Page 41 of In It for the Long Ride

“What if he’s lying?” I reality checked them both. “He’s a game player. A flesh peddler! Do you trust that he– That this isn’t all a dance for nothing?”

“That's a chance we have to take, if it gets Easy back his ol’ lady,” he pointed out. “We need to get home and count our allies. So many fled when Princess died.”

“Fucking mafia strumpet,” I let loose, causing both men to go silent for a while.

I couldn’t help it. The woman’s existence had caused nothing but tension, and her death had turned so many lives upside down. I’d never met anyone so abrasive despite their beauty. I recalled the time I had thrown her out of my salon during anentitled meltdown on her first visit. Things had been a little hostile between Mark and Anthony for months afterward.

“Where the fuck did Mark even meet her at anyhow?”

“Anthony’s strip club, I think,” Carl blurted out.

I scoffed and shook my head, “I should have guessed as much. She didn’t exactly have the book club sense of peace about her, and despite her expensive clothes the bitch didn’t have the class to be permitted in a soup kitchen, though she let everyone know the local country club was beneath her breeding.”

“Sounds like her.” Carl gave a half smile. “Shame you never made it for the club Christmas parties.”

“I was afraid I’d be tempted into decorating her throat with a few strands of blinking lights.” I was terrible speaking of the dead like that, but she was where this particular plague started.

The plague of death and destruction. A drought of mercy. That’s what we’d been enduring.

“Can you do something for me?” I abruptly asked.

“Baby, I’d bury a body for you. You’re my ol’ lady,” Carl returned, without an ounce of hesitation.

My eyes snapped to the rearview mirror and locked on his. It was so sincere and final sounding, his loyalty and devotion toward me. I wasn’t used to it. I sucked in a breath and averted my gaze, and found my nephew staring at me in the passenger side mirror with a big old grin.

My cheeks heated like some young girl.

“Back there blushing like it was something she didn’t already know,” he drawled, with a low rumble of laughter.

Eric turned the radio on and lit up a cigarette. The miles passed in a comfortable silence while I drifted in and out of sleep.

About fifteen minutes from our exit, the phone rang. My heart was pounding the minute I opened my eyes. Eric and Carl were exchanging nervous glances.

“What’s wrong?” I spat.

“Demetri has your personal number,” Eric whispered, and answered the phone.

When he didn’t put it on speaker phone like they usually did, I shot up to hug the back of his seat. His jaw clenched tighter and tighter.

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous!” he roared.

“Speaker,” Carl hissed.

“Fuck you. Fuck you! You ain’t even a man, you cocksucker. Who does that? Who demands that? Of their own sister?” Eric began firing off questions and curses without regard for who he was speaking to and the car swerved violently as Carl grappled for the phone.

“What the fuck is going on?” he barked, once he wrestled the phone away from my nephew and managed to swipe the speakerphone option on.

“He’s fucking disgusting and demented, that’s what!” Eric yelled, despite us all being two to three feet away from each other.

“I have made my demands. You will remove that mark from my sister and bring it to me at our meeting on Friday, or I will be placing an ownership mark of my own on Crystal’s sister. I will call with the expected time and locations.”

“Fuck you!” Eric spat again.

His face was paling and contorting with bottled rage. I wanted to rub his shoulders or do something to soothe him like I used to when he was a boy, but I was afraid to set him off further if he misinterpreted my touch as some effort to restrain.

Chapter 18

Montana

---