Page 1 of Sinful Restraint

prologue

Funerals fuckin’sucked. Especially when you were attending the homegoing for someone who knew you more than anyone else in the entire world.

During Rev’s funeral, I’d felt like a ghost of myself barely keeping it together on the inside. Now we were at the repast, sitting on the back porch of a house that reeked of the kind of grief that didn’t feel real yet. Even outside, it was impossible to miss the whispers through the open windows from folks speculating how Rev really died.

I leaned against the wooden railing, taking a wisp of my cigar and trying to hold myself back from cussin’ out all the people who wanted to gossip instead of celebrating our friend.

Storm took a sip of his drink as he stood next to me, his arms crossed and his usually calming smirk nowhere to be found, while Titan’s jaw was tight as he restlessly paced the grass on the side of us, trying to avoid all the prying eyes through the windows. Titan never paced, more proof that we were all out of our element.

“This is a goddamn shitshow,” I muttered, shifting my weight. “His parents keep looking at us like we should have the answers.”

“Because they know something ain’t right,” Titan said darkly, pinching the bridge of his nose as he stopped pacing and joined us on the porch.

“They’re not stupid,” Storm added. “No way in hell do they believe that car robbery bullshit.”

We’d staged it all perfectly, but even then, the shit had felt wrong. None of us belonged here at Rev’s childhood home right now. Not with him six feet under ground while all of these people who barely knew him showered his family with hushed condolences and bitter exchanges over the audacity of the food being catered and not potluck style like most did in this neighborhood.

“They didn’t even know him,” I spat. “Not the way we did.”

We had known Rev in blood, brotherhood, and in whispered laughter between gunfire when taking out a target. Those muthafuckas in there? They knew a different version of Rev. The one with good grades and a charming smile, and the son who always sent flowers to his mother every Sunday no matter where we were in the world.

To them, Titan, Storm, and I were his downfall, with the worst decision of his life being becoming friends with me whenwe were kids. I knew what they saw when they looked at me. They saw the broken boy who had shown up at Rev’s doorstep asking if he could play with the basketball hoop in his backyard, and they couldn’t unsee the violent, tattooed man I had grown up to be.

For the first time, I couldn’t bring myself to say they were wrong. Yet, to love Rev was to love all sides of him, and these townsfolk never understood the man who bled out on that mountain even though we begged him to stay with us.

“Whether they believe the story or not, we stick to the lie,” Titan stated. “Otherwise, the wrong people will start askin’ the right questions.”

Storm huffed a humorless laugh. “Yeah? And how long until that certain someone starts asking thewrongquestions?”

We all knew the answer. She already was, and that was a big problem because if she wasn’t asking us, she was asking the cops.

The door behind us creaked open, causing the three of us to instinctively stiffen.Fuck.It wasn’t that we were surprised to seeher, I was just hoping that since she ignored us at the funeral, we could avoid the confrontation she was clearly geared up to have.

Santari Lake. Rev’s little sister who wasn’t so little anymore. She stood in the doorway, her dark eyes burning with anger as she crossed her arms over the black dress that clung to her like death itself.

Her gaze flicked between us, and I felt the weight of it settle over my skin, crawling down my spine in a way it hadn’t since I was a teenager.

She knows. Maybe not all of the details, but Santari and Rev had been close, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that she suspected we were lying about the car robbery. Glancing over her shoulder, she motioned for us to follow her to the side of the garage that was away from prying eyes.

We’d barely turned the corner when she laid into us, asking, “Are you three gonna tell me what the hell really happened, or do I have to start pulling answers from Miami PD?” She looked between the three of us. “Not that I think for one second that my brother was even killed in Miami.”

Each of us stayed quiet, the weight of that night hitting me like a freight truck as I thought about the long drive we took to get Rev’s body from Tennessee back to Florida.

Titan fixed her with a stern and unmoving stare. Storm flashed her a look of sorrow before he turned his head away. And me? I twisted the butt of my cigar into the ground before tossing it in the trashcan by the grass, releasing a frustrated breath into the air.

“Santari, I told you on the phone what happened. Rev’s accident wasn’t anyone’s fault except for?—”

“The asshole who I’m sure you three paid a lot of money to in order to make it look like Rev was robbed when he was getting out of his car,” Santari spat, cutting me off. “I’m not naïve enough to believe your lies, so spare me the car robbery bullshit about him not giving up his wallet and getting shot because of it. If you don’t want me to involve the cops, tell me what really happened to my brother.”

I swallowed hard, because with Rev having been my best friend since we were kids, that came with a lot of promises over the years. I had sworn to protect his family like they were my own and to keep them away from the life we lived. Santari was at the head of that promise. She was nurturing and always so optimistic. Sure, she was usually soft-spoken, but she was also a spitfire and if you pushed her to her breaking point, she didn’t falter, she fought back.

Looking into her eyes, I knew she wasn’t going to stop until she had the truth no matter if she destroyed our reputations and her brother’s memory in the process or not.

“All I know is that one minute Rev wanted out,” she said. “And the next, I’m getting a call that my brother was killed. So which one of you bastards convinced him to do another job that resulted in him being murdered?”

My mouth almost dropped as my eyes flew to Storm’s raised brows and Titan’s clenched jaw while we processed Santari’s words. Three things were certain in that moment.

One, seeing Santari made my heart hurt even more than it already did because there wasn’t anyone in the world who Rev loved more than his sister.

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