Chapter 1: The Life Before Death
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. "Who the fuck is this guy and why should I care about his life story?"
Fair question. Let me answer it with another question: have you ever accidentally became the crime lord of New York City because you were too cheap to do your own dirty work?
No? Just me then.
Name's Jack Conner. Was Jack Conner. Is Jack Conner? Look, we'll get to the tense issues later. Grammar's not really my strong suit—I dropped out of community college to work as a runner for the Vitale family. Not exactly Ivy League material.
For fifteen years, I was nobody. And I mean nobody. The kind of guy who picks up dry cleaning for guys who actually matter. I collected protection money from bodegas in Queens. I counted cash in basements that smelled like mildew and broken dreams. I was thirty-three years old and my biggest life achievement was that I knew a guy who knew a guy who once met John Gotti.
Pathetic? Absolutely. But it paid the bills.
Then my boss, Sal "The Butcher" Marconi—and yes, that was his actual nickname, the man had the creativity of a brick—decided I'd been skimming. Which, for the record, I absolutely had been. Just not enough for him to notice. Or so I thought.
Sal called me into his office in the back of this Italian restaurant in Little Italy. The place made shitty pasta but great corpse-disposal marinara, if you catch my drift. He sat there, fat fingers steepled together like some discount Godfather, and told me I had twenty-four hours to come up with fifty grand or he'd turn me into Sunday gravy.
Here's the thing about being a low-level nobody for fifteen years: you learn things. You hear things. You know which of the boss's guys are loyal and which ones are just waiting for a better offer.
Turns out, most of them were in that second category.
I spent my life savings—all thirty-two thousand dollars of it—plus borrowed another twenty from a loan shark who'd regret that decision, and I made some calls. By the time Sal's deadline rolled around, I had twelve of his fifteen guys on my payroll.
The meeting went differently than he expected.
Long story short: Sal went into the marinara sauce, his remaining three loyalists went into the Hudson, and I woke up the next morning as the new boss of the Marconi operation.
Was it smart? Debatable. Was it insane? Absolutely. Did it work? Well, I'm telling this story, aren't I?
The thing about being a crime boss that nobody tells you—and why would they, it's not like there's a LinkedIn course—is that it's mostly boring. Sure, there's the occasional exciting part where someone tries to kill you or you have to decide whether to expand into Jersey, but mostly it's meetings. So many goddamn meetings.
But it had perks.
Money, obviously. Power, sure. Respect from people who'd stab you the second it became profitable, absolutely. But the biggest perk?
Access.
See, when you control half of New York's underground, you can do favors for people. Big favors. The kind of favors that open doors most people don't even know exist.
Which brings me to Ana.
Ana de Armas. Yeah, that Ana de Armas. Cuban goddess, Hollywood rising star, and somehow, inexplicably, currently in my penthouse apartment wearing one of my dress shirts and nothing else while she raided my fridge.
"Jack, why do you have seven different types of cheese but no actual food?" she called from the kitchen, her accent making even grocery complaints sound sexy.
I was sprawled on my leather couch, wearing boxers and a satisfied grin. "I'm a crime lord, not a chef. I have people for food."
"You have people for everything." She emerged with a bottle of wine and two glasses, bare legs on full display. "It's lazy."
"It's efficient."
"It's lazy," she repeated, settling next to me and curling those legs underneath her. She poured the wine with the easy comfort of someone who'd done this a hundred times before. Which, to be fair, she had.
Here's what you need to understand: Ana wasn't with me because of the money. I mean, the money didn't hurt—the favors I'd called in had definitely helped her career. That callback for the Bond movie? Me. The introduction to that director? Also me. The situation with her stalker that got quietly resolved? Yeah, you're seeing the pattern.
But she didn't need me. She was talented enough to make it on her own, beautiful enough to have her pick of Hollywood pretty boys or legitimate billionaires. She chose to be here, in my apartment, drinking my overpriced wine and giving me shit about my cheese collection.
"You're thinking too hard again," Ana said, watching me with those dark eyes. "I can see the smoke coming from your ears."
"Just wondering what you're doing here."
"Oh, we're doing the insecurity thing again?" She set down her wine glass and shifted to straddle my lap, hands on my shoulders. "Jack, we've been through this. I'm here because I want to be here. Because you make me laugh. Because you're honest with me when everyone else in my life blows smoke up my ass. Because you're dangerous and kind and smart and stupid all at the same time."
"That last part didn't sound like a compliment."
"It wasn't meant to be." She leaned in, lips brushing my ear. "It was meant to be the truth. You orchestrated a coup against a mafia boss using basic economics and social engineering, but you can't figure out how to work your own espresso machine."
"That thing is complicated."
"It has two buttons, Jack."
This was new for me, this... feeling. In my old life, before the whole accidental-crime-boss thing, relationships were transactional. You gave something, you got something. Simple. Clean. No feelings involved.
Ana complicated that. She loved me. Actually loved me. Not the money, not the power, not what I could do for her—though she appreciated those things—but me. The guy who still bought his clothes from the same store he'd shopped at when he was making runner money. The guy who couldn't cook to save his life but remembered how she took her coffee. The guy who'd once executed three men without blinking but got nervous when she wanted to meet for dinner without knowing the restaurant in advance.
Being loved for who you are is terrifying when you're not entirely sure who that is.
"You're doing it again," Ana murmured against my neck.
"Doing what?"
"Overthinking. Let me help you with that."
Her lips found mine, and for a while, I stopped thinking entirely.
Look, I know what comes next in this kind of story. Guy's on top of the world, beautiful woman in his arms, everything's perfect. That's usually when the universe decides to fuck you over.
Spoiler alert: the universe has impeccable timing.
But we'll get to that. Right now, in this moment, I was just a guy who'd stumbled backwards into a life he never expected, holding a woman who saw something in him worth loving.
It wouldn't last. Nothing good ever does, not in my experience.
But damn, it was nice while it lasted.