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I shrugged. “Step inside and find out, Addison. Or should I call you Little Addy?”
She tried to hide her expression, but it was impossible. That flash of recognition was gone as quickly as it appeared. Agent Beck stood taller and squared her shoulders, doing her damnedest to appear unaffected.
“So, you warmed my father’s bed on occasion. I’m sure you weren’t the only one.”
I let out a laugh that echoed in the small cell and the smaller hall that led to the main guts of the cop shop.
“Oh, that’s cute, honey. Your father warmedmybed for many nights. Many, many nights,” I added just because I could. “In fact, I was almost a stepmother to Little Addy. In fact, he offered to leave you behind so he could warm my bed permanently.”
There it was. The flash of anger I was looking for.
“You’re a liar. Why would I believe anything you have to say?”
“I don’t give a fuck if you believe me or not. But Jack made the offer and said he could leave you with your aunt in Florida so we could be together full-time.”
Jack had been a good man and an even better fuck, but father of the year, he was not. Apparently, I had a type.
“But a man so quick to leave his child, well, he’s no man at all as far as I’m concerned. A little girl needs her daddy, or who knows where she might end up.”
“Running a criminal organization,” she shot back with a derisive snort.
“Or simply working for one,” I shot back. “But hey, some of us are leaders, and some of you are meant to be nothing more than…mediocre.”
Another flash of anger flared in her big blue eyes, and Beck stepped forward, lips pulled into a thin white line. “You’re going down, bitch.”
I laughed. “Better women than you have tried and failed, dear.”
“We’ll see.” She smiled, but in those blue depths, I saw doubt. Uncertainty. She thought she had me, but she wasn’t completely sure. As far as I was concerned, that meant she didn’t have shit on me.
Hopefully, Ellison would make it true.
Eventually, the boredom and cold got to me, and I curled up on the hard bench and tried to sleep, but it didn’t come easily.
Instead of peaceful dreams, hopeful dreams, hell, even erotic dreams, I was haunted by them. They were nightmares, but there were no monsters under the bed, no boogeymen. No, these were real-life nightmares of all the things I let slide, doing a disservice to myself as well as my children.
Those thoughts, those nightmares inevitably starred those fucking priests. Perverts, every last one of them. But it was me and their own damn father who’d let those grown men use my boys as fuck toys.
If I’d been stronger back then, I would have put a bullet in Colm’s head from the start, preventing years of pain for my sons. But I was weak. A weak-ass bitch afraid of her own shadow. And my sin was much worse than that. I was afraid of being alone. Of being poor.
And what did I do with the power once I had it? Did I transform the world like I had planned? Did I make the lives of the people around me better to make up for the way I came into the money? Fuck, no.
I got revenge.
My family would be fine as long as our misdeeds didn’t catch up to them. Kat said I’d given her a life that made sure she didn’t turn out like me. That was a mother’s dream, but was that enough?
What about the people of Glitz? The people in the Green Zone?
Those were my people. They made my organizations run—on both sides of the law. I made money from their labor and gave them nothing in return except dime bags and titty bars.
But what else did I have to give? The Ashby Organization wasn’t a charity but a money-making venture, a capitalist enterprise. And who the fuck was I kidding? Sadie Ashby was nobody’s PTA leader; she wasn’t the type who baked cookies and gave back.
She was a stone-cold boss bitch. She wastheCEO.
The head bitch in charge.
But was thatallI was? The truth was, that kind of thinking was why I sat in this fucking jail cell in the first place. Jasper warned me that the murders came too close and would draw the wrong kind of attention. Warned me about my obsession with Mueller. With Bonnie. But I didn’t want to fucking hear it.
I let out a deep sigh as the hours passed, and sleep refused to give me any peace. Was I sitting in this cell for no reason other than my son, my posterity, was finally seeing his full potential as head of the family?
