Page 1 of Vows In Corruption

PROLOGUE

BENNETT

When it comes to life, I know what it feels like to be on the highest high, where I’m able to meet with god and have him praise me and the lowest lows of hell where not even the devil himself could touch me.

I’ve suffered through death and mourning. Through abandonment, and through loss of self identity. For years, I didn’t know what was right or wrong, what was up or down, who I was, let alone who was sitting right next to me. I was lost in my own mind and I didn’t know how to get out.

At one point, I was twenty-two, with all the damn money in the world, and all I wanted to do was drown myself in everything that I could think of. Alcohol, women, a dark ocean that would forever shield me from ever seeing the light again.

Because back then anything would be better than the life I had been living.

I wanted to give up.

I wanted to throw everything away.

But then it all changed.

It changed the day I was driving up to my childhood home and saw four pairs of eyes staring back at me. That day all the shit that I was battling with went out the fucking window. All of that shit that I had been going through didn’t matter anymore.

I didn’t want to drown.

I wanted to fucking thrive.

I wanted to conquer the fucking world and make life worth living again.

It was that day that I realized that there were other things in world that mattered more than anything else and there is nothing that I wouldn’t do for them.

So that’s what I did. I put those four sets of eyes before anything else, and I started to conquer the world one minuscule step at a time and that is what I continue to do even to this day.

The world became my playing ground and Chicago my kingdom.

There is a reason why people in my every day life call me a king. They see me as a ruler of the very floor they walk on. They see me as the good guy that would do anything to help people in need.

But what they don’t know is that even the king, who may seem like the most godly figure of them all, loves corruption.

Loves the bad and all the deception that comes with it.

And when I want something, I will stop at nothing to get it. Even if it means shedding some blood along the way.

1

ELLA

Five Years Before

Sweat rolls down my back as I continue to drive away from the house and back to Chicago.

My eyes keep moving from the rearview mirror to the back seat, making sure that nobody is following us and that Charlie remains asleep.

He promised that he wouldn’t.

He promised that if I did what he told me to do, then he wouldn’t follow us.

That he would let her come with me and that he wouldn’t bug us. That he would let us be as long as I kept my end of the deal.

But even if he promised, I can’t help but to not believe him. Especially now.

It wouldn’t take much for him to change his mind, come after us and take Charlie away from me and threaten to not give her back to me until I meet his new price.