Chapter 5 #2
He’s my age and he’s competitive and he wants a wife at home, not in the empire of the streets which are my entire life.
But he’s familiar; my uncle introduced us shortly after I turned eighteen on one of Lynx’s runs down south.
He was my first friend in North Carolina.
Back then, he really was just a kid. More immature than me, more lighthearted.
But he was a kid who could knife your face from your skull.
“Yes,” I tell Eve. “He doesn’t know anything yet.”
“And Fox?”
My bodyguard reluctantly left me here to follow one more lead. I glance at the analog clock on the wall above the bay of windows. He’ll be here at ten, in half an hour.
“We’re going to find out who sold to him.” I say the words and know I sound like a cop when I do. Fuck.
Eve cocks her head, her raven braid slipping down one shoulder as her brows fly up, a small wrinkle in her forehead forming. “You have no idea at all?” she questions. There’s something in her tone like surprise and I don’t like it. Like she’s implying I should know.
She doesn’t want to test her luck. Not when it comes to my brother.
“Why’d you say it like that?” I ask, my voice low.
She looks at me a moment, then turns and grabs a black squeeze bottle—mine—from the ring at her back. She tosses it easily to me and I catch it with one wrapped hand, tilt my chin up, and pour the cold water in my open mouth.
I don’t stop drinking until my head starts to hurt from the cold, thanks to the ice in the bottle. I dip my chin and hit the mouth of the bottle closed with the back of my hand as I meet Eve’s gaze, waiting for her to answer my question.
“You know everything that happens in this town, Lydia. When it comes to product, I mean. Has anyone been grumbling lately? Running off at the mouth? Any complaints?”
“If we had any, I’d have warned Lele.”
“Lele doesn’t listen to warnings.”
“He listens to me.” And I to him. He might be a party animal and a bit of a whore but he’s valuable even if we’re speaking strictly business which when it comes to family, we never are. He’s charming where I’m cold. Friendly where I’m mean. He brings people in. I shut them out.
Eve folds her arms and glances at the floor. It’s like she’s hiding something. I wait her out, aware of the darkness, the time slipping by, and my brother in a fucking coma.
Finally, she looks up at me from beneath her lashes.
“You know he can’t be controlled. And if there’s no one you pissed off recently, it’s possible…
” She trails off and I clench my fingers tight around the bottle in my hand.
If she says some shit about him going too far on his own or being erratic and deserving where he is right now, I’m going to hit her, consequences be damned.
But she doesn’t say that.
She looks right at me and says, “I had a fling with Lynx, did you know? That’s why he recommended me to you in the first place, a year ago.”
When my uncle told me to move here. Expand his territory.
My stomach grows hard and it’s like all the breath has left my lungs. Lynx said she was good. I didn’t think to ask any more questions about their connection. My assumption was he trained with her before on a visit down here.
“I know he’s your uncle, but he’s cold and he’s calculated. If he thinks Lele is a liability, I don’t know what he’d do to solve a problem like that.”
“But there’s no fucking problem. Lele is related to him by blood. He’d never try to kill his own and for you to suggest it is fucked in the head, Eve.” My loyalty is unmatched. This woman seems to have a death wish.
She doesn’t blink. “I watched him drown three puppies. One by one. He’d do far worse than what I’m suggesting.” She says it so casually and it takes me a second for her words to catch up with the reality of what she’s saying.
It’s like the floor tilts and sways beneath me.
What?
Immediately, my brain pushes back on this. She’s lying.
But why?
Lynx was strict, even now, he values obedience above all else. He’s just lengthened my leash. His punishments were unusual, but he hardened me. Otherwise, the world would’ve devoured me whole.
Then again, Lele doesn’t have the same gratitude for his methods that I do.
Still, none of his overbearing behavior makes my uncle a psychopath.
Not in my mind.
“You watched him drown puppies.” I repeat it back to her with no emotion.
She’s still holding my gaze, and she nods, slow.
“You stayed with him.”
Her throat rolls as she swallows. Finally, she averts her eyes. Her voice is small when she asks, “Don’t you think he’d have done worse to me?”
“Put it in your pocket.”
I glance at the necklace hanging from the display. It’s nothing of real value. My uncle has more gold than exists in this department store. “But I don’t want it.” I shake my head and look at Lynx.
He smiles slow at me, then steps closer.
I inhale the sharp scent of his cologne.
“Take it, Lydia.” His voice is low. The store is quiet. Anyone could be watching. And if I wanted this necklace with the butterfly on it, I could buy it myself with the allowance I get from my uncle. It’s cheap. This exercise doesn’t make sense.
“But I—”
My uncle cuts off my words with a sharp pinch at my throat.
I flinch, reeling at the sudden movement and the quick pain. I curl one hand into a fist. My other has two fingers in a splint. It doesn’t ball up as easily.
His smile is wider and he leans down closer, his breath over my ear. “The necklace, or your thumb. You choose, Lydia.”
But that was my pain.
My training.
He’s ruthless when he needs to be but it’s always for a purpose.
I glance at my gloves on the floor and I should pick them up, but I stare at them and remember standing on my balcony Friday night. Before the call.
It was the girl at Orange; she found my number in his phone, on his recent texts. But I sensed something outside. Someone in the woods, at the Hollows. And only Lynx would be brave enough to come up on my house through those woods. But why would he bother?
Finally, I retreat a few steps and sink myself down onto a black exercise ball.
I keep my spine straight, then I take a breath and look up into Eve’s eyes.
She’s good at waiting us Flynns out. No wonder my brother comes at least twice a week, despite the fact he’s fucking ripped and knows how to workout all on his own.
He needs someone with Eve’s patience. But she’d tear him to shreds if they were ever anything more than trainer and trainee. Someone like her could match someone like Lynx. I wonder if Lele knows she hooked up with our uncle or if they decided to keep it from both of us.
“Are you saying he threatened you?”
She doesn’t answer me.
“And why did you break up in the first place if he was so terrible? How did he let you leave him?”
She lifts her chin. “He cheated. It gave me an out. He was bored and I was the one boring him.”
I don’t react to those words. “You wanted to train me and Lele after all that?” That seems suspect.
She frowns, her brows knitting together. “You think I’d hold the sins of your uncle against you? If that were the case, I wouldn’t have any clients. They’re all stained.”
That’s probably true. “You think he had bad drugs sold to my brother and hoped… What? It’d kill him?
That’s a stretch, and a gamble. He could’ve found a more violent and definitive method.
” I have to think of this objectively, because the moment I imagine Lele shaking in my arms, I want to throw up, thinking my uncle—who gave me everything I needed to put myself where I’m at—was the reason behind it.
Was it a warning? To get him in line? Lele parties. His vices are all the usuals: Sex, drugs, cash. But he shows up when he needs to. Besides, he’s not inheriting the throne. Lynx knows I’ve proven well enough it should be me. There’s no need to try and whip my brother into shape.
Eve still has her arms crossed. But there’s a distant look in her eyes, like even though she’s here, she’s thinking about when she was there, with Lynx.
I don’t know what I feel when I think of him. In my world, you measure a person’s goodness by a strange yardstick. If I’m going against the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, the stories I’ve heard of what’s happened to other people around me, Lynx is a fucking saint.
Eve is staring right at me but she’s not really seeing me. “I don’t know,” she says quietly in answer to my question. “But I thought I’d mention it to you. In case you hadn’t thought of that angle.”
No. I certainly had not fucking thought of that angle.
“Why wouldn’t you tell me any of this before?”
Eve smiles at me, but there’s no warmth in it. It’s a reminder she’s not someone to taunt. “Do you know the power your uncle has?”
I narrow my gaze. “And you think I have none?”
“Sometimes you seem grown, Lydia James. But then I remember you have so much more to learn.”
I don’t like her fucking tone. “So did you decide to stop being a little bitch when Lele ended up in the hospital or is there something you want from me Lynx won’t give you?”
A muscle in her jaw hardens. “I suppose in some ways you are just like him, aren’t you?” The dig lands and I don’t know why the rage grows so hot. Is it a compliment? Not from her.
My phone buzzes from its perch on the edge of the ring and I snap my gaze to it.
Eve starts to walk toward it but I’m already up and moving.
I beat her there and snatch the phone up, my heart in my throat when I see it’s Fox calling.
I answer the call and wait without saying a word, the screen pressed to my ear.
If it’s my uncle, he’s dead. And that’s going to put me in a world of shit with his network because it extends into my territory too.
We overlap. Usually, our empire is one and the same.
They wouldn’t follow me like they follow him. But no one fucks with Lele.
“The Learys.” Fox’s voice is calm and precise. I think he’s driving; there’s a hum in the background. He must be on his way here to Rector’s.
The Learys.
Storm.
But no. The son can’t be who he means.
Hawthorn and Cassia.
Husband and wife but word is after decades of marriage, they’re together for business purposes only.
Business being bodies. Not sex trafficking; death dealing.
Which means I doubt their scope is drugs, so I wait for Fox to keep talking.
Besides, as Lynx told me after the funeral, we have a truce and that family is off limits.
Something I never needed to concern myself with.
Fox needs to hurry up his fucking preamble.
“Their…son.” My bodyguard sounds hesitant. He knows some things. But he wasn’t at the funeral when I was a teenager. He doesn’t know about the hands and bruises in the dark. Blue eyes I’ve never once forgotten.
My blood runs cold.
I let Fox keep talking.
“He’s twenty-two, twenty-three, somewhere around your age. Anyway, they’ve done a good job keeping his records obscure.”
I close my eyes tight.
“He’s a dealer around Ely. Works with a chemist named Grey.
If we’re being technical, Grey’s girlfriend is who gave it to Lele.
She stole it from Grey, under his nose, and the Leary kid is the one who gave him the orders to make it and test it.
A teaser to see how the street likes it.
Grey was being fucked over by this girlfriend fucking Lele so I don’t think we should hold the girl or the chemist responsible but that’s on you, Lyd. ”
“You’re sure about all of this? You haven’t gotten even one single thing wrong?” Any amount of relief I might have felt that it wasn’t my uncle’s doing is gone.
Storm is off limits. The Leary family as a whole is off limits.
This is why Ellicottville is off limits, isn’t it? My uncle lied to me. Storm has been there all along, hasn’t he?
My throat feels tight. For a year, he’s been nearly next door.
The memories surface.
I went to the funeral with two broken fingers. I left with a bite mark on my neck.
The next morning, I woke up with a lesson in the form of my arm in a sling.
Pain was how my uncle helped me remember things.
But Lynx will back me up though, won’t he? For Lele.
Where my brother is concerned, I’ll start a fucking war.
He will wake up—he has to—but right now, he’s hovering between life and death. If word gets out and I’ve done nothing, my inaction makes all the Flynns look bad. It makes Stone Fell look bad. And that puts us in more danger.
Fox pauses. It’s like he doesn’t want me to know. But he should know better than to withhold information from me. “Look, I’m on my way. We’ll talk about it when I get there.”
“How sure are you?” I am relentless.
Fox still hesitates. “There’s some tangled webs with the Learys I’m not certain you want to cross—”
“Fox.” I clench my teeth. “I know about the fucking web.” He must mean the truce.
“Do you?” He seems to be taunting me. Testing me.
“I know Storm.” It’s not the whole truth. But it isn’t quite a lie.
“So you’re aware then of how well he knows Lynx?”
I clench my teeth.
No.
I’m not.
A truce, and Lynx was clear we stayed away. I thought that meant him, too.
“What are you talking about?” I whisper the question.
I think of Eve in this room and I want to hit her for seeing me off my game, but I don’t even fucking look at her.
“It doesn’t matter. There’s peace between them. Your uncle won’t let you break it for this.”
This. As if my brother is nothing.
I snap my eyes open and they find Eve’s dark blue ones. She’s watching me like she’s seen a ghost. I wonder if she heard what Fox said.
But given what she told me, this connection makes Storm’s impending death weigh far less heavy on my conscience.
“Let me?” I ask Fox, voice cold. “When is the last time a man let me do anything?”
Then I end the call.