Chapter Twenty-Eight #4
While it was not necessarily characteristic of me, I found myself not wanting to ask.
If there was one thing I learned from having brothers who had been, to not mince words, drug dealers and pimps for a decade or more, it was that some pasts were private.
None of us had gone out and boasted about Paine and Enzo’s ‘careers.’ In fact, my mother had turned her nose up at any money either of them had ever tried to give us, scraping a life together by herself and with the help of my aunts and grandmother, refusing to take part in their dirty money.
So if Tig’s story was something similar, it was something I didn’t feel I had the right to pry out of him. That was something he would have to give me freely.
Where did that leave us?
“So, I heard you were a bit, ah, wild when you were younger.”
Well, I guess we were moving onto my own sordid past, which, even at its darkest moments, was likely more tame than his own.
“When Mom started to realize that, despite her best efforts, Paine was getting pulled into the streets, she really cracked down hard on Reese and me. Reese, who, as I am sure you can tell, did not need any of it.”
“I was afraid of speaking too loudly around her. She startles like a mouse.”
I smiled at that because it was so true.
“She has always been her own keeper. But me, well, I rebelled against it and went ahead and proved to her exactly why she had needed to crack down in the first place. I drank underage. I hung out with trouble almost exclusively. I partied. I dated guys she hated, probably just because she hated them.”
“What turned it around?” There was no shock or judgment in his voice, and I wondered if it was his own experiences that made him so blasé about it or if it had something to do with his career.
I shrugged at that. “I really screwed up. Well, Cassie and I both really screwed up. We, ah…”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
I looked up and found understanding, a complete lack of pressure for my darkest parts. But that was even more reason to share them with him. I wasn’t overly shy about the things I had done in my past, but this one part, well, it was the only real bit of shame I knew.
So I lifted my chin slightly and shrugged. “I was fresh off a breakup with someone who cheated on me. Cassie and I hit the town. We drank. We got stupid. We found a dealer…”
“Not one of your brother’s ones…”
“Yep,” I agreed, nodding. “Enzo’s. Paine was already out and rebuilding his life.”
“Fuck…”
Fuck was right.
“We took H twice, and Paine found out and freaked the hell out. Shipped me off to rehab where I did learn to turn my life around, though I wasn’t an addict in any way, shape, or form.”
“And the situation with your brothers?”
“None of us knew it at the time, but Paine went over there with a gun and threatened Enzo. That would be shocking,” I added, reaching for my wineglass, “if you didn’t already know that Paine shot Enzo when he was trying to get out. Those two had a long, rough road toward reconciliation.”
“What about you and Enzo?”
“I never blamed him. It wasn’t his job to protect me. It wasn’t his job to make sure I didn’t take drugs. That was on me. I never had any bad blood there. He was my brother. I missed him. It wasn’t until real recently that we started reconnecting, but now he’s off in the city.”
“Working for Rhodes.”
“You know him?”
I had never been able to get much information about the man.
I knew that Paine said he operated in a “gray zone,” not always following the law the way PIs were supposed to.
Maybe I should have been worried about Enzo working for someone like that, but the fact of the matter was, a “gray zone” seemed infinitely better than the world of drugs and prostitution he had been in for years.
Plus, whether he wanted to admit it or not, he was into the Espen chick he was working with.
It was nice to see him getting a normal life back.
His mother, Annie, had done everything in her power to keep him off the streets.
He had been a great kid, a model student, and an all-star athlete.
Until he got hurt, until all his dreams for his bright future in sports died.
It was painful to watch that transition.
He might have technically only been a half-brother, but we had been raised close enough that the half didn’t mean anything.
After he had recovered, he sank. There wasn’t even a hint of happiness in him as he graduated, got a soul-sucking job, then watched Annie die.
After that was when he went to Paine and wanted into Third Street. In a lot of ways, I couldn’t even blame him. Everything in his life was beating him down. He just wanted some of his power back.
Then he had it.
He eventually lost it and that was when Paine sent him in the direction of Xander Rhodes.
“Yeah, I know him, honey,” he agreed, thanking the server as our food was dropped off.
“Because you run in the same PI circles?”
“Because we were street kids together. Well, ‘kids’ might not be accurate. We were teens when we met.” He looked up at me when I remained silent, committing to my belief that it wasn’t my place to pry. “You can ask, Kenz.”
I had been reaching for my fork, my hand pausing in the air. “Ask you what?”
“Ask me about my past. I might not broadcast that shit, but it’s not some secret either. You can ask me.”
So then I asked.
And he gave it to me.