Page 114 of Silver Fox Daddies

I tense when I see Gigi.

She falters when she sees me, returning my gaze. Her eyes are hard but her jaw is unlocked, mouth toying with a sentence she just can’t bring herself to say. Then, she looks over at Bishop and the tension dissolves. “Are you okay?” she asks him.

“Yeah, fine.”

“I’m sorry,” I blurt out, grabbing her attention. Gigi turns to me, a frown on her face. “I accused you of planting that document. I’m sorry.”

She stares at me, mouth chewing on that sentence again. “It’s not you that needs to apologize. I’m the one who couldn’t help but open my mouth and tell everybody about?—”

“How did you even find out?” interjects Diesel.

Gigi shifts her weight. “There’s something you don’t know. Snapper is a?—”

“Spy,” says Cash. “Yeah, we know.”

“I seduced some information out of him.”

I arch my eyebrow.

“Yeah,” continues Gigi, raking a hand through her blown-out hair. “I told him I’d have sex with him for free if he told me what he knew. He was always acting shady. It was obvious he knew something.”

“Well,” Bishop says once Gigi has gone. “There we have it.”

I drop my shoulders and take a sip from my drink, bubbles fizzing under my tongue. Funnily enough, lemonade is the drink I always used to order when Daddy and I dined out. It always quenched my thirst after the food.

The food he paid for with blood money.

A tear slides down my face. Back then, things were easier. We had fun, even though I now know it was fake. Back then, I thought the laughter was real. He was the only parent I had left. He was my biggest influence.

If I isolate all of those dinnertime memories from everything else, it hurts much more than how I imagine a knife to the heart would feel—this isn’t the way I wanted things to end. I could have saved him.

But there’s nothing I could have saved him from. He has always been this way. Carrying bodies out of the house when mom and I were home? That’s abnormal behavior.

I take another sip, wanting to quietly tuck myself away in an isolated memory for a while, but I can’t. There are so many more memories to come—real ones, not ones that have been curated.

Daddy has given me many pieces of advice throughout the years. Now, there’s only one that I intend to carry with me so I can attempt to move on from this hell: Ignorance is bliss…but only for so long.

I retireinto my room when the day draws to a close. Laughter from the main room tickles the atmosphere, but in this bedroom, everything is quiet.

I crack open a window and lie down on the mattress, listening to the chirping crickets.

It’s not long before the noise starts to transition to the roaring flames in my head. Next comes Bishop’s agonizing cry, the gun recoiling in my hand as I shoot Daddy dead.

The heart palpitations begin. Then, the shaky breath. It’s like I’m back there struggling to breathe again.

The door opens, revealing Cash, Bishop, and Diesel.

Their presence erases the visions.

Concern twists their faces when they see that I’m visibly distressed.

“Are you okay?” Cash asks.

I nod, swallowing the terror as it passes. “Yeah.”

It was the same last night. We all slept on the same bed, each of us tossing and turning throughout the night, reliving the fire. I expect it will be the same tonight.

Bishop hobbles into the room, walking with the aid of a wooden stick.

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