Four
Oz
July 8, 2025
“What have you gotten out of her?” Linc asked.
I took the cigar from my mouth before I bit off the head, and my teeth instantly started to grind. I’d gotten nothing. Fucking nothing. She’d been down there for eight hours, and I’d not gotten one goddamn truth from her.
Where the hell was her brother anyway? Her phone was on and available for tracking. Hell, I had expected him to show up by now. It was three a.m., and no sign of him.
I had taken her from the Hobby Lobby parking lot at two p.m. Driven over to Sam’s Club and gone inside to get two hot dogs and two pizza pretzels, then headed straight here. She tried to wake up once, and I gave her a sip of drugged water that kept her out for the rest of the trip. I’d planned on feeding her the second hot dog and pretzel after eating mine on the four-hour drive down here, but then I’d used it as a form of torture and eaten the others in front of her.
“Nothing,” I ground out.
“Nothing?” he asked, sounding as pissed off as I was about it. “Are you starving her? Making her shit and piss in a bucket?”
No, Linc. I made it the motherfucking Seasons. Of course I was.
“Yes,” I clipped. “All she has had is eight ounces of water the past thirteen hours.”
He sighed heavily. “Okay. Give her until tomorrow afternoon. If she’s still not talking, then you’re gonna have to add a little pain to the experience. You know I hate to order that, but it’s four million dollars. Just start small. No need to slice off anything.”
Fuck. Like I would be able to actually take a knife to her. Why wouldn’t she talk?!
“Has Wilder gotten a lock on her phone? Can he see if it’s being tracked yet?”
Wilder Jones was the mastermind behind all the interwebs within the family. He worked directly with the boss in Florida. For him to be put on this only said just how invested Blaise Hughes was with getting the money and Perry Gerard. And that I had been the one to trust him. I’d missed it all.
My hand tightened on the phone, and I heard it crack under the pressure. I forced myself to ease up on my hold. I didn’t have time to go get another burner phone, and telling Linc I had broken this one wouldn’t go over well. I was already in the line of fire here. I had to get the girl to talk.
“Wilder has her phone on his supercomputer. He said there have been no dings that someone is tracking it. The moment it happens though, he will call you.”
“Okay,” I replied.
“Get some sleep. You need to be ready when and if you get that call.”
“I will be,” I told him.
The call ended, and I tossed the phone onto the royal-blue velvet tufted sofa.
Although the furniture in here looked like expensive antiques, they were all in excellent condition to be over a hundred years old. I had yet to find a normal, comfortable place to sit in the six different sitting rooms that looked like they were for lounging. What had the wealthy old Southerners needed with all these rooms that appeared to be for sitting in and nothing else? What a fucking waste. They didn’t have pool tables, televisions, or even a poker table. Just the fancy sofas and elaborate tables, fireplaces, and crystal lamps. There were also a lot of books. Maybe I could read.
It was the twenty-first century. Why didn’t the Louisiana branch of the family have a fucking game room or television in this place? If they used it for the prison below, then you’d think they’d have more things to entertain themselves with in the rest of the place.
At least there was plenty of whiskey. I appreciated that it was Carver’s Bootleg Whiskey. Even the Louisiana family knew that Mississippi had the best whiskey in the South.
The burner rang again, and I jerked it up, hoping it was Wilder with news that Perry was tracking Winslet’s phone.
“Yeah?” I said, anxious for this to end.
“You good?” Bane’s voice came over the line, and I wanted to groan in frustration. Not that I didn’t want to talk to my friend, but right now, he wasn’t who I needed to be calling me.
“No,” I snarled, grabbing a bottle of whiskey and going over to sit on the fancy-ass couch. “Why are you awake? It’s three in the morning, and you’ve got a wife to be curled up in bed with.” Which seemed to be his favorite pastime other than fucking her and playing with Hawkins, his five-month-old son, who was technically his nephew. But seeing as his brother was dead and he was married to the baby mama, Hawkins was his son.
“Hawks is teething. Sleeping like shit. I just got him back to sleep and wanted to call you to see how things were before I went back to bed.”
“I thought that Halo had magic tits that put him back to sleep,” I drawled, then took a long swig.
“Yeah, well, he was nursing too much. Doc had us put him on some cereal shit, and it fills him up more. She’s weaning him from night feedings, and I’m ready for her tits to be mine again. Not that I want Hawks to suffer, but when he’s six months, I’m thinking the little man can move to a bottle.”
I chuckled. It was fucking hilarious, hearing Bane Cash talk about nursing, bottles, and baby shit in general. Never would I have imagined he’d become this man.
“Why is that funny?” he asked, sounding more like the bastard I knew.
“I needed the laugh. Let me have it.”
“Is she a raging bitch?”
My mood soured again. I wished she were a raging bitch. This would all be easier.
“No,” I replied, then took another drink.
“Ah, so that’s the problem. Attractive and nice. It’s hard to hurt them when they’re like that.”
He would know. But then he’d been on a path of vengeance when he went after Halo. Holding a knife to her throat hadn’t bothered him at all. Although that memory tortured him now.
The last time someone had brought it up—which was Than Carver, his dead brother’s best friend—Bane had held him against a wall by the throat while I ate my breakfast and watched. Lucky for Than, his older brother walked into the room, and Ransom had calmed Bane down, threatening to go tell Halo if he didn’t let him go so Than could breathe. We all kept our mouths shut about the things he’d done to Halo before he fell into fucking infatuation with her. Now, he was married to her sexy ass.
“She’s got to be lying,” I said, setting down the bottle to pick my cigar back up from the tray I’d placed it in. “But she’s real…low maintenance. I don’t know that the living arrangements down there are enough to make her crack. She wasn’t wailing about the fact that her stomach was rumbling so loud that it echoed or that she would have to piss and shit in a bucket. I’m mentally preparing myself to physically hurt a female who can babble on about food from a Sam’s Club café like it’s fine dining.”
There was silence.
“Sam’s Club has a café?” Bane asked.
I took a pull from the cigar. “Yeah. And the hot dogs are fucking delicious. Even when they’re cold.”
“Huh, interesting.”
She had been funny at Hobby Lobby. She made me want to laugh more than once. It made me angry. I hadn’t wanted to have any opinion of her at all. Especially the one I’d gotten in the short few minutes we interacted before I took her from the parking lot.
“No female who looks like that one is going to be used to the conditions she’s in. Don’t let her fool you. She’s been having men fall at her feet all her life. And the ex-boyfriend of hers is fucking Alec Dart, as in the running back for the Saints.”
I stilled my cigar halfway to my mouth. She’d dated Alec Dart for two years? Really? The second-grade school teacher with no makeup, no fake anything, who was wearing a pair of cutoff sweatpants and flip-flops, had dated Alec Dart.
“Are you positive?” I asked, finding it hard to believe.
“Go look at his Instagram. He’s not deleted her from it. You’ve got to scroll a bit, but you’ll find her. I didn’t realize it, but when Halo saw her photo, she recognized her. She went and found her on his Instagram. That fucker who calls himself her brother is a State fan and followed Dart back then.”
Winslet was stunning. The all-natural-beauty thing had been given to her all the way around. But she didn’t seem like the kind of girl a guy like Dart would date. He had a huge ego, and he didn’t seem to be a relationship guy. In the interviews I’d seen him do, he was a fucking cocky-ass douchebag.
“Do we need to be concerned that the football star is gonna track her? If he calls the cops, then the Feds need to be alerted that he’s stepping into things.”
“Nah, he’s got models and cheerleaders on his arms all the time now. She’s not been on there in a long time. They’re the past.”
I fucking hoped so. But if anyone tracked her phone, then Wilder would know. We’d wait and see.
“I gotta get back to bed. Halo needs sleep, and if she wakes up and I’m still not back, she’ll come looking for me.”
I took another drink. “Yeah. Night,” I said.
“More like morning,” he replied with a small chuckle.
The call ended, and I dropped my phone into my lap.
I wanted to go see what she was doing. If she was sleeping on the concrete floor. I knew she wouldn’t be cold. It was July. But she sure as hell wasn’t gonna be comfortable.
“Just talk, little darlin’, and this can all end,” I whispered to no one.