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“What happened to him?” I fight the urge to pounce on her and force the truth out of her, the parts I know she’s still hiding. But for some unknown reason, I don’t.
“Nothing. He got to continue at college and carry on with his life.”
“How is that fair?” I ask, my muscles tensing in frustration.
“How is anything fair?” She shrugs, and although I have to agree with her, I hate it. “So what about you? What do you need to confess?”
I stare at her, there’s still more to this story than she’s willingly telling me, but I can tell that she’s confessed more than she’s happy about.
“What do you want to know?” I ask, spinning it back on her. There are a million things I could confess, but I need to know what she wants to hear.
Her lips part, and without missing a beat, she asks me the one question I was hoping she wouldn’t.
“Who keeps calling you, and where do you keep disappearing off to?”
“Agh, Dove,” I complain, falling onto my back and staring up at the twinkling stars above us in the inky black sky. “Going right for the big questions, huh?”
“Are you going to tell me?”
I can hear the doubt in her voice. She thinks I’m about to back out of our little deal. It makes me wonder if that’s why she only told me half a story just now.
“Donny,” I confess. “Donny Lopez. He runs an… organization in the Heights.”
“An organization?” she asks.
“Of sorts. He has his hand in most of the dealings that go on in the Heights, but his biggest earner is the movement of drugs and guns.” She gasps, although I’m not sure if it’s because she wasn’t expecting it or because I’ve confirmed her suspicions.
“And you work for this Donny guy?”
I blow out a slow breath. “Not by choice.”
“So why?”
“Ace,” I admit.
“He got you into this?” The anger in her voice makes me smile. Even knowing what kind of man I’m tangled up with, she wants to fight for me.
“In a way, but it’s not what you’re thinking.”
“Go on.”
“Ace got tangled up with Donny years ago. Our dad had… I mean Charlie,” I correct, because even now, even though I know the truth, it’s still a mind fuck that James is our dad and Charlie was our uncle. “He died, our mom was a mess, and someone needed to take charge and make sure the lot of us didn’t die of starvation. Most people go one of two ways in the Heights. They either get addicted to something, or they supply those who are. He knew that the only way for a kid to earn enough to keep the roof over our head was to go to Donny.
“Ace already had a reputation by then, so Donny gave him a chance. He ran for him for years, even after we moved here, although by then, Conner and I thought he was done. He’d met Remi. He was changing, softening, but it turned out that Donny never let him go. He was too valuable.”
“You took his place?” She guesses correctly. “You took his place so that he’d be safe and could be with Remi.”
I shrug. “He tried getting out, but Donny wasn’t having any of it unless he could get something out of it. He set Ace up and called me to come and rescue him from what could have been the beating of his life. By doing so, he’d pulled me in. A favor for a favor.”
“What did he ask you to do in return?”
“I think you already know the answer to that, don’t you?”
“Charlie?” she whispers.
I nod. “Apparently, Donny had wanted him for years after he disappeared with a shipment. When he got word that he was back in town, he knew it was his time to strike.”
“Why you?”
