrecognizable my fists have melted her face into a mass of bruised broken flesh. I am sick, I did this and I don’t even remember it all. I feel her neck for a pulse, it is there, but so weak I can barely feel it. I sit on the edge of the bed hang my head in shame and try to forget that this is what I do. Over and over, I hurt these women I need help I need to stop.
I hear the front door slam closed, thank God, Rowan is here. “Callum” he yells to find me. I cannot answer I know he can see the carnage as he walks through my home.
“Callum what the fuck!” I hear him yelling again. I just sit there naked, ashamed and completely fucking broken. I can hear him mumbling at someone on the phone. Cleaners, he will get them to clean, but what can I do with her. She is never going to be the same. This one cannot walk away and try to forget.
When he does eventually enter my room, he ignores me. The girl is his first stop I watch as he checks her pulse and shakes his head. He looks at me with that look, the look that says I have disappointed him again. Then pulls out his silenced gun and shoots her in the head that I smashed in over and over again. She is gone in second, he doesn’t even flinch or blink, she is just another number to him.
“I am not letting her live like a vegetable you fucker! Get dressed! We need to talk.” Rowan spits his words out glaring at me his anger is just a simmer he can control it so well. I cannot.
I take a shower and wash the dead girl’s blood off my body, I can hear the shuffles and gasps of the cleaners outside the bathroom door as I try to wash away the evidence of my madness. The water can clean my body, but my mind is so dirty I don’t even want to think.
I find Rowan in my kitchen barking at the men he uses to clean up after a kill, he is usually a lot less messy and this is a big job to fix. He eyes me with the blue eyes that have a hell behind them and shakes his head. “Callum, this is the last time. That in there, that was too far. What is going on? You cannot do this forever! Someone will catch you.” I run a hand over my beard and try to think what caused it, I don’t have an answer, I never do, it just happens.
“I have someone coming over to help you. She is a doctor, well a shrink; she is also a customer of mine so she knows what kind of people we are. You will listen, you will talk and you will do whatever she fucking says or I will end this. I will end you with a fucking bullet Callum. Rape is filthy fucking crime I want nothing to do with. Are we fucking clear?” Rowans deep voice bellows through the hollow kitchen and vibrates in my ears, he doesn’t make threats if he says he will kill me, he will.
I met Dr Janet that afternoon. She saved me from self-destruction; she fixed me, not all the way, but a little. I never had to call Rowan to clean up anymore. I still lost it, but never all the way. The pills and the therapy keep me from madness. Dr Janet made me into a controlled monster that could learn to run an evil empire and plot and scheme and plan.
Now after eighteen years I am home, no Dr Janet, no medication and a plan to end every single person that shares my filthy dirty criminal blood. I am here to take what is mine.
There is madness in me again and I need to set it free.
DEATH FOLLOWS ME LIKE A SHADOW creeping silently after me, tethered to my blackened soul. I am cursed to carry it with me everywhere I go. It is never far away from me, and I am perfectly happy with that. The dark shadow of death keeps me alive in this rotten fucking world.
I am Doctor Shannon O’Leary, and I inherited my father’s medical practice. I inherited all his problems, debts and patients.
I inherited the fucking mob.
I am the mob doctor; I spend my life sewing closed bullet wounds and bandaging stabbing victims. I fix the thugs who crash their cars while chasing other thugs, and I don’t have a choice I get to do it all because my father did it before me. I work for them; I keep their secrets, and I fix their problems and in return they keep my secrets. My dreams were all dashed when my father died. It wasn’t fair, Cassie my sister was supposed to do this, this was her job she was the eldest but Rowan killed her. The one person she loved slaughtered her. I won’t love anyone so that they cannot ever kill me the same way. A broken heart is possibly the worst way to die; it’s slow and painful and utterly brutal in its silent suffocation. Torturous and cruel to the very end. Cassie was dead long before she fell to her death. She died because Rowan didn’t love her back. Love cannot be felt in only one heart, if it is the heart will shatter and break. Unrequited love is a death sentence.
I was eighteen the year Cassie ‘jumped’ out of the building where I lived with my parents. Dad’s dingy surgery of horrors was on the ground floor, and we lived in the two stories above that. I was home; I heard a thud and a crack as her body hit the ground, the screams of the people who saw it sliced through the evening air like knives filleting the flesh off my life. The image is painted in my mind forever as I looked down from my window to see her in a crimson pool of her blood glowing in the light from the street lamp like she was already an angel. A red halo of death surrounded her, her red hair mixed with the blood in a puddle of eternal sadness. Her glassy eyes open wide staring up at the heavens above her. The rain began fall from the sky washing it all away. The night she died so did any hope of me ever having my own life from that day onwards I was groomed to do this job, and I hate it. I know the truth of that night; it hides in me, a little voice that talks to me when my conscience rears its ugly head. A voice that says she didn’t jump all on her own. The voice that knows there was a monster in her room that pushed over that window ledge. A jealous dark shadow that healed her broken heart by killing her.
I have a funeral to attend, yet another one. My boss; Connor O’Reilly is dead, murdered, chopped up and posted to his family. Leaving his asshole son Neil in charge of their empire, and I mean empire; their business is a worldwide web of drugs ammunition and more recently human trafficking. I have been summoned by Satan’s spawn to meet with him today; no doubt he is just trying to show the world he is the boss now. I will get the “nothing is going to change” speech. I didn’t expect it to change; the O’Reilly’s own me that’s how it will always be. I just have a new boss pulling the strings now, one who doesn’t think I deserve to breathe because I am a woman in a man’s job. One who knows all my dirty secrets and keeps them safe. One who is responsible for what I have become. One who watched as my father allowed me to become a monster. As my soul was ripped out and replaced with the grey haze of madness. My body was broken, and my innocence stol
en. Neil knows everything about who I am and how I became this way; he held me down and helped them make a monster. I was only fourteen. Later he found me in my safe place and broke me just a little more for fun.
I have heard rumours amongst the men that his brother, well half-brother Callum has returned. I remember Callum as a youngster he was always around with Cassie and Rowan. He left when Rowan ran away to Africa somewhere. I wonder why they brought him home now; the old man hated him. He was very vocal of his loathing for the Spillane blood that coursed through Callum’s veins that he was half devil. A vendetta that is as old as these families. I remember the jealous shadow of him leaving my sister's room after the screams of my mother drew me away from the window the night Cassie died. He was always just a shadow, now he is really here.
It was my father’s misguided dealings with a Spillane that made the O’Reilly’s use me as the currency to pay his debt. He watched them do it with a smile on his face like I was nothing to him. I hated my father and the air he breathed after that. I saw who lay beneath that smile, and he scared me. He was no longer my daddy -- he was a cruel demon.
The thought of a meeting with Neil has my skin crawling before I even leave home, he is as shady as you get in this world, and it’s a pretty dark world. I have become one of the many shadows that hide in the crevices of it. The world where dark things happen and darker people ignore them every day.
Monochrome My Madness Page 1
