City of Ashes
By: Beccatdemon13
©2008
Disclaimer: I don't own anyone except for Addison Marie Darley, as well as anyone you don't immediately recognize. Please don't sue. You'd only be getting about seven weeks of minimum wage. What? Don't look at me like that High School ain't a paying gig you know. But god I wished it was. Beccatdemon13 now will go off to fantasize about being paid to go to school. Oh, right, the story! On we go…
Synopsis: Life wasn't meant to be easy. If anything they were like cards you tried to make something out of the hands you were dealt but sometimes things happened that are out of your control. Being a teenager was horrible you aren't a child and yet you aren't an adult. What makes things worse was the fact that no matter what you can't change your blood, your family, or who you were destined to be.
Author's Note: Inspiration can be such a bitch sometimes. One day I feel like I can't write at all and sometimes the ideas can't stop coming. I hope you enjoy this story it's different from anything I've ever written before. Also please know that this story will have heavy cursing, drug use, underage drinking, self-mutilation, and there may be sex, who knows? Just keep these warning in mind. Thank you. And, as always please, please, please, review! Character concepts are in my profile.
Chapter One: Iron Jawed Angels
"Every curse has a beginning. Every beginning has an end."
Some would argue that the Darley family was cursed, always had been and always would be. I hated to say it but it was true to an extent. William 'Billy' Darley was known to most of Southie as a vicious gang lord who had no heart and no mercy. He was the one person you did not cross under any circumstances. Billy was quick to anger and even quicker to retribution.
However, one such as Billy Darley was not born the way he was. No, instead he had adapted in his environment. It wasn't so much the neighborhood where he grew up but what house he grew up at. His father Patrick 'Bones' Darley was as abusive as they came. He took everything out on his eldest. Any mistake was answered with violent consequences. It was when Billy was seven years old that he began running his father's drug and weapon packages. When Joseph Darley was born, Billy didn't have to worry about his actions but his younger brothers as well. Bones Darley had always been a businessman; there was no affection for his sons of any of his other family. All he wanted was money and his sons became the employees he didn't have to pay. He sent them to the worst neighborhoods in the worst conditions to deal his drugs and ammunitions. Granted, he did give them a roof over their heads and stuff to eat that was the only thing he ever gave them.
When Billy was fifteen years old he moved out of Bones apartment and took his little brother with him. They moved to the top of an apartment complex. Joe was ten years old and attended the local middle school as Billy was attending high school. It was in high school that everything changed for Billy. Some would argue for the good and some would argue for the worst. For it was in High School that Billy would meet Felicity Mercer. She was seventeen years old and a junior in high school.
Felicity and Billy met randomly at a party one-day it was the typical thrown together booze fest that was invariably broken up by the police. That was the first time they hooked up and it was also the first time they both felt truly cared for. They were the perfect matches; she was the calm to his volatile. The kindness to his anger. But the two loved each other from the beginning had a connection the first time they saw one another. And that as they say was history or more specifically my history.
As far as introductions go my name is Addison Marie Darley. I am sixteen years old with long light brown hair. I have hazel eyes and am five foot seven. And I was born into one of the most dangerous families that Southie had ever seen.
My mother and father were deeply in love and it showed. But Billy Darley was still the same gang lord the rest of South Boston was familiar with. It made being a Darley dangerous while at the same time protected those Billy loved.
It didn't protect my mother though. Even though I was only two years old I'd never forget that night. The fear etched across my mother's porcelain skin; her blue eyes mirrored the fear that she couldn't hide as she rushed me across the deserted streets. I didn't know what was going on. But some nagging part of me told me that I wouldn't want to. We were a block away from the apartment when they all came out of nowhere. Ten men came out of all different places entrapping my mother and me.
My mom put me down backed us both against the wall. One lunged right after another pulling my mother away from me. I screamed rushing after her but another one grabbed me and held me tightly. I had to watch as my mother was tortured and raped before someone finally put a bullet in her brain. Even after all these years her screams for mercy and to spare me echoed in my mind tore me from my dreams.
I don't know why but they left me by my mother and that was exactly where my father found me holding my mother close. I would think that was the moment when my father changed. He loved me with all his heart and never laid a hand on me abusively. He was just very worried and severely overprotective. He was more brutal after that. Showing no mercy to anyone who crossed him or his family. My father found the people that murdered my mother and made sure they paid the price for taking away the love of his life and destroying the innocence of his only child.
My life wasn't easy. I grew up with a loving family especially after my grandfather mysteriously died. My grandfather was a brutal man who never showed any emotion but anger. My grandfather was an ammunitions distributor but also ran a legal automotive business. It was in that business where I learned how to fix cars from top to bottom. My grandfather wasn't the only one who led a double life. My father was the leader of the South Boston Assassins otherwise known as the SBA. My Uncle Joe was also a ranking member of the SBA but unlike Bones they didn't have their guards up twenty four seven. That didn't mean that I was ever allowed to go anywhere alone.
My father's paranoia of the dangers that existed in everyday Boston became so much of a worry that he sent me to a boarding school a half hour away. It didn't work out the way he had planned. I was the outcast at that school. The one who didn't come from money but from blood and violence. Where there was no fear of who I was related to. The only thing these kids cared about was material possessions and the need for drama.
I had always been a good student but it was at Spenser Academy where I became more like my father. I was antagonistic and combative only as a means of self-protection. I was the only person I could count on and those kids had not grown up in the same atmosphere as I did. They didn't understand that I didn't sleep well or at all. That nightmares were always on the fringe of my conscious and that even far away I wasn't safe. It made me worried whenever I would hear the news.
My father had kept me away from the danger; away from ground zero for about five years when I finally had it. I couldn't take not knowing what was going on with my own family. I had heard that my Uncle was in the hospital for something serious not through family but through the grape vine. There were walls guarding all of Spenser meant to keep us in and those who didn't belong out. But, you couldn't keep someone like me in the walls. I had learned enough through my time on the streets to escape almost any situation.
Perhaps that was where everything went down hill. Joe came out of the hospital better than ever. And I was enrolled in the local high school, it was Joe's responsibility to take me and pick me up every day. Unbeknownst to me the law was riding my father just waiting for him to slip up. The streets were not letting up a gang war exploded between the Hall, B-Street, and the SBA. There more many innocent people murdered and it got so bad that my dad had pulled me out of school. I resented that he did that. I loved school, I had friends there and I wasn't the scary gang lord's daughter but Addy Darley. I even had a boyfriend who was an actual civilian. He had no idea how to even handle a gun before I had come into his life.
It was four years later that my father thought that the gang war had died down. My leash that was forever short had finally elongated. I had been celebrating my freedom maybe too much that I failed to notice on my way back to the apartment that I had followed. It all happened so fast one minute I'm almost home the next minute I'm lying on the sidewalk bleeding to death.
I was only twenty-three years old when I died. Barely out of high school and almost graduating college. Too bad my lineage proceeded me. I died purely because I was Billy Darley's daughter. So, to say that the Darley family was cursed would be the understatement of the century. My name is Addison Marie Darley and in order to understand my death you have to understand my life and my family.