Page 187 of Filthy Love

With a smile on his face, like he was visiting for a Sunday brunch, he stepped into the foul stench of a living room to see a slenderly built woman in a dressing gown and slippers chain smoking next to an overflowing ashtray and a row of beer cans.

Such class.

“I ain’t got no money if you’re here to rob me.” She said matter of fact, plumes of smoke surrounding her scraped back hair bun. Fingers nicotine stained.

He could see Hawk in her around the eyes. Would be awkward as fuck, he thought, to break into the wrong house.

“Colton sent me.”

Her eyes lit up. “My boy sent you, did he? He always did take care of his old mom. I been tryna get hold of him for days.”

Lawless pushed the debris from the small coffee table onto the floor. She was too busy staring at him with a mix of fear and interest to bother about the shit on the floor on top of all her other shit.

Gotta love addicts. Some mean looking bastard breaks in, makes himself comfortable and not one word said about the cops.

Lawless parked his ass, pulling his duster coat around his legs, leaned forward resting arms to his knees and held out a flat palm with the syringe balancing in the middle.

“W-what’s this?”

“I think you can recognize candy when you see it. Take it.”

She did. Like a greedy maggot. Fingers scratched his palm in her haste.

“Where’s the money my baby boy sent me?”

Keeping his face impassive, Law stared her in the eye.

She might have been a looker back in her day. If she wasn’t already … you know,fucking vile to the core.

“Just the candy.” Voice rough. Forceful.

Some sins were heavier than others.

He felt not an ounce of remorse watching how she stuck that needle into her ruined vein, pumping every drop into her system. And when she jerked in her high-backed chair, fingers clutching the arms, the needle still in her vein, he stood to his feet as she sighed and smiled her way through the intense high careening its way directly to her beating organ.

Addicts would reach for the fix over everything else.

He knew, he used to be one of them.

Curious mind and all that, he poked around a little. Her house was small and so fucking piled with junk she could have earned a place onHoarders.

Photos of a younger VP were everywhere giving Lawless the creeps.

He popped a few of those photos out of their casings and stuck them into his pocket. Gia would probably want them.

Never did Lawless think he’d find what he did stuffed inside a bureau inside a red metal tin under divorce papers, insurance policies and other boring legal shit.

The paper dangled between finger and thumb.

Nothing much fucking shocked him.

“Oh, fuck.”

Carefully folding the piece of paper, he took that and several similar ones.

Oh, yeah. And the momma of the fucking century was dead in her chair.

He almost forgot why he’d come.

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