The statement held no question, but I heard the one beneath it. “I didn’t want him driving. He could barely stand.”
“If you really trying to leave, that ain’t your responsibility.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
The words landed harder than his damn tone. I folded my arms across myself. “I wasn’t trying to save our marriage, Lev.I was trying to keep a drunk man from getting back behind the wheel and killing somebody.”
A faint sound came from the couch and both of us looked. Rome shifted onto his back, mumbled something, then fell completely still again. I exhaled a sigh of relief. Lev had his Glock in one hand, and he pulled a thick envelop from his back pocket before passing it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked confused.
“Twenty-five thousand, and I hope you learned your lesson.” He gazed down into my eyes. “I like you, and I ain’t gone act like I don’t, so I don’t want you beating up that pretty body no more working yourself like a slave. Next time you see some shit that ain’t yours, remember what kind of danger can be lingering behind it.”
I swallowed hard because I didn’t know what else to say. “I… Lev… I…”
Lev stepped closer, and once again placed his finger to my lips. “Lock this door behind me, and when they get him out, lock the front too.”
“I know.”
His eyes stayed on my face, quietly searching for something. For a moment, I wanted to ask why he had come. Why he had needed to see me badly enough to show up without warning. Why he had been standing outside the back door before I even told him where to go. But the questions felt too dangerous for a kitchen still holding the evidence of every complicated decision I had made that night, so I only nodded.
Lev opened the back door and disappeared into the hallway. I then locked it behind him before I stood in the middle of the kitchen, with one hand resting against the counter while Rome slept twenty feet away and Bill’s headlights had yet to appear through the blinds. My husband was unconscious on my couch. His pregnant mistress was calling his phone. The manI owed twenty-five thousand dollars had just walked out of my back door after fucking me right here a few feet away from my husband and even giving me the money. My best friend was preparing to end a pregnancy she had been too afraid to tell me about until today. I looked around at the shopping bags near my bedroom, the dying candles, Rome’s jacket hanging across my chair, and the blanket twisted at the opposite end of the couch.
Less than twelve hours earlier, Tasha and I had been lying inside a spa laughing about the tension in my shoulders. Now every muscle in my body had tightened again. The headlights swept briefly across the front window, and I moved toward the door before Bill had the chance to knock. He needed to get Rome’s ass out of here.
CHAPTER 22
E’Leveyn ‘Lev’ Laurent
Day Ten
The office had been empty for almost an hour before I finally shut my laptop. I sat there a few seconds longer anyway, staring through the glass wall at a floor nobody occupied but me. The cleaning crew had already passed through the hall two times already and the lights had been cut off in the offices farther down. My phone sat beside my hand with three missed calls from BJ and that was the only reason I hadn’t gone straight home.
Barbara Jean didn’t call three times unless somebody was dead, bleeding, locked up, or making her nervous enough to believe one of those things was about to happen. She had left one voicemail, but all she said was, “E’Levyn, come by my house when you leave that office,” in the same firm voice she had used when I was twelve and knew I was in trouble before I ever crossed her threshold.
I slid the laptop into my bag and stood up. That office was supposed to represent everything I had changed about my life with men in suits calling me Mr. Laurent instead of whispering my name because they needed something moved, buried, or handled. I had worked too hard to build distance between who I had been and who I had become, but lately Marv kept shortening it for me. Every call about him felt like somebody pulling on a rope tied around my fucking neck.
By the time I rode the elevator down, irritation had already got the best of me, and it stayed there through the parking garage, through the valet bringing my truck around, and through the entire drive toward BJ’s estates. Before I reached the door, she opened it. BJ wore a long house dress with her reading glasses hanging from a beaded chain around her neck. Usually, she would make me knock even if she saw me through the window, claiming she didn’t raise any of us to enter people’s houses like the police. Tonight, she stood there holding the door with one hand and pressing the other against her chest.
“What took you so long?”
“I came straight from work.”
“You could’ve left that work early.” She scolded with worry wrinkles all over her face.
“That’s not how work goes.”
She stepped aside without answering with her lips tight enough to tell me arguing wasn’t gone improve her mood. The house smelled like onions, butter, and whatever cake she had baked earlier. The television played in the living room and a half-finished cup of tea sat on the end table beside her chair, but the bag remained floating inside it, untouched.
BJ never let tea steep that long, so I knew something was wrong. I set my keys on the small table near the door knowing this was about Marv. “Where he at?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You called him?”
“Of course I called him. The phone either rang until it cut off or he sent me to that machine.” She walked toward her chair but didn’t sit. Instead, she turned and looked at me as though I had already failed to fix the problem. “He came here earlier.”
