Page 28 of Vile Bastards
With a sigh, I start to stand up, but Bohnes locks his hands on my hips.
“Are you going to school tomorrow?” he asks, and I shake my head.
“Starting back on Wednesday,” I murmur, and he finally releases me, allowing me to stand up and head into the bathroom to clean myself up.
By the time I come back, the boys are fully dressed, the coffee table is back in its rightful place, and they’re waiting near the back door to leave.
“We should probably get together and talk,” I tell them, my body tingling, my cunt throbbing, my nipples rock-hard all over again. I swear to fuck that they both notice, looking me up and down with matching primal gazes before flicking their eyes to one another.
If they both didn’t take their words so seriously and hadn’t promised me they wouldn’t go rogue on one another, I’d be worried.
“All of us,” I add, before either of them can say a damn thing.
“I’ll see if I can’t coax the Kelly boy out of hiding for you,” Bohnes offers up, and then shrugs. “I’ll do my best to arrange a meeting. Until then, Lawless over here and I will be taking shifts to watch your house.”
“Aww, equal parts creepy and comforting.” I give Bohnes a kiss that turns into a near-fuck make-out session, and then go for Widow. Not one to be outdone, he, too, takes the kiss a tad too far, and then I’m pushing him back and giving them both a look. “I moved my meeting with Emma Jean to next weekend; we’re going to trade information and see what we can figure out. The mob might not be working with the mayor, but they’re not on our side either. We need to find out if Alexei’s dad truly was working with the feds, or if it’s total bullshit.”
“You’re not convinced, are you?” Widow asks, and I shake my head.
“Doesn’t it seem mighty convenient that the mayor would have Pavel killed, disappear his body to make it look like he ran, and then here the mob is trying to find and kill him? Let’s see what’s going on with his company. If he’s missing, and Alexei is missing, who’s in charge of the Borisov Group? Who’s in charge of Pavel’s estate?” I exhale and push dark hair back from my face, staring at the toes of the boys’ boots instead of their faces. “If there’s no blood trail to follow after a murder, you know what they say?”
“Follow the money?” Bohnes queries back, and then he chuckles. “You’re too smart for your own good, Force. Go get some sleep.” He reaches in his pocket and passes me a blunt before turning to go; I see that he’s not actually going to leave until he’s certain that Widow’s going to follow him.
“Wish you’d never gotten involved with me, eh?” I ask, and Widow shakes his head.
“Glad that I finally have a reason to live.” He turns away and then glances over his shoulder with this cocky smirk in place that truly makes me consider castrating him in his sleep. “We have a future to fight for, Scarlett. Marriage, a house, kids. That whole jam. I’ll do whatever it takes to get there.”
“Get out of my house.” I point with a single finger as Widow chuckles, Bohnes studies his exposed throat with interest, and the two of them disappear out into the night.
I head upstairs, crack my window, and smoke the joint that Bohnes gave me. The weed, the sex, and the knowledge that at least one of my men is lurking outside finally, blessedly, allows me to enter into a dreamless sleep.
Ash Aspen Kelly
“Maybe it should’ve been you feeding the sharks instead of your idiot brother?” my father hisses at me, storming down the hallway toward his office. His publicist and the deputy mayor are waiting inside, strategizing how best to deal with my dead twin. Or, my dead twin’s fucking foot to be precise.
If I hadn’t come home the other night to find Mayor Kelly drunk and having his dick sucked, I might not have been able to take his phone and deal with the text message that came in from Shipman, as predicted.
It’s Ash.
That’s all it said, which bothered me even more so because it seemed like there was prior context to it. Does my father know? Has he guessed?
I hesitate in the office doorway, the gunshot wound in my arm carefully bandaged and hidden away, and all eyes turn to look at me. Jonas accused me of leaking the information about Aspen’s DNA results to the press, but I did no such thing.
Didn’t stop him from beating me.
Didn’t stop me from fantasizing about his eventual death or incarceration.
None of the lies I came up with to explain my presence at the hospital went unpunished either, although the truth would have been a far worse monster to tame. I claimed to have been at the track, scouting information on Alexei Borisov. As far as my father knows, I was assisting Shipman in locating the boy, and then as soon as he got ahold of him, he shot me and took off.
