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I know her type. Not well, but I know it. Girls like Charleigh don’t hang out with guys like my brothers and me. In fact, our paths seldom cross. We usually end up with the bad girls, the dirty girls, who don’t care that we make our living doing illegal shit. They just want our money and the security that offers. They want to be with the guy with the most power so they can lord it over other women, their friends included. In return, they’ll fuck us day and night—even our friends, if we ask them to—and put up with the boatload of shit women in our world are required to. As long as the money keeps flowing, they don’t give a damn what they have to do.
But someone like Charleigh, she doesn’t know what to do about a guy like me—an admittedly dangerous and scary prick. Given the choice, she’d run in the opposite direction, were she to confront me in a dark alley. I represent everything she’s not. Everything that’s dark and forbidding and treacherous about the world.
Everything existing in a man who would hurt her father.
And God bless the man. Or damn him to hell, depending on your perspective. Just as my brothers and I were leaving his dump of a shop, he called after us,offering her. Yeah, he fucking offered us his daughter. Maybe not in the way we might have liked. But he put it out there when he suggested that maybe we have some work for her. Something that pays better than her little job at the shop.
Seems the man might be smarter than I give him credit for. Or at least more resourceful
I’m sure he had in mind having her serve cocktails or some such in the game room. I’m not sure he knows much about what we do in the rest of the club. But he knows enough. And yet he still dangled her out there in front of us, like a piece of meat to a hungry pride of lions. He’s seen enough beautiful women come and go in the club, for a variety of reasons, to know that his Charleigh would fit in just fine here.
Whether she wants to or not.
That fact, he does not give a shit about.
Given the work I do, I hang out with some scumbags. Hell, sometimes I’m a scumbag myself. But this man, Gil Gates, has taken that shit to a new low.
Offering his daughter.I have to say, even I am a little offended by that.
But not too offended.
“Hey.”
I yank my head out of my hands and look up to see my brother Kir at the door.
“Got another migraine?” he asks, gesturing in my direction with a toss of his chin.
I run a hand over my smooth head, shaved bald by my barber that morning, as if that would relieve the tightening belt around my brain. “I’m fine. What’s up, Kir?”
I lean back in Papa’s chair—even if it had been Mikey’s for two years, I’ll never call any of this his—and crack my knuckles.
My brother makes himself at home opposite my desk. “How are the numbers looking?” he asks. “Mikey’s numbers?”
I shake my head. It’s not worth being angry anymore. Waste of my energy. It’s time to look forward.
“Well,” I start, “I met with the accountant, and he confirmed that Mikey pretty much used the place as his personal ATM machine.”
Kir scoffs. “Tell me something I don’t already know. I swear, if I could get my hands around that fucker’s neck—”
But I wave him off. I’m tired of the ‘ifs.’ It’s time to deal with the situation. Not dwell in the past no matter how infuriating it is.
“We can get out of this, Kir. We can pull cash from the other businesses as long as we need to. We’ll collect what we’re owed, pay off the debts Mikey racked up, and have the place back to Papa’s standards in no time.”
“What about the girl?”
Charleigh.
Fuck. I knew he was going to bring her up.
I choose my words carefully. My brother doesn’t need to know I’ve spent the better part of a day thinking about the lovely lady.
“She… she can help us. Shewillhelp us.”
A shit-eating grin makes its way across my brother’s face.
Am I conflicted? Am I ever conflicted? For fuck’s sake, am I pussy-whipped by a woman I don’t even know? Who I saw from a distance at my father’s funeral two years ago, and who I just saw for fifteen minutes as I gave her father a warning beat-down?
What the fuck is wrong with me?
