A Dirty Business (Kings of New York #1)(36)

I’d find my own way home.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX


TRACE


It was a week later, and I was watching her.

I was always watching her, but I stayed away.

Still, I watched. I could do that much.

And as she was working, and I was standing in my private box, a conversation came back to haunt me.

“Was there collateral damage?”

Stephano had wanted to know more. He hadn’t been satisfied with the initial report of what had happened with Jess’s aunt and her abuser.

I had braced myself, steeling myself, and raised my chin up. “What do you need to know, Uncle?”

His eyes flickered just once before his own face hardened. “You killed the uncle?”

I didn’t answer that. “My men buried his body. He’s dead.”

His jaw clenched. He knew I was playing word games, something I’d been doing more and more lately. Anger flared in his gaze before he smothered it. “The aunt?”

“They’re gone. Ashton made his calls. She’d checked in with their local women’s shelter earlier that day. We think she left him.”

“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?”

I nodded, but slowly because this was opening Pandora’s box. “I know.”

“Why are you still working there?”

“Because.” Because I liked Anthony. Because I’d worked there so long. Because . . . because if I left, then I’d have no contact with Trace, even though he’d followed my warning. I never saw him, but I swear, I swear that he was there and that he was watching me. I just never asked, and I never looked. It was a sick obsession at this point. “You know how it is. Work somewhere so long it becomes too familiar to leave. I know the workers. I like my supervisor, for the most part.”