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A banging on my bedroom door had me rolling over and groaning. “Fuck off!” I called catching sight of my digital clock. It read 10:30 a.m., but I hadn’t slipped into bed until after 4:00 a.m.
Which everyone fucking knew.
I expected to hear footsteps walking away. Instead, the door flew open slamming back against the wall with a hard thud. Instincts had me reaching for the gun I kept tucked under my pillow, flicking off the safety and sitting up in one swift movement, ready to put ten fucking bullets in whoever was standing in my doorway.
My aim was dead perfect, and I could have killed the person within a couple of short seconds, but you wouldn’t think so with the way Wrench stood there with his arms folded across his chest and a beaming smile on his face.
I didn’t lower my gun, and for a minute I wondered how much trouble I’d get in if I just shot the smug bastard. “Did you break my fucking door?”
“Well, don’t you look fucking horrible in the mornings,” he commented casually. “Ain’t no lady gonna want to wake up to your ugly ass.”
“Is there a reason you’re beating down my door at the ass crack of dawn when I’ve been on a shift at X-Rated until three?” I snarled.
No, I wasn’t a fucking morning person.
“Ass crack of dawn? It’s nearly fucking midday.” He stepped in ignoring the death glare I was throwing at him in the dim light of my room. “And sorry, princess, I was excited. Pretty sure you’ll forgive me after I show you what I found,” he explained flicking on the bedroom light and almost fucking blinding me. Obliviously, he walked forward to the foot of my bed pulling a folded stack of papers from his back pocket before sitting down.
I huffed in annoyance but clicked the safety on and slipped the gun back into its hiding spot. Wrench handed me the papers, and I took them eagerly, my brain finally awake enough to realize what Wrench was talking about. I’d asked him to find information on my brother and sister, and while so far, the search had been a handful of dead ends, he looked extremely optimistic.
“When I couldn’t find anything, I had a friend of mine in a government agency do some searches that would even push the limits of my abilities,” he went on. “There’s some good news. Some not so great.”
It made my stomach twist in excitement as I looked down and sawRomeowritten across the top of the page, but the ecstatic feeling soon began to deflate as I realized just what these papers were. “Prison records?” I rasped, looking up at Wrench for some kind of explanation.
The excited look was gone from his face, and he gave me a slow nod. “Yeah, your brother’s been locked up for about six months now. He’s got less than a month left on his sentence.”
I frowned looking down at the charges. “This can’t be right,” I insisted. “There is no way my brother is like this.”
The file read that Romeo had been caught dealing coke and heroin down in Las Vegas. And those were past charges—this wasn’t his first stint behind bars. Running from the police. Assaulting an officer. Fucking Christ. I just couldn’t imagine the little brother who used to follow me around and bug me to play with him all the time was capable of drugs and assault.
Sure, Rome had his cheeky side doing what normal teenagers did, like going to parties and drinking while they were underage, but he was more like the class clown. I couldn’t imagine him ever purposely hurting someone with his body or by giving them hardcore substances.
Wrench held up his hands in surrender at my harsh tone. “Hey man, don’t shoot the messenger. Your bro there changed his name, that’s why I couldn’t find him anywhere after his last foster home. The minute he turned eighteen, he’d become someone else. Same with your little sister.”
I clenched the papers in my hand scrunching them tightly in anger before tossing them onto the bed beside Wrench and throwing the blankets back. He didn’t say anything as I snatched up a pair of jeans which had been thrown haphazardly into the corner of the room and pulled a fresh white T-shirt from the folded pile on my dresser. I pulled them on before taking my club cut from its place on the back of my door and slid over my shoulders giving me the support I needed to ask the question I’d been considering for a while now. “You think they were trying to hide from me?”
Wrench took the papers in his hand and stood up to face me. He held them out, but all I could do was look at them in disgust. For so long, I’d just wanted to find my little brother and sister and apologize for not being there when they needed me, and it seemed that maybe they didn’t even want that much from me.
“I can’t ever imagine that I’d hate my brother for fighting that many years in court for me, or for becoming homeless because he spent every cent he had on lawyer’s fees,” Wrench announced clearly and slowly, no doubt hoping I heard every damn fucking word. It didn’t matter, though, it was going in one ear and out the other.
Shaking my head, I made a beeline for the door stomping out and down the hall. Wrench followed behind me, not saying a word, but offering his silent support as I headed downstairs. I just wanted to fucking hit something, or throw something, maybe just feel something else other than the ache in my chest.
“Phee is doing good,” Wrench pointed out calmly as I stopped briefly at the bar ducking around behind to grab a bottle of water. I gripped the cold bottle in my hand allowing myself to look when he held up a picture across the wooden bar top. It was a newspaper article of some new home in Cali that took in homeless teens and helped them get back on their feet and go to school. It was owned by some famous movie director. “She and her friends are living in this house and going to school.”
I cringed. “Another group home.”
“No, not this one. This one’s different. The kids here are old enough to care for themselves, so they are expected to get a job, go to school, and be respectable members of society,” Wrench explained as if he’d studied the article down to the finest points. “They have people come in, counselors and things like that to ensure the house is looked after. But from the sounds of it, it’s a great place.”
My body warmed as I examined the photo closer. It was black and white and a little grainy, but I could see my sister’s face hiding in a group of six or seven teens. I would always recognize her smile. It was slightly crooked, like one side of her mouth couldn’t go up as high as the other, no matter how hard she tried. When she did smile, though, her eyes lit up so brightly it was like stepping out into the morning sun. It filled your body with something you knew you couldn’t get anywhere else.
“That’s good,” I finally croaked. Feeling the emotion begin to build in my chest and throat, it was choking me burning my vocal chords. I coughed, trying to clear it, already feeling far too emotional and out of my depth like I was swimming and couldn’t quite reach the bottom.
He slapped the papers against my chest. “Read them. If you truly want to sort your shit out and have the chance of maybe putting your life and family back together, you need to know what they’ve been through while you’ve been apart,” Wrench told me in all seriousness. “All their information is there, it’s up to you what you do with it now.”
I wasn’t sure how long I stood there just staring at the ink on the paper, not even reading the words or trying to make sense of what they said. This was the moment I’d been fighting for so long, bugging Wrench day in and day out to do this for me, and drinking myself into a hole whenever we hit a dead end. I think he was probably expecting some kind of excitement, maybe some jumping up and down and screaming ya-hoo, but instead, it was like reality punched me in the gut. All the things I’d forced myself not to consider before were slapping me in the face—a wakeup call that I found extremely hard to stomach.
They could have found me, my name was the same, and I wasn’t hiding. There was no reason they couldn’t have come looking for me.
They just hadn’t.
