Page 32 of Well Aware

Always literal with my brother.

Instead of dwelling on it, I changed the subject. “I have something really important to talk to y’all about.”

“What?” Lysander asked.

“I think we should sell our shares of the Condors and the Cowgirls.”

Silence.

Utter and complete silence.

“Why would we do that?” Lysander asked.

I explained everything that had happened today, not leaving a single piece of information out.

If I was going to do this, they needed all the facts.

Even the ones that my mother would rather not hear.

She didn’t get along with Seraphina.

After Sonja’s death, my mother and Seraphina had never been the same.

Mom had tried, but Seraphina made it impossible.

There was no way to fix something that one party refused to admit was broken.

So, they’d been estranged for years, and Mom had grown resentful as she watched her daughter continue to spiral. And watched her ex-husband refuse to admit that their daughter was broken.

“What do you want to do?” Mom asked quietly.

“I want to sell every single bit of our shares,” I said. “If we do, then Court, who I plan on selling the team to, will have a majority of seventy percent, enough to do what he wants to do. More than enough if he gets Charleigh to side with him.”

Mom looked like she saw peace in that moment. “Okay, let’s do it. Lysander?”

“I’m down,” he said. “As long as we get fair market value. I’m not going to sell my shares for a song.”

I grinned. “Then it’s agreed.”

I drank a beer at Hopps and didn’t notice the music pounding my skull, nor the people who tried to talk to me.

I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even notice the stool next to me being pulled back until Court said, “Why do you look like your parade was just rained on?”

Because it fucking was.

I’d given up eight months of my life for this stupid fucking team, and my father was shitting on that.

He had no fucking backbone.

“Bad day at the office.”

“What happened this time?”

Court was a professional soccer player.

Or had been before he’d gone to prison for killing his wife.

He was the single one out of the group that Apollo and the Dixie Wardens MC hadn’t broken out of prison.