I was worried out of my fucking mind. I had four guys searching for my girl, and all of them were coming up completely empty. Savage had gone back home after calling me every name in the book, and I was left to worry by myself. He’d promised me he’d help me find her, and I had a feeling he’d stay true to his word. He seemed completely obsessed with Evangeline anyway, and maybe him being a dirty old man would finally prove to be useful.

I knew I had to do something else to keep myself busy, and since Savage had told me to connect the dots, I decided to do some more digging into Evangeline’s past. The events that shaped her life took place more than ten years ago, and my memory was somewhat hazy, although I remembered the important details of the whole ordeal. I remembered her father, and I remembered firing him… It was all my fucking fault. My fault her innocence was shattered and my fault her family fell apart. And I was too fucking self-involved, too worried about my own shit to realize what my family had done to hers.

I went to my office in the city and leaned back in the chair where I’d had Evangeline help me what now felt like a lifetime ago. I fired up my computer and looked for all the information I had on her father, on what we’d done to her family. And as I scoured the information, I tried to forget about the last time I’d seen her father, and what a wreck he had been.

* * *

The young man was stressed to fucking hell and back.

This new job was not proving to be as fun as he thought it would be. Originally, he’d only agreed to take it to get under his father’s skin. He fucking hated his dad and the way he ran his business. But the old man said it was important for the family to look like a united front, and that’s why he had to come and work for them. He decided his son had to be a part of their legacy, and there wasn’t anything he could’ve done to convince him otherwise.

Of course, along with the introduction to his father’s company, his dad had also given the young man access to something else. Something invaluable, something that he already knew was going to change his life.

He’d had his fair share of women, of course. He was an attractive guy. Young and boisterous, loud and daring. He never had problems getting women.

But for the past few years, something else had started brewing inside him. Something he didn’t even completely understand himself, but he knew he couldn’t keep ignoring it for much longer.

There were these dark urges awakening inside him. A desire to hurt someone, to make them beg. A want to have them call him a specific name, though he was far off from admitting that to anyone. It would’ve been a fucking weird topic to bring up during one of their family chats.

But then again, what wasn’t weird about his fucking dysfunctional family?

His mother had been a trophy wife her whole life, and Daddy dearest had been fucking all her socialite friends behind her back for the duration of their marriage. But now, he wanted to introduce the young man to the world of absolute pleasure, that came with a hefty price. He introduced him to Empire Sin.

“An exclusive club,” he’d told his son. “It’ll get you anything you want, from a target on someone’s back to a girl that’ll do anything you fucking want her to.”

His father had laughed at that. The young man was skeptical at first. It didn’t seem right, and it sure as fuck didn’t seem legal. Sure, he’d done some illegal stuff when he was young – mostly recreational drugs and underage drinking – but this was another thing altogether. If they got busted… It could mean the end of their company.

But his father assured him everyone was in on this game. There was no way they were getting busted for what they were doing, because anyone who was anyone in the city was in on it, too.

So, the young man believed him and followed his father’s lead. He visited the gentlemen’s club first and had a girl dance for him. The girls were exquisite; the cream of the crop in the city.

But now, it was the next Monday, and the young man had work to do. There was no time to waste, he had an important meeting first. And it was going to be his first time firing someone, which he was already dreading.

Alec Lovell was a man who had been with their company for more than a decade. But now some things had come to the surface, and the young man was furious.

Alec had been stealing money from the company for years. In fact, he’d stolen so much, the company was in serious danger. And worst of all, he’d embezzled the money and laundered it through the company. It was all right there, black on white, so painfully obvious what he’d been doing right under everyone’s noses.

The young man was pissed to hell and back. If there was one thing he hated in the world, it was injustice.

He sat down to a meeting with Alec that day, and he could tell the man, who was a few years his senior, didn’t have a clue what was about to happen. He looked surprised, but excited to be sitting down with the company’s new CEO.

“Mr. Lovell,” the young man began. “Do you know why I called you here today?”

“I’m not sure,” the other man responded pleasantly. “Is this in regards to the promotion?”

The young man gave him a despicable look. “No, Mr. Lovell, it is not. In fact, it is quite the opposite.”

He spent the next ten minutes explaining why Alec Lovell’s services would no longer be required, and watching the man’s facade crumble. He fell to pieces in front of the young man, an absolute wreck of a man as he realized he no longer had a job.

He swore up and down that he didn’t do what they were accusing him of, but he didn’t have an explanation for the plain facts the young man showed him, either. He couldn’t find an excuse fast enough, and the young man felt disgusted with him. This man had infiltrated their company and possibly done irreparable damage. He would enjoy having security throw him out.

He watched with a sick kind of pleasure as two guards dragged Alec Lovell into the street. He hoped the man would pay for all the wrongdoings he’d caused the company, and after everything that happened, the young man was pretty damn pleased with himself for taking care of the problem.

He went to speak to his father after that.

Their relationship had always been slightly rocky, but it seemed like the Empire Sin thing was connecting them. When he expressed his worries about Alec Lovell’s family, his father shrugged it off.

“He should’ve thought of that before he cheated our entire company,” he told him, and the young man had to agree.

It was weeks later that he found about Lovell’s death.

The young man didn’t care to hear about all the gory details. But knowing that the man killed himself, leaving behind a widow and a young daughter, filled him with inexplicable anxiety.

He let it simmer for a couple of weeks before he did anything about it. But the man, and what he’d done to himself, wouldn’t leave his mind.

He’d been intrigued by permanent marks on his skin before, but his father was so against tattoos he never did anything about it. But he needed something to remember this by, the man who had taken his own life and the role he’d played in his suicide.

He paid a visit to a tattoo parlor a few weeks after Alec Lovell died, and he got his first tattoo right there.

Humanum fuit errare, diabolicum est per animositatem in errore manere.

A Latin phrase that translated to, To err is human, to forgive divine.

As the years passed, the young man filled his skin with more and more ink. He covered most of his body in black tattoos, reminding him of the important moments, the deciding s in his life. But he never forgot the story about his first permanent ink. He never fully forgot Alec Lovell, even though the memory faded as the years passed.

When he was younger, he vowed to look up Lovell’s family, maybe try and help them.

But he’d always been a selfish young man, and the thoughts dissipated to nothing as he fully immersed himself in the world of Empire Sin.

* * *

I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Alec Lovell, a blast from the past, a man whose life I’d ruined.

It was becoming painfully obvious that Evangeline had known who I was all along, and I couldn’t help but wonder what her thoughts were when she realized I was the one buying her.

Or maybe she’d planned it that way all along…

There was so much about my pretty little toy I still didn’t completely understand, and maybe never would. The thought scared me, and the need to have her back, to have a chance to explain, was so intense I burned from its pressure, right from the inside.

I knew there was one last place I had to check for any trace of Evangeline, and it was the grave where her parents were buried. I’d heard through the grapevine her mother had passed mere years after her father, but not before marrying Barron Savage and having him legally adopt the daughter she’d had with Alec Lovell. So, Barron really was Evangeline’s stepfather… It wasn’t some sick game they played. They really were family.

As I drove to the graveyard, I realized something about that idea bothered me. Perhaps it was the fact that Barron never really acted like my Angel’s father. No, he was jealous, possessive and fucking crazed with anger, like only a lover could be. The thought made me sick to my stomach. I needed to find out exactly what went down between the two of them.

The driver waited for me as I went inside the graveyard’s gates. It wasn’t special, just a simple middle-class place, but I noticed the Lovell grave right away. it was adorned by a large marble statue of a weeping angel for Marissa Lovell, the woman Barron Savage had been briefly married to. The modest stone with her first husband’s name looked pathetic next to the extravagance displayed by Savage.

There were fresh flowers on the grave, and I kneeled down to it, waiting for something to happen. Anything to bring me closer to her once again.

“You can’t change the past.”

I turned around and stared at the figure approaching me from the sidewalk. He walked slowly, with the pain of every step so very obvious in his aging face. He was an old man now. An old, sick man, who had almost ruined my life several times.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” I asked him roughly.

“I heard about your girl,” he said nonchalantly, leaning on his cane. It was a new addition. It must’ve been really hard for him to walk – he would never use one of his own accord.

“So?” I barked at him. “None of your fucking business.”

“I remember him,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s a shame what happened.”

“Lovell?” I asked, and my father nodded. “What the fuck do you mean?”

“Sometimes,” my father went on, disregarding my words. “You have to bury an innocent man to save a more important one. You should know that by now, Carter.”

I stared at him for a very long time, the sun reflecting on his sunglasses as he turned his face towards the warmth. He was so fragile now. So close to the end.

“Dad,” I said softly. “What the fuck have you done?”