Three Months Later…
Sable
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?”
I sighed as I plucked at the apron around my waist. It was the most dressed I’d ever been at work as an adult. “What other choice do I have? You’re being all noble and want to have a legitimate business, unless you want me to hop up on the bar and take my clothes off.”
Victor laughed, shaking his head. His hair fell into his face before he pushed it out of the way.
It had taken a while for him to lighten up again after the whole incident at Faded Sins.
Most of the dancers had a hard time finding work because no one wanted to hire someone with a criminal history, even if a misdemeanor wasn’t that big of a deal.
We all did what we had to in order to survive.
Then there was the day we were all sitting at Orion’s new little apartment.
He’d invited a bunch of the staff over because we were trying to brainstorm what to do.
Okay, so I might have begged him to let me invite them over.
It might have included a filthy blow job that had him nutting in less than five minutes, but either way, I’d gotten my way.
Victor came up with the idea of opening a new bar.
He’d been a little more responsible than the rest of us, stashing a shit ton of money away in savings.
There was also the bonus that Victor had only been the bartender at Faded Sins. He fared a lot better than the rest of us. He never sold himself, didn’t help with selling the staff—all he did was serve drinks, able to play ignorant to what was happening in the back rooms.
Of course, Henry had thrown a massive fit about that when it had all gone to court. He’d tried to say that Victor was his right-hand man. That was a joke because Henry didn’t trust anyone but himself with the business.
Either way, thanks to Victor, we all had a new place of employment that didn’t question what happened at Faded Sins.
The biggest change was that the place was only a bar.
There would be no more stripping, no more selling ourselves to clients for extra cash.
The pay was significantly less, but it kept us all out of trouble.
“Please, as much as I like seeing that adorable little ass—”
“Watch it,” Orion cut in, pointing the mouth of his beer bottle in Victor’s direction.
Victor lifted his hands in surrender, laughing lightly.
There were days when things were still tense between the two of them.
Hell, things were still tense between me and Orion, but it wasn’t like either of us had a place to go.
He’d done so much to make sure I was taken care of after everything...
And I really had fallen for him. There were days that I struggled to trust him, but if I explained that to him, he would open up. We were both working on it.
That was the other thing that had changed as well. As Orion and I grew closer as a couple, he’d become a little more possessive of me and my body. Maybe it was because I wasn’t selling myself anymore, but I sort of liked seeing him take ownership.
A month after we’d moved in together, divorce papers were delivered.
He’d looked so damn lost at first. Not that I could blame him.
He’d been married to Whitney for nine years.
After she’d found out about his infidelity, she’d made no further effort to reach out to him.
While he had no desire to be a dad, it bothered him to know that there was a child involved that might never know him.
He’d signed the papers because he said Whitney deserved her freedom and to find real happiness, since he couldn’t give it to her. The sucky part was that we were in California, so we’d have to wait a year for the divorce to be completely finalized.
Our little happy bubble of the day seemed to pop when a man in a suit knocked on the front door of the bar and stepped inside. “Sorry to interrupt you gentlemen, but I was hoping to find an Orion Masterson here?”
Orion set down his bottle of beer, leaning forward in his seat. “Can I help you?”
The man gave him a tight smile. “I was hoping we could speak somewhere in private.”
It only made Orion laugh, shaking his head.
“Sorry, man. Anything you have to say, you can say it in front of these two.” And that was another way he’d been trying to earn back our trust. There were no secrets.
Everything was out in the open. It was refreshing to know that he wasn’t hiding anything anymore.
The man looked skeptical, shifting his weight from one foot to another before making up his mind. “Very well. I’m Detective Brown. I have some questions for you about your father’s garage.”
And just like that, it was like the temperature in the room had dropped a few degrees.
While Orion still worked at the garage, he spent as little time there as possible.
He’d told us about how Jayden had been working for his dad.
How he wanted no part of anything they’d been doing.
The day of the arrests, he’d just finished a huge job that had given him enough money for him to start seriously thinking about starting his own place, but he’d spent all of it bailing out me and Victor.
It made me feel bad about the way I’d treated him when we saw him after we were released.
I was mad, but that was no reason to take it out on him.
The more I learned about what happened that night, the more it seemed inevitable, anyway.
Even if he hadn’t known that Jayden was dealing, Henry’s business was shady as fuck.
You can’t prostitute out your employees in the state of California.
It wasn’t legal, though; I still upheld that people should be able to do what they wanted with their bodies within reason.
“What about the garage?” Orion asked.
Once more, Detective Brown looked unsure about saying anything in front of me and Victor, but Orion held up a hand. “These two won’t say anything. If there was anyone I trusted with my life, it was them.”
That seemed to settle the detective. He crossed the bar and sat on the stool across from Orion.
“We have reason to believe there might be illegal activity going on behind the scenes.”
Orion laughed. “There’s definitely that.”
Detective Brown’s eyes widened. “I don’t—I don’t understand. Normally, when we have to come to family members asking about this stuff, they don’t want to tell us anything.”
“Have you met my dad?” Orion’s expression was blank, like he really expected the detective to answer.
Orion and his mother had been beaten by his father for years. Even as an adult, Orion didn’t have a way to get away from him. His father had threatened to blackball him as a mechanic if he left the garage—as scary as the man was, I couldn’t blame him for believing him.
In just the last three months, I’d watched Orion come home with more questionable bruises—he’d even had his pay withheld. If I were in his situation, I’d have no problem talking to the police either.
Detective Brown laughed. “Not yet, but we’ve been keeping an eye on things.
There’s been a lot of people in and out of the business that have nothing to do with the cars being worked on there.
Normally, that wouldn’t trigger us to pay attention right away, until we saw that Jayden Rose used to work there. ”
That had all of us sitting up a little straighter. “Jayden never worked for the garage.” Orion corrected. “He was a childhood friend of mine, but he wasn’t working for my dad.”
The detective nodded. “We figured that out. Mr. Rose didn’t have any credentials to be a mechanic. Neither does over half the staff within the facility.”
“Fuck,” the word dropped from Orion’s lips with so much disdain. “I knew some guys were suspicious, but I had no idea that he’d been hiring people just to fill holes. We’d had customers complaining for a while that they didn’t think their cars had been worked on at all.”
“That’s because they weren’t. We pulled surveillance footage, and it looks like you’re the only person within that shop that does anything.”
I walked up behind Orion and placed a hand on his shoulder. “What do you need him to do?” I asked, even though I knew this had nothing to do with me. Orion had been there for me, and now it was my turn to be there for him.
“Honestly, we just need proof that something is going on. Outside of knowing that Mr. Rose was selling drugs, we’re pretty sure he got from the garage—we have nothing else to go on. We can’t even use the surveillance footage since we didn’t have a warrant for it.”
“So you need someone to expose them?” I asked.
“I’ll do it.” Orion didn’t hesitate.
Once more the detective looked taken aback, like he hadn’t expected any of this to be that easy.
“Mr. Masterson, I need you to understand that this could be dangerous. If your father is truly running a drug ring, he could have very powerful people protecting him.”
Orion only laughed. “You act like I’m scared of that asshole. He’s beaten me down too many times in life to count. If I have even a sliver of an opportunity to stick it to him, you can count me in.”
After that, Victor and I really did have to leave. While the previous discussion had been relatively vague, I understood why there needed to be more privacy for what the detective needed to ask Orion to do. The fewer people who knew, the fewer people who were potentially in danger.
My stomach soured because while I was happy he was finally standing up to his dad, I didn’t want to put his life at risk. It had taken me this long to find someone worth my time. I didn’t want to find him, only to lose him so damn quickly.
It was like Victor knew I didn’t feel good about any of it. He didn’t care that Orion often got growly when he put his hands on me these days, but he wrapped me in a tight hug that I returned. It felt fucking good to have someone to cling to when I didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on.
“I know I already asked this today, but are you sure you’re okay with this?”