Page 6 of Of Snakes and Men

A take-no-prisoners, badass woman who never let anyone even look at her sideways… let her coworkers talk to her like absolute shit.

The fuck was that about?

I had no idea, and then I was being ushered into the back with the men while Hope sat in the front, watching my dog like he was planning on charging her or something.

I sat there, saying very little, as the Mike guy prattled on and on and fucking on about their experience and promises.

And, at the end of it, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t trust a damn one of them to handle my shit.

Hope, though? With her biker daddy and her biker uncles and her aunts that did all sorts of illegal shit?

She could be trusted.

Besides, it was funny as fuck to watch those men’s faces fall when I demanded it be Hope.

If there was one thing I’d learned in life, it was that it was satisfying as hell to take a person of power down a peg or two.

With that, I walked out, a smile tugging at my lips as I walked Val down the street with me to order some bulk tamales to bring back to my place for the men.

It was an old trick my bosses in the Soto cartel had used on occasion. Plying the men with unexpected food or gifts, looking for the one who looked a little too smug about it. Then pulling them aside for a little chat.

The problem was, my guys were too good, I guess.

Most had been with me in the Soto cartel, watching the games play out, cataloging them in their heads.

So everyone’s faces were just a mix of joy at a free lunch, and I took myself toward the front of the house to my study to stew a bit, wondering if it had finally happened.

If I got so big that I thought everyone was coming for me. My power and ego making me paranoid.

But, no.

There was shit going on. Shit that couldn’t be going on if things were on the up-and-up like they were supposed to be.

“Fuck,” I hissed, dropping down at my desk, and raking my hands down my face.

It had been a fuck of a year. Supply chain issues and shutting down an up-and-coming local gang who wanted a taste of what was mine.

Nothing, I guess, like shit had been in my homeland, where the street wars between rival organizations were an almost constant problem, where each morning usually started with a death or injury breakdown from one of my men.

That was the point of coming here. To get a layer of protection between myself and other fuckers who wanted to flex, who wanted to make their name by taking me out.

It wasn’t that it was safer here.

It was just a different kind of dangerous.

Back home, I could grease the right palms, keep myself out of jail no matter what shit was going down.

Here, it was more strategic than that. I had to keep my hands clean as much as possible. Sure, there were some fat, happy pockets at the local police department thanks to me, but it proved harder than I’d anticipated to get judges and state’s attorneys to bend or break.

So I had to be careful.

I had to be smart.

I couldn’t let a single suspicion go without a full investigation.

All it took was one snake to take your whole operation down.

I’d worked too fucking hard for too fucking long to let that happen.

This house in and of itself was evidence of how far I’d come in life.

Once upon a time, it had belonged to some shithead skin trader named Lex Keith who’d fucked with the wrong woman who eventually blew it all to shit with her fun little bomb-making hobby.

It had been demolished and rebuilt, but sat vacant for years thanks to the previous owner. People tended to be pretty chill about buying a mansion when it belonged to a drug dealer or a con artist. Skin traders, though, that was a different game altogether.

I didn’t fuck with those types of assholes either, but, hey, a deal was a deal when it came to eleven-thousand square feet on a couple-acre property that already had perimeter security fencing and a nice, soundproof basement with secret walls and all sorts of convenient hiding places.

Hell, the architect had even built a panic room off of the master bedroom. Either he was anticipating someone like me buying the place eventually—and, in Navesink Bank, the chances of some criminal boss buying a mansion was pretty high—or he was expecting some Wall Street billionaire with a bad rep needing a place to hide out during the peasant uprising when they decided to eat the rich on a gold platter.

“You not eating?” Luis, one of my men, asked, walking past the door with a full plate. He was tall and thin, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a nose bent from three breakings.

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