Better when He's Bold (Welcome to the Point #2)(8)
“I never thought a pretty boy like you could throw a punch like that. Even if it was just lucky.”
It was the best compliment I had ever received. I flicked blood and hair out of my eyes and asked him if he needed a ride to the hospital. It was strange, he had just tried to carjack me, had beat the crap out of me, but it was a defining moment in my life. Bax, his life, his world, woke me up and I couldn’t go back to my fluffy dreamland.
I wasn’t as immersed in the underground as he was. I didn’t have the street cred, the attitude to pull it off. But I was smart and I was an asset, and before too long, we were a team. I didn’t steal cars, didn’t break the law, but when he needed help, I had his back, and I liked to think that long before he fell in love with my sister, I was his voice of reason. It was exciting; living hard like that opened up a whole new world to me. There were girls, women really, who showed me things no teenage boy should know. There were drugs, there was excitement and challenge around every corner, and it was a blast until things got too deep.
Bax was taking more risks, Novak was using him more and more. We were getting lost in the mire and poison that was the lifeblood of the Point, and I wanted out, wanted to save us both before we went under. Only Novak was far smarter than I ever gave him credit for and far more twisted. He wanted Bax and had no qualms about using me to get to him.
My father, like most rich men, couldn’t keep his junk in his very expensively tailored pants. Dovie was my half sister, born to a junkie who got paid off after agreeing to abort her. No one should trust a junkie; the next fix matters more than anything else. Dovie was lost in the system until she wasn’t.
Novak used her, used my dad’s need to keep his secrets, to play me. My dad paid Novak to have her killed, only Novak double-crossed him, recorded the entire conversation, and pulled me into his dark and twisted game. There was no way I was going to let anything happen to my blood, my sister, even if I didn’t know her, so I blackmailed my dad, pulled Dovie out of the system, and agreed to Novak’s twisted scheme that had been designed to tie Bax to him forever.
The mobster was smart, but I was smarter. I set Bax up. No two ways about it. I betrayed my only friend, sold him up the river so I could save Dovie, so my dad would be forced to be Novak’s puppet. I led Bax into a trap, knew it was going to end badly, but because Bax was Bax, he had made everything ten times worse by running from the cops. An arrest that should’ve resulted in six months at the most turned into a total shit show that had him getting locked up for a solid five years and had me taking Dovie and disappearing until he got out and I could exact my revenge. I lived with the guilt and the threat of Novak hanging over me for five f*cking endless years.
As soon as Bax got out of jail, I set things in motion, took over the chessboard, and started moving pieces around that would free all of us from Novak’s hold. Only once again, Bax had thrown a wrench in the plan by falling in love with my sister and giving a really bad man a vulnerable place to attack him from. Bax was ready to sacrifice himself, to burn the entire Point to the ground if it meant Dovie made it out alive. Luckily, things hadn’t had to come to that, and everyone made it out, beaten, broken, and slightly worse off than before. But Novak was no more, and now we were rebuilding the underground, the foundation of this horrible place, brick by oily, soiled brick, because if we didn’t then somebody else would.
My dad had cast me out, watched me with wide, panicked eyes, waiting to see if I was going to sell him out. He cut me off financially, disowned me, pretended like he never even knew me, all while knowing I could bring his lux and ostentatious world down around him at any minute. I steered clear, wanting to make sure Dovie was insulated from him and his desperate machinations. My father knew that Bax was in Dovie’s life, knew that no one was getting to her unless they went through him first, and for now that was enough. Keeping her safe was top priority, always. It was one of the main reasons, besides not having any other legitimate way to make money, why I was doing what I was doing.
In all honesty, I was born to run numbers. I had a mind custom made to be a bookie and a loan shark. I had a photographic memory. I remembered every name, every face, and every dollar amount owed and borrowed of the people I dealt with. I didn’t need a spreadsheet, didn’t need to write anything down. The feds would never find a little black book, never find incriminating evidence on my computer. It was all up in my noggin, safe and sound. It made figuring the lines and the spreads easier as well. I had endless scores, miles of stats, all the schedules of every game, team rosters for days all lost up there, just waiting to be recalled when needed. It was pretty sweet for me, but not so much for those that were risking what they didn’t have to lose. I didn’t forget, so there was absolutely no wiggling out of a debt, no tying to argue what was owed, which is why the garage was full of boosted cars waiting on their owners to be accountable.
I poured another Scotch and was stripping down to hop in a shower before bed when my phone rang. It always went off. People wanted to place bets, wanted to ask for money at all hours of the day and night, but the ring tone trilling throughout the loft belonged to Dovie, so I dropped my jeans and tucked the phone to my ear while messing with the shower. There was no middle temperature in the loft, it was either burning hot or freezing cold.
“Bax just left. He should be there shortly.” It was a twenty-minute drive from the heart of the city to the burbs where Bax and Dovie lived, which meant he could make it in ten.