By Sin I Rise : Part One (Sins of the Fathers Book 1)

Some things run in your blood. They can’t be shaken, can’t be changed, can’t be lost, but they can be forgotten. From an early age, I had a foolproof instinct when it came to danger or sniffing out a person who couldn’t be trusted. And I listened, always paused before I acted to glimpse deep inside of me for that gut feeling, to double-check.

Until I stopped listening, until I got used to others taking care of my safety, until I trusted their judgment over mine. I handed over my life to others, to capable bodyguards, to men who were so much more equipped to protect me than I—a mere girl, and later woman—was. If I had listened to my gut feeling, to the tingling at the back of my neck that first night, and later when they took me, I would have been safe. But I’d learned to be deaf to my inner voice, to an instinct inherited by my father, because I was meant to be oblivious to the dangers of our life.

Little children quickly learn that closing your eyes from evil doesn’t protect you. It took me far too long to grasp that lesson.

Maddox

From the very first moment I spotted Snow White, she’d burned herself into my brain. Every fucking night, the image of her naked body tortured me in maddening detail.

Sometimes I woke with the remnants of her taste in my mouth, half convinced I’d actually buried my tongue in her undoubtedly pretty pussy. Fuck, I hadn’t seen an inch of that legendary body yet, much less touched her. Oh, but I would, even if it took a poisoned apple.

A guy like me would never be allowed near Snow White. I wasn’t a fuckin’ loser, far from it. I was going to become the president of the Tartarus MC, following in my uncle’s footsteps, the current prez. Of course, that made me the lowest scum on earth if you asked Snow White and her fuckin’ father, Luca Vitiello, the Capo of the Italian mob on the East Coast. I was a little boy, barely five years old, when the life I knew was ripped from me. As the son of the president of the New Jersey chapter of the Tartarus motorcycle club, I had watched many disturbing things at my young age. Club brothers getting it on with whores in the middle of the clubhouse in broad daylight, brutal fights, shootings… but nothing had left quite a mark like the night the Capo of the Famiglia brutally killed my father and his men.

The murderous bastard had slaughtered an entire chapter of our club—alone.

Strike that.

Not alone—with a fuckin’ ax and a skinning knife. The screams of my dying club family still haunted my nights, an echo of a memory I couldn’t shake unless I drank enough booze to kill an elephant. Those images were the fuel for my hunger for revenge.

And revenge I would finally get, with the help of the spoiled princess of New York: Marcella Vitiello.