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"Never been where?" I asked, shaking my head.
"Exactly. You will be seen out," he added, hitting a button on his desk that literally chimed into the rest of the house.
I had never been someone who begrudged someone their wealth, but I was starting to see Liv's point.
"That was rather... boring," Liv said, snorting as we walked down the driveway.
"Do all your drops end in violence of some sort?"
"No, but that was just so easy considering how hard it had been to find these guns the first time."
"We got lucky. Hopefully, we get lucky again with the last one."
"Yeah," she agreed, hopping back into the driver's seat. "I figured you got enough driving yesterday. I checked us out of the hotel with the TV before we left. Your shit is in the trunk."
Well, then.
No more having to worry about her crawling all over me in bed then, I guess.
The disappointment was something visceral as I sat there watching out the window for the first hour of the drive before Liv seemed to have enough of the silence.
"You know my whole story," she said, making my head swivel to look at her profile.
"Just about," I agreed, nodding.
"I know next to nothing about yours. And don't try to tell me I know a lot because I only know about The Henchmen. And we both know that isn't where it all started for you. If I were to place a bet, I would put my money on it all starting back in Puerto Rico."
"You wouldn't be wrong," I agreed, nodding.
"We have a long drive, Roderick. Indulge me."
Not many people had my story. And those who did - the guys in the club who needed to know like the prez and the guys who asked like Sugar and Cy and Virgin - only knew the outline of it all, not the shit that filled it in, all the guts of the story.
"It did all start in Puerto Rico. Before I was even in existence really."
My mother had been young and pretty. Gorgeous, actually. And really pretty girls in really poor neighborhoods didn't have a lot of choices. They could sell themselves out. They could try to catch the eye of someone from a better area. Or, well, they could belong to one of the few guys in the area who had money, who had a way to get them out of the slums and into a better situation.
Of course, it came with some stipulations. Like looking the other way to the guns and drugs and cash. Like treating battlefield wounds on their nice dining room tables. Like learning what furniture to hide behind if rivals came through with automatic weapons out the windows of their cars.
But my mother had no mother of her own and a father who spent more time in the local pubs than at home.
And she was starting to get too much attention from men she didn't want attention from.
She slept with a knife under her pillow.
And she needed an out.
So when a man named Benigno - Benny - started paying her attention, she let him. She let him wine and dine her, offer her safety, get her out of her childhood home.
She had been young, but not naive.
She knew who Benigno was, had seen him on the streets with his crew.
The Ñetas.
The biggest gang in Puerto Rico.
But Benigno said the right things, gave her the right things, and my ma, yeah, she needed a break in life, knowing nothing could break her spirit like a life of unending poverty.
So she did what any girl from the slums did when their only out was to attach themselves to dangerous men. She steeled her spine, her stomach, her heart.
She tried not to jump when she heard gunshots, go pale at the sight of blood, question why my father's eyes were so goddamn bloodshot all the time.
I came a couple years later, a mistake by all accounts though my mother would never admit that.
Pleasant surprise, that was what she'd told me.
But there couldn't have been many pleasant memories of that time because the minute he found out she was pregnant, that was when the beatings began.
Benny didn't want to be a father.
He just didn't want to wrap it up.
And he wanted the young, pretty, flat-bellied girl he had picked up out of the slums.
But he didn't kick her out.
Just fucked around on her, beat her when she was - in his mind - being a nag, demanding too much, when she couldn't keep me quiet when I was crying and he was sleeping off a hangover.
But my mother was stuck.
It was either stay in the creature comforts, giving me the things she had been denied all her life, or try to leave and raise me back in the slums.
Try being the operative word there though.
