A Dirty Business (Kings of New York #1)(71)

I met her gaze, what I could see from the flashlight. “He didn’t blink once. He shrugged it off. Does that make you wonder again? You have a good relationship with your dad? You trust him? Or you trust your brother? It seems the two different reactions might say something by itself.”

She looked away, her nose turning up before her mouth did a weird motion. “I didn’t talk to Trace about our mom. He hated her, so why would he care about this?”

“What about Ashton? He’d have the wherewithal to speak on your brother’s behalf. How’d he react when you told him why you were threatening me?”

She didn’t answer.

I took a step toward her, raising my voice. “What’d he say?!”

“He didn’t. He took me to the airport, booked me a flight to Vegas, and told me to stop talking about shit I didn’t know anything about.”

Fuck’s sake. Right there. She said that, and there wasn’t one ounce of remorse in her tone. The whimpering was fake. I stepped back and heard my own voice. It matched what I was feeling on the inside. Cold. “You don’t even believe it.”

“What?” More alarmed this time. Less of the pretending to be scared.

I frowned, going with my gut here. “You have no emotion now. You’re not scared. You’ve not once tried to leave or asked to leave. You’re faking it. And you’re almost bored. You struggled against a yawn five sentences ago.” I was right. I knew it, and I moved to the side, trying to make her feel unbalanced, more than what she should’ve been, but she wasn’t scared. That was glaringly obvious to me. “Why did you put the order out against me? You wanted to blow up my career, because that’s all those kind of orders do to people in my career field.” Another step, my head cocked all the way to the side, still exploring where my gut was taking me. “I gotta think that takes a lot of balls, doing what you did.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Laying claim to a parole officer on the streets. You’d know what kind of shit that leads to for me. My colleagues thinking I’m dirty. Them thinking I’m either snitching or fucking someone in your family.”

Her eyes went to slits, and she went eerily still.

Her lips parted.

“People die from orders of protection like the one you put out there. I’m here trying to piece it together, scrambling because I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to kill someone to defend myself. That’s what that shit does. You getting that now?”

A real gasp sounded. This one quiet and in the back of her throat, like she didn’t know she’d even made the sound herself. She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring off.

“Who suggested to you to do what you did?”

Her mouth opened again, wider, before she clamped it shut and shot me a withering look. “I ain’t saying shit. You can go to hell for what your mother did to mine.” She raised her chin up. “I hope you die, cop slut. Then maybe your mom will hurt an ounce of what she put me through. You deserve all the hell that’s coming to you.”

The door suddenly shoved open from behind me.

I barely reacted, while Remmi screamed before jumping up and squealing. She took off running, going past me.

“That’s enough.” Trace’s voice filled the room, echoing around me.

“Trace!”

I didn’t watch, instead hearing some shuffling and, from her, “What the hell, T?”

His own coldness barely resonated with me. “Go with Ashton.”

“But—what?! Trace!”

“Let’s go.” Ashton’s own tone was clipped as well, no patience there either.

We could hear them moving away. She kept demanding to know what was going on, if Ashton was mad at her, why would he be? She was the victim. What the hell? A lot of “what the hells.”

After they left, I spoke. “I never restrained her. Not once. I told her to come with me, and she did. If she had asked to leave, I wouldn’t have stopped her.”

“You think I give a shit about that? I love my sister, but right now I don’t like her. She’s been given a pass on a lot of things because of how she was affected by our mom’s suicide. I’m seeing that didn’t do her any favors, and trust me, she’ll be learning a steep lesson. One, not to trust my father.”

I turned now, flinching as I saw him gazing at me with a softness.

I didn’t want that look from him.

I didn’t want his pity.

I rolled my shoulders back, raising my head up. “Your father’s a threat. He knows you care for me, and he pitched her against me to hurt me, to hurt you.”

“I know.” His barely restrained fury told me he’d pieced it all together as well.

“You heard?”

“I was turning it over in my head when we were on an exploration through hallways and basement stairs that I never want to see again in my life. Do you know what creatures are down here?”

“Right now?” For some reason I could only think about the worst that we’d done, what we’d helped cover up. Because what made us so different from his sister, or his father? Even his uncle. “Two people who could be convicted of accessory to murder.”

I moved past him. He reached out. “Jess.”