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"There's a short supply of kindness in this world. People sniff it out, and they swoop right the fuck in."

Fezco's grandmother had told him that when he was a little kid. She had taught him a lot of things, while she was alive.

Fezco's grandmother was a mother-fucking-G.

There was simply no better term to describe the woman. I mean, she had raised him. He never knew his mother, and his father was an abusive shitbag who had long since given up on the endeavor of becoming a competent parent.

One morning, when Fezco was ten years old, his grandmother found him sitting on her front porch with a black eye the size and color of an overripe plum. She knew perfectly well who had given it to him. Running a manicured hand over the boy's cheek, the woman examined the bruise for a couple of moments before letting out a sigh of exasperation.

"Get in the car, darlin."

His father had held a management position at the local strip club for years, since before Fezco was born. As an adult, Fezco quickly put two and two together about the circumstances of his conception. At that time, his father had had consistent access to a regularly growing group of young vulnerable girls, all desperate enough to give him whatever he asked for.

Fezco hadn't actually seen what happened between them inside the strip club. He would later learn that his grandmother, with her gun in hand and her pantsuit pressed and pleated just right, had marched through the crowd of horny scumbags drooling over the gyrating naked women, found his father's office in the back of the building, and shot him in both legs.

Prior to his grandmother's visit, his father had been getting a blowjob from one of the newer recruits, a service he requested regularly from some of the worse off girls who needed a little extra cash.

Fezco's grandmother hadn't even waited for him to put his dick away.

From that day on, his grandmother filled the role of parental guardian. Sure, some of the things she exposed him to were pretty fucked up. But Fez learned a lot living with her. He learned everything there was to know about the drug market. He learned the number of grams in an ounce. He learned how to transport product inconspicuously. He learned that sometimes, violence was the only answer that mattered.

Fezco liked that she never treated him like a child. He was her business partner, an equal. When she died, he inherited her business, as well as the responsibility of caring for his little brother, Ashtray. He wasn't his biological brother. Ashtray's mother was a junkie who had traded him to Fez's grandmother as collateral about 3 years prior, when Ashtray was still an infant. When the woman never came back for her son, Fez and his grandmother took him in.

Ashtray was family now. All the things his grandmother had taught him, Fez taught to Ash. And he was a natural. Ash wasn't spooked by any of the creepy characters involved in their kind of trade. He was tough.

And, to a certain extent, so was Fezco. At least, that's what anyone else might have told you about him.

What those people didn't know was that Fezco was perpetually haunted by vivid nightmares. Night terrors that would have him shooting upright in the middle of the night, sweat pouring down his body, gasping for air. That particular night sleeping on Lexi's floor, Fezco had dreamt he was back at that New Year's party.

Nate Jacobs was crumpled into a heap at Fez's feet, still and cold as a corpse. When he bent down to check his pulse, Fez couldn't register even a hint of a heartbeat.

Dread seeped into his chest. Fuck. This wasn't happening.

A shriek pierced the heavy quiet of the room.

Lexi, her beautiful face contorted in horror, stood an arm's length away from him, taking in the scene. When she finally brought her eyes to meet his, what he saw there made his heart shatter into shards of broken glass.

She was terrified. Of him.

Fezco looked down at his hands, which were soaked in what had to have been Nate's blood. The blood went all the way up to his elbows. He frantically tried to wipe them on his jeans, but they only became more and more slick with the warm, sticky substance.

His breathing became labored.

Choking on air, Fezco lifted his chin upwards, looking at the ceiling. Above him, there was a reflective glass mirrored ceiling that looked over the bar.

In the reflection, he did not see his own, but the face of his father, grinning widely back at him.

Fezco lurched out of his dream state and onto his side. He gasped and choked at the air, trying to get a single ounce of oxygen into his lungs somehow. His forehead and chest were cool with sweat. One glance at the clock on Lexi's nightstand told him it was 5:41 am.

Where the fuck was he? What had happened last night?

A feeling of panic rose in his chest as he took in his surroundings, not recognizing this new and unfamiliar sleeping space.

And then, Fezco saw the angel sleeping on the bed mere feet away from him, and it all came back to him.

Lexi was curled onto her side, facing him as she slept. Thankfully, it seemed that his dramatic dream awakening hadn't stirred her. Her breaths were slow and consistent. She looked so restful and content, the way her eyelids twitched, and her statuesque nose crinkled. The chocolate brown curls he loved so much, the ones he thought about reaching out and touching every time he saw her, were splayed out across her pillow. She was mesmerizing.

As he gazed at her, looking as peaceful and angelic as he'd ever seen her, he thought of another lesson his grandmother had taught him. Something he had forgotten a long time ago, something that hadn't come back to him until the night he met Lexi for the first time.

"Don't ever fall in love. It's the one instinct you can't trust."