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I flash him a grin and force my shoulders to relax, adopting a carefree posture. “Nah, man. If you're good, I'm good. And Evangeline sure as fuck is good.”
“Is she coming down or are you two gonna continue whatever the fuck this bullshit conversation is?” Silas snaps, apparently exhausting his short supply of patience.
I smirk at his unintentionally witty question and take a drink. Damn, that's a good latte. “She'll be down in a few minutes. And I don't know, brother, maybe Bane and I don't think it's bullshit, yeah?”
Silas crosses his arms over his chest and glares between the two of us. “Then discuss it on your own time. I've got a garage to run.”
And I don't have time for you or your bullshit. That's what he really means.
“What else is new, man? Your lines are getting fucking tired.” I take another drink of my latte, letting the sugar rush even me out a little. It sounds counterintuitive, but somehow it works. It only takes moments, and already my annoyance is forgotten.
“Tell us about the cleaners,” Bane says, looking from me to Silas. “Have you gotten the final report?”
Silas shakes his head. “Nah, not yet. I met with them last night, later than I planned since I took Hunter to the hospital.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket, tapping a few times on the screen. “He's supposed to reach out in an hour or so.”
Bane nods. “Good. And you? You went to her place today?”
I spin the cup around slowly on the table, letting the soft scratchy noise fill the air. “Yeah, I grabbed her a few things to change into. And I wanted to scope the place out, see if there was anything the cleaners missed.”
“Was there?” Silas asks, leaning forward.
“Nah, they're efficient as always.”
“They should be fucking immaculate for what we pay them,” Silas says. “They upped their rates, despite the fact that they do less add-on options than they used to, and we rarely have to need them.”
“That's probably why they raised their prices,” Bane says. “They lost a lot of business from us when we left.”
Silas shrugs, a shadow crossing his face quickly. “Yeah, well, there are plenty of surrounding areas that still require their services often. I doubt they're hurting, not with the way Hell Hounds still run their shit. And now with Savage Souls apparently back and their fucked-up alliance with the Hell Hounds—yeah, I think they're well-fed.”
“Did you hear any chatter?” I ask, jerking my chin toward Bane.
“Not yet. It was too messy to be professionals, and amateurs always run their mouths. It's only a matter of time,” Bane says.
In between wallowing in my parentage bomb wreckage last night, I tried to figure out who would rob Mrs. Carter's house. “What are the odds that it was meant as a message for us? It seems too, I don't know,smallfor that. Not when the last message they delivered was a barrage of bullets.”
Bane shrugs, and Silas purses his mouth to the side. It's his tell.
I sit forward in my chair and look at him. “What aren't you telling me?”
Silas sighs, dragging his hand along the back of his neck. “Nothing, just something stupid someone said to me once.”
Bane whips his head to the side and looks at my brother. “Who? When?”
“Five or six years ago, Marcus Stockton promised retribution for his dad,” Silas says.
I toss my arms up in the universalwhat the hellgesture. “Well don't leave us in suspense, man. Who was his dad?”
“Richard White,” Silas says, holding my gaze.
I lean back into my chair with a thud. “No shit.”
Richard White is the motherfucker who shot me. Though technically, he was aiming for my old man, but I stepped in front of him. It wasn't as altruistic as I sometimes let people believe. More of a wrong place, wrong time situation. I was trying to hustle Dad inside the gates, where he was protected, and he was too busy chatting up the package delivery woman.
My sixth sense kicked in, that feeling that washes over you and drowns you in intuition. You can't always tell what's going to happen, but you can feel the air shift.
Shit really shifted for me that day. And in the end, it was all a moot point, because Dad got taken out not long after.
“But I didn't kill his old man,” I say, working out the connection in my head.
