Page 16 of Pretty Lies

Della didn’t think it was.

“Don’t cause a problem for pussy when we both know you’ve got a phone full of it that’ll give you a lot less headaches than I will, Luis.”

After all, his extra pussy was what ended this in the first place.

He didn’t even deny it.

“Except you had to go and make me work for yours,” he told her as a car pulled up to the curb with a guy in the driver’s seat that she recognized. One of the guys who had been sitting in her brother’s booth when she first arrived. The door was shoved open. Luis leaned in before she could step off the curb and get into the car. Just enough to catch a strand of her wavy brown hair between his fingertips when he said, “And since I earned it, I think that makes it mine, Della.”

Up until then, she’d been good.

Didn’t poke his monster.

Hadn’t even tried.

“Fuck you, Luis.”

The highest of disrespect, she knew.

He’d killed men for the same before.

She watched him do it.

Oh, well.

Della slipped out of his reach and into the safety of the car. Before he’d even stepped away, the guy hit the gas, making Luis jump back. The door shut with a snap.

“J says you’re to go home—nothing else.”

She glanced at her driver.

“He doesn’t run my life.”

“I do what the boss says.”

Since when did someone call her brother boss?

Things were certainly changing, weren’t they?

Della wondered if she might like it.

•••

“Home safe?”

“Yeah,” Della said into the phone. “He just dropped me off at the townhouse.”

“Lock the doors. He’s not going anywhere but right outside your door for the night.”

“What, like an enforcer, or—”

“Just don’t … ask?”

“When did things with Dad’s business start to change for you?” she dared to ask her brother.

J sighed. “Last year.”

“Huh.”