Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
VEERA
“Where’s your sister?”
Gabby knocked the legs out from under her sparring partner—a client who was staying with us until I could move her somewhere safer—before offering me a single-shoulder shrug. “Not my sister. Also not her keeper.”
She was also lying. Those girls never went anywhere without letting the other know. Not for safety purposes but to cover their asses. Even if Gabby wasn’t doing a good job of it right now.
Though she wasn’t ratting on Bells either.
“Hmmm.” I made the noncommittal sound in the back of my throat. “I have an appointment in the morning. At Briarwood. I expect to see you both in my office when I return.”
“I’m not your personal message service,” Gabby grumbled, and I cocked an eyebrow at her. “What makes you think she’s gonna answer my texts when she’s clearly ignoring yours?”
“Precisely my point. She’s ignoring me for a reason.” Gabby opened her mouth to argue, and I lifted a hand to stop her. “I don’t want to know. Just make sure she’s here or I’m freezing both your accounts for the next week.”
I was much more fond of the “hit them where it hurts” style of parenting, even when it came to a couple of grown women.
Gabby nodded, and I quietly clicked the gym door closed. Sometimes the loudest replies were the silent ones. I didn’t have to scream or yell when I could convey everything I wanted to say with actions.
There was too much testosterone in the room.
It thickened the air and made it difficult to choke down the cheap coffee staring back at me from the bottom of my mug—I’d tested it with a fingernail.
It might have tasted like ass but it was clean.
What was even less palatable than floating coffee grinds, however, were all the supposed alpha males holed up in one space all thinking the same thing.
That the fact they were born with an outie instead of an innie made them superior.
It didn’t. It made them easier to manipulate.
I clicked my nails across the conference room table as I waited for the children to quit scratching their balls and start settling down.
I’d expected a little more professionalism, considering the caliber of clientele The Renegades were known to entertain.
The women who crawled to my door had little more to their names than what would be left to them in their spouse’s will.
Though some of them were wealthy wives, fed-up with their cheating husbands.
Again, that was what made Danica Rossi the outlier.
She wasn’t destitute, and she wasn’t married to some rich fuck.
In fact, she wasn’t married at all. Though rumor had it that she kept a boytoy tied to her bed in some nowhere town outside the city.
I didn’t care to find out if that was true or not.
Everyone had their… peculiarities. The point was, the girl had family wealth all on her own and that wasn’t including the paychecks she brought in.
Money was great, sure. I envied the life Danica built in some ways. But it wasn’t everything. Revenge was. Keeping the promise you made to your twenty-year-old self was. I’d sold my soul to the devil a long time ago. I wasn’t about to offer it to him again.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
The obnoxious bouncing of the chair was driving me nuts. I could barely hear myself think. Fuckers couldn’t keep their asses still. But boys would be boys and all that nonsense that allowed men to act like neanderthals without consequences. Speaking of…
My glare refocused on where Dr. Adrian Lambert sat at the head of the table.
The Surgeon. My only son. He thought I was dead.
I’d always known he was alive. Somewhere.
Under some name. I just couldn’t force myself to care enough to dig up what it was.
Though I admit I respected his work far more than I respected him and slightly more than I respected his father. Who I didn’t respect at all.
Dr. Lambert kept his hands steepled and his head tilted to one side as he eyed me like a weed he wanted to pluck from the garden and squash in his hand.
On his left were the brothers. Not much was known about them other than the fact one was a computer whiz and the other couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag.
The Russian sat to the right, his stare nearly as crazy as the reputation that preceded him—that was my chair squeaker, by the way—leaving two empty spots between us.
I could only assume they belonged to the one-eyed freak they’d taken on a few years back and the newcomer we’d yet to pull a file on.
They called him “The Negotiator.” The guy was in charge of the details, laid out the rules for every hand-off and had the last word when it came to the final take-home rate.
Odd, considering no one could tell me a thing about him, other than he was a fucking ball-buster.
But then again, so was I. And everyone was always so eager to drop their pants and allow me to do it too.
I spun in my chair at the sound of the door opening, announcing that the last members of this little backyard boy band had finally arrived.
But it wasn’t the first guy’s face—as horrifying as it was to look at—that had my coffee nearly coming back up the way it went down.
No, it was the petite figure behind him, her swollen belly entering the room several seconds before she did.
My mouth tipped up into a sickeningly-sweet grin as I watched her step around the table.
“This is my wife,” the man grunted in my direction before guiding the woman over to the seat beside me. “Emily Michaels.”
I scooted my chair another inch closer and offered Emily a hand, while my glare dipped to the metal collar around her neck and back to her face again. “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Michaels.”
She cocked a challenging brow, taking a moment to eye me up and down. “Is it?”
“It is. Makes things interesting,” I hummed. Far more pleased with this sudden turn of events than I should have been.
“Oh, yeah? How’s that?”
I lifted a shoulder. “Well, from what I hear, Mrs. Michaels, you’re one hell of a negotiator.”