Page 43 of Violent Little Thing

Seraphina gasped. “What? Why?”

That was when Charleigh started to laugh.

She bent over double and slapped her legs, fries still in her hand.

“Oh, this is great. Where will she get her booze if she can’t get it here? The three counties surrounding us are dry!”

The next email was much the same.

It showed her arriving at the next store, only to be refused service there.

Her final stop was at The Mercantile.

She didn’t even make it through the door before Vera, Hux’s mom and the owner, stopped her.

“I’m sorry, but you are no longer welcome in my store.”

“Oh, damn.” Charleigh shoved those fries that were now practically mush into her mouth and spoke around them. “I almost like her for that. Almost.”

“What is it with you and Vera?”

“Vera’s a bitch,” she grumbled, scowling slightly. “She always treats her employees like shit. Which included me once upon a time. I used to work there when I was in high school. Right after Sonja was killed. I needed something to do, and The Mercantile was it. But Vera fired me because I wouldn’t wipe her ass for her.”

And for some reason, I knew exactly what she was talking about.

Hux was the same way. His mother needed help with almost everything, and she used anyone—family or employee—to get that to happen. She couldn’t do a single thing for herself.

My lips twitched. “Did she ask for that?”

“No,” she grumbled. “But I refused to carry hundred-pound boxes into the store, and she got mad. I told her that it was impossible—at the time I was only ninety pounds—and she said that I could find a way to get them inside or get fired. I got fired because there was no way that I was moving those in there. So…”

“So…” I urged.

“So I drove the forklift into the main store and fucked up the tile. She got mad, told me I had to pay to get it fixed. I refused, and she fired me.” She shrugged. “But seriously, I was a high school girl. I wasn’t even a hundred pounds soaking wet. Those boxes that she wanted me to carry inside were three-quarters of my height, and twice as wide as me. Not to mention a hundred pounds each. How, exactly, did she expect me to get them inside?”

“Why not open them and empty them?” I wondered.

“I only thought of that later,” she admitted. “After I broke the tile getting them inside. But to be fair, I’d seen her sons move these boxes in a hundred times before. They never opened the boxes to get them inside.”

“Probably because they didn’t need to.” I chuckled. “You are a tiny thing.”

She shrugged. “Anyway, I guess I’m just salty. That was a trying time in my life, and I needed that job as a distraction. Without it, I had to think about my life, and that only made me madder.”

She finally finished off her fries, and I realized that I had, too.

A sliver of fear went through me at consuming all those carbs, but that fear dissipated almost as fast as it arrived.

And that had to do with the woman that was now leaning over the truck I’d been working on and peering inside like she knew exactly what she was looking at.

“So what are we fixing today?”

Twelve

Settle down nippledick. It was a joke.

—Text from Charleigh to Court

Charleigh