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He gives me a look when he catches me mid sip from the bottle, and Malice snorts dryly.
“Told you,” Mal comments.
“It’s fine.” I gesture to Vic with the bottle. “It’s alcohol. Whatever germs I’m leaving behind get killed by the booze.”
“It’s still disgusting,” he says, sitting down on the couch with Mal.
It’s no different from a lot of nights the three of us have shared. We’re a unit, a family. Whenever there’s something big going on, or we need to talk, we fall into this pattern. Sitting up together, hashing shit out.
When Malice was in jail, it felt wrong. Like we were missing something essential, something weneededin order to function the way we were supposed to. It’s always been the three of us, and we’ve always faced anything that’s come our way head on.
But now, we’re all united in dancing around the elephant in the room. The reason none of us are asleep.
“How’s the fallout from you pissing off the Donovans?” Vic asks. That’scloseto the topic that we’re all skirting around, since Willow is involved in both situations, but not quite it.
She’s involved in everything now, it feels like.
Malice shrugs a shoulder. “Eh. I didn’t want to work with them anyway. Bunch of fucking cunts.”
“Yeah, but we’re going to have to do something,” I put in. “We need to have a good reputation if we want our shop to succeed. Right now, not everyone in Detroit has heard or believed the shit Ethan is spreading about us. But if that changes, we could be fucked.”
“We’ll work it out,” Malice grunts.
We seem to be saying that about a lot more shit than usual these days.We’ll work it out. We’ve always managed to do it in the past, but there are so many things up in the air right now. This mess with the Donovan gang, whoever’s poking around asking questions about Nikolai, the message from X…
It feels like it’s all snowballing, one thing feeding into the next, making it impossible to keep up.
I know Vic must be having a hell of a time with it. He’s a problem solver, but he has a specific set of skills. When those skills can’t solve the problem, he gets antsy and irritated. Right now, he’s focused on figuring out who the face he found on that security footage belongs to, but it’s not like he can ignore everything else on top of it.
“I know some guys I can call,” I offer. “They usually try to move whole cars, because they’re idiots, but I can probably convince them there’s more money in chopping.”
“Sure,” Victor agrees. “Do that. It’ll at least get us by until this thing with the Donovan gang blows over.”
We fall silent again, and when Malice pushes the bottle toward Victor, our brother actually looks like he’s considering it for a second before he shakes his head. He doesn’t really drink, ever, so the fact that he looked tempted is a pretty good sign that he’s just as wound up as the rest of us.
Finally, I can’t take it anymore. We all know why we’re up and what we’ve been avoiding bringing up, and I decide to just come out and say it.
“What the fuck are we gonna do?”
My brothers both look at me, and then Malice goes back to glaring at the rug that fills the space between the couch and the chairs.
Vic sighs, tapping his fingers on his knee. “We have a little time before X expects us to deliver her.”
“But he won’t wait forever,” Malice grunts.
Vic and I both nod because we know that. None of us have ever met X, and we don’t know who he is, but he doesn’t strike me as someone with a lot of patience. Power, yeah. Probably in spades if he was able to get Malice out of jail after he took the fall for murdering our dad. Resources, probably. But he likes things done in a certain time frame, and the longer we take to deliver what he wants, the higher the stakes get.
“So what do we do?” Victor asks. He’s usually the one with the plan or an idea of how to come up with one, but now he seems as lost as Malice and I feel.
“I don’t want to give her up,” I say, once again being the first to speak up. “Not knowing what he’s probably going to do to her. Who the fuck knows what would happen if she got sold to some asshole? We all know there are some depraved fucking scumbags in this city, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing we just… gave her up to that.” I cross my arms, sitting back in my chair. “That’s where I stand.”
Victor taps his fingers together thoughtfully. “I agree. It’s not her fault that she’s in this mess. And she’s done what we’ve asked of her so far. Handing her over would make our lives easier, but…”
He shakes his head.
We both look to Malice, because he has the most to lose here. He’s also been the most vocal about not wanting Willow around. Mal’s jaw clenches, and he grips the glass in his hand hard enough that I’m worried he’s going to break it. His eyes flash, and they look haunted for a second, like he’s reliving everything that happened to him in prison or something.
Then he takes a deep breath and lets it out, grabbing for the whiskey again.
