Page 85 of Violent Little Thing

I went to the funeral.

I didn’t plan on it at first.

Truthfully, I should’ve stayed far away, because it felt like a betrayal to Sonja every time that I had anything to do with Seraphina. But seeing Olive, Lysander, and Beau going, I felt obligated.

Plus, I would not watch them go and not give them the moral support that I knew they needed.

Not to mention, it would look kind of bad if the other two owners of the Condors and the Cowgirls didn’t go to the funeral.

Though word was out on how she’d lost her life.

The PR marketer, Dottie, hadn’t been able to hide it.

She’d done her best, and it was surprising that she was so good at her job seeing as Seraphina had been the one to hire her, but shit had literally hit the fan.

The Condors were in the news all over the place, and not in a good way.

Not only had we lost every single game since the news had hit, but they’d practically dug up every single bit of dirt on Seraphina, Court, and myself to kind of highlight the worst of the worst running organizations that should be setting the right example for today’s youth.

Or whatever bullshit had come out of that one reporter’s mouth.

One chick in particular had taken it upon herself to tell every dirty secret that we had.

Which, inevitably, wasn’t all that much.

What stuff she’d been able to dig up on Court had already been known and proven false.

The worst she’d been able to get on me had been an arrest when I was seventeen and acting out, which hadn’t even gone on my record.

Seraphina, though. They’d been finding so much, even more than we’d bothered to find out ourselves.

Though when it started coming out, Apollo had come to the rescue and given us everything that he had on her, down to the banking receipts and text messages, so we wouldn’t be blindsided.

Apollo had been able to do a little damage control on his end.

But poor Dottie was barely keeping her head above water as she tried to get the Condors’ name out of the mud.

I was thankful that we had.

Seraphina’s one good act…

“What’s with that face?” Beau asked.

I was squished between him and Lysander, and we were in the front looking like the doting family that we were not.

Benedict sat on Olive’s other side, both of them heartbroken.

Because, even if she’d been excommunicated from the family, she was still their child.

And children should never die before their parents.

Never.

“I was thinking about all the stuff that the one reporter is digging up,” I said. “How is she getting all this information? I mean, my arrest wasn’t even on record. She’d have to know someone from a decade and more ago to have that information. Not to mention, there isn’t even anyone left at the department that was there that long ago. She’d have to go talk to retired people.”

“You think she has an inside source?” he asked. “One of your friends from high school, maybe?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “Many of them would have been pretty easy to convince. I mean, it wasn’t like I was super nice in high school after Sonja passed.”