AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“My sister probably didn’t mean it the way it came out,” I pointed out.
Hancock, who still hadn’t left, snorted from behind me.
I flipped him off behind my back, causing him to chuckle.
“I brought your stuff over,” Hancock said.
“Uncle Hanny!”
Hannibal pulled me off of him like I was a piece of dirt on his hands and turned to the girl that was calling his name.
Just as he turned, the little girl hit him like a battering ram.
“Hey there, Darcy.” Hannibal picked her up and held her tight.
Hancock slid his arm around my shoulders, and together we watched the two of them interact.
“Hey there, Hanny.” She placed both of her tiny hands on either side of his face and said, “You have a bunch of bullshit in your refrigerator.”
I snorted out a laugh.
“Don’t encourage her,” Hancock whispered. “Sway hates it when she curses.”
“I can’t see why,” I found myself saying. “She used the curse word perfectly.”
“Yeah,” Hancock nodded. “You okay?”
Was I?
I didn’t know.
I knew I would be, though.
“Sure.” I shrugged. “I’m hungry, though. I worked up an appetite dealing with that.”
Hancock laughed. “Well, I had a dual motive when I came over here. One was to bring you your suitcase. The other was to ask if you wanted to have breakfast at my parents’ farm. They own about a thousand acres about ten minutes outside of town.”
“We are not taking her over there to deal with our mother after that,” Hannibal disagreed, settling the little girl on his hip as if he’d done it his whole life.
Or hers.
“Yes, we are,” I said. “We’re gonna rip this Band-Aid off.”
Hannibal was already shaking his head. “If you think you can leave later on…you’re wrong.”
Why did that sound so ominous?
CHAPTER 18
I just laugh stuff off because prison doesn’t cook the food I like.
-Hades to Hannibal
HANNIBAL
My mind wasn’t on the drive as it should be.
It was on how Hades had been treated her whole life.
Had I come into that house and heard Zip’s words to her, I might’ve been in a different state of mind than I was. But I hadn’t heard them come from their mouth. I’d heard them secondhand come from my brother’s mouth as he explained everything that had happened since he’d arrived with Darcy.
As it was, I was angry with Zip for ruining the small amount of peace that I was able to give Hades since she’d come waltzing into my life.
Now she was sitting there worrying about everyone in her family finding out that she wasn’t an actual part of their family.
And that wasn’t all right with me.
As it was, she was sitting there spinning a mood ring around on her finger.
It was blistering black. No color whatsoever.
It was a color I hadn’t seen on that ring before.
It made me wonder if it was supposed to mean something, or if the mood ring was broken.
“I’m sorry you rushed home,” Hades said quietly into the stillness of the truck.
We were in my truck today because the bike needed a little tune up after that long ass road trip, and I had taken it into the shop this morning.
“I was already on the way home with some news,” I said. “Your hunch about it being Benji was correct.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
I patted a leaflet of papers that was sitting on the truck bench between us. “Take a look at those.”
She picked them up and took a long look before glancing at me. “Receipts for all the shit he sent her in the mail. It was him.”
She was already shaking her head as she started leafing through the pages.
“This is real,” she said after a while. “All this time, and you figured it out in a freakin’ day.”
Less than, really.
I hadn’t had time while I was working with Crew to put even a call in to my boys in the office.
That’s all that I’d needed to do today. Call in.
Jagger, one of our resident ex-cons, had used his superior sleuthing skills to get what he did.
But he’d also come back with more information.
“Yep,” I said. “Now all we need to do is figure out a way to approach him and tell him to knock it the fuck off.” I paused. “That’s gonna be a bit of a problem, though.”
She looked at me with a frown. “What? Why?”
“Turn to the next page,” I suggested.
She did, and her mouth dropped open. “A restraining order? What?”
“I talked to a couple of my employees, and that’s what we’ve been doing all morning, trying to figure out how he was able to get that. And it turns out that he’s marrying an FBI agent. One who helped him get this restraining order. But since you were nowhere to be found, according to this woman, the judge issued it and you just never knew about it.”
She was already shaking her head. “That’s insane.”
