Page 53 of A Dirty Business
“Where’s she now?”
“Disappeared. Probably hiding from him.” I studied him. He wasn’t happy still. I needed to give him a little more. “She’ll never know that she doesn’t need to hide. He’s dead. He wouldn’t help anyways. He was an abuser, and that would’ve made him a liability. He could’ve offered evidence on us if he’d ever been arrested for domestic assault. You know the kind. We have someone in his place who we can control. It’s a win-win for everyone.”
It was enough. I saw some of the suspicion ease from him, and he nodded.
I started to relax.
Until he spoke again. “We have a problem. The family wanting to push in is getting worse, and my health is still deteriorating. I need you to take over the family business.”
I gritted my teeth. “When?”
There was silence. He was back to studying me. “I want you to be running everything within three months.”
Three months. Three months before everything would change.
It wasn’t enough time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JESS
I was watching my brother walk toward me on the other side of this plexiglass window. He’d trimmed down but bulked up in muscle, and his hair was gone. He’d shaved it all off. I looked for tattoos but didn’t see any, and that ball in my belly unwound a little bit. Still, though. I saw our cousin, the one he’d never meet, and I doubted he’d ever know that she looked like him with the same round face, plush cheeks, and eyes maybe a little too close together.
They even had the same freckles.
Isaac had always been a little rough looking. He walked with a wide swagger, his head low and his shoulders out. If someone hadn’t known him, they might’ve stereotyped him as a bully at first sight, or a thug, but then the next event always happened.
He’d smile. And when he did, everyone else smiled too. He had that effect, and he was so far the opposite of a thug that it made me tear up when I considered how he’d ended up here.
I loved him so much that my throat was swelling up, just like it did on the drive here and would on the drive home.
He flashed me a smile, taking his seat and pushing the intercom button. “Hey! You look good. I see you got your VO.”
Visiting order.
I nodded, at the same time absorbing all of it because these days, I needed any moment of happiness I got. “Hey yourself. You’re looking good.”
He laughed, and his smile got wider. “You must’ve got the day off? Leo give you some ribbing?”
I only smiled, deciding not to tell him how Leo was almost a permanent fixture at our house because our mother was drinking every day, or how she never asked about our aunt, even though Leo told her one of the times she was sober that I’d gone to help out. Leo called the next day, asked how it went. I told him as much of the truth as I could, that she got on a bus and didn’t tell me where she was going to end up.
He got it. He never asked again, and it was another thing Trace was correct about: how little they would look for my aunt.
God. Trace. It’d been a month since I’d seen him.
I ignored the emotion filling me at just remembering him. I didn’t want to name that emotion.
“Tell me. What’s new with you? Still working? Still working at that club? Kelly still single and hot as fuck?”
I informed him about Kelly. She was a lighter conversation to have.
“Still working. Still at the club.”
He made a face. “I know someone in here who knows Anthony. He says that the owner has ties to—”
“I know.”
He frowned, his eyebrows dipping down. “You know?”
