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Hundreds of thousands of dollars hidden in the broom closet, walls, couches; guns were stashed everywhere. I lost count of the times my mother rushed us out of the house in the middle of the night. Growing up, I thought it all was normal. I never questioned when my mother told me we didn’t talk about what my father did. All I knew was that he answered phones, “Go ahead, partner” and ran a bar.

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My father took me to Denny’s every other Sunday. The manager would hand my father an orange. I’d watch the thick orange skin crinkle under my father’s palm as he rolled it around on the counter before cutting a hole in the top and cramming one of his peppermints inside it, and I’d suck on it while we waited for the paper sack of money that would be delivered to the front counter. Once a month I went with my mother to the safe deposit box at the bank. I remember peering into the vault, my gaze drifting over the gold and silvers bars, the jewels, the money tucked safely inside. One time I asked her if daddy was a pirate. She laughed. When he came home with medieval swords and shields and armor I was certain he was a pirate, but he wasn’t, he was a bookie with a bar that served as a laundry mat to clean it.

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I went with my dad to collect money. I hide thirty-thousand dollars underneath a scooter seat when I was only three years old. I almost got kidnapped—twice, and the last time, I watched my father put a Desert Eagle .45 Magnum to the man’s head and force him to his knees. After that, hired men followed me around in case someone wanted to take me as collateral. They followed me until I was 21.

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We didn’t practice fire drills in my house, but drills of survival. “This is what you do if someone kidnaps you," my father said. “This gun stays here, hidden and don’t ever touch it unless someone has killed me and your mother, then you take it, and you point and aim. Pull the trigger, then run, feetheart. Got it? You run.”

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Gunfire at one am. House fires used as retaliation. Abductions…

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Sounds like the plot to my next book, or actually—it sounds like bits and pieces of all the books I’ve written, doesn’t it? But guess what? It’s not.

That was my life. I was a teenager before I realized what my father did was illegal, before I realized other people’s fathers didn’t walk around with $10,000 rubber banded together and shoved into his business slacks. The older I grew, I realized no one else had guns stashed around their house. And it wasn’t until after both my parents passed away that I learned the extent of the “family business”.

People ask me why I write dark stories, how my mind can twist the way it does. That’s simple. It is my normal.  And that is why I write things like Wrong and Wrath and Darkest Before Dawn, Absolution and White Pawn. I grew up in a fairytale world tainted by crime and blood. I was a criminal’s little princess.

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Before you judge me, my family, my bloodline, the thing you must understand is that, to my father, it was only a job. He may have been ruthless, he may have done terrible things, but to me, he was the most tenderhearted man that ever walked this earth. He cried every year when we’d watch Miracle on 34th Street. He cried when I went off to college, when I got married, when he held his granddaughters for the first time. And until the day he died, he always called me “Feetheart” so, in some ways, my life was normal. I saw the light in the darkness, and that’s all I do when I write, try to show you all the light in the darkness. All I do is write what I know.

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