I pulled up, parking behind Sawyer's massive SUV, walking up to the three men standing there: Sawyer, his giant wall of muscle named Tig, and Sawyer's other guy, a tall, thin, but strong guy around my age with buzz-cut blond hair, sharp features, and brown eyes. Judging by the wide-legged stance with his hands clasped behind his back, he screamed ex-military.
"Brock found the car," Sawyer said as soon as I joined them. "Over about half a block in a lot. She'd kicked out the taillight. He found her gym bag in there, but her phone was gone so she lost it, got it taken from her, or, hopefully, still has it on her."
"Anything else?"
Tig and Brock shared a look that immediately made me straighten. Whatever 'else' there was, it wasn't good.
Luckily for me, Sawyer wasn't the kind of man to sugarcoat anything. He turned to me and gave it to me straight, no chaser, no garnish. "Brock found her gym lock. She must have used it to hit D," he said and I felt my stomach start to churn. So much for hoping she wouldn't piss him off. D had a short trigger. You looked at him wrong, he was zero-to-a hundred in a second flat. You came at him with a fucking padlock? Fuck.
"Say it," I demanded through gritted teeth.
"Blood and a fair amount of it on the pavement. He said it looks like some of it was from falling and skidding and that some looks spit out."
"Drag marks?"
"No. When he took her, he either carried her or she decided to just go with him to save herself any more abuse."
Shoot's ridiculously expensive car rolled up behind mine and he was out of it before any of us could draw breath. "Break will be here in two, three if he decides to stop at any of the red lights. So... two," he said, nodding at the guys.
"Warehouse on Kennedy. She went at D with a padlock. She paid for it," I supplied, barely able to get that short retelling of events out with the fire churning in my stomach.
"And you'll make him pay for whatever he did to her," Shoot said with a look that said he understood. When someone fucked with Amelia, he'd made the entire fucking side of the man's head explode with a bullet. You didn't fuck with what was ours. At least not without expecting to pay for it with your life.
Breaker's SUV pulled up and he rambled up toward us, all long-legs and coiled muscles, ready for a fight. If it weren't for my rage making me hum like a God-damn psychopath, he would be the most formidable one in our group. Shooter was a bit on the thin side, wiry, great with a gun, but with a gallows type of humor in every situation, making you underestimate his skills. Sawyer and Brock had a calmness about them that spoke of inhuman self-control. Tig was huge, but he had a bit of a gut, making anyone who didn't know him think he would get winded in a fight. But Breaker, Breaker spent a lot of fucking time keeping himself in shape, never knowing who he would be paid to lay the hurt on and what shape they might be in. He was big, bulky, and lethal with a mix of control and rage that made anyone shrink away from him when he was on a job.
He was on a job.
And this was personal to him because it was personal to me.
And that made him all the more dangerous.
Shoot filled him in and we compared notes.
"I don't know how fucking long you plan on watching this place when who-knows what is happening to her in there," I growled as we stood beside a building to the left of the warehouse, watching the door.
We'd been there fifteen or twenty minutes already just fucking waiting and watching.
All we'd seen was D walk out for a smoke then go back in.
I took a bit of comfort in the nasty fucking bruise he had on his cheek.
If she hit him, at least she managed to do some damage.
"Quiet," Sawyer barked, pointing toward the building.
When I looked again, there was a new car parked out front. It was late model and expensive. The driver and passenger doors opened and two people stepped out. One, I recognized as one of Enzo's former higher-ups, the guy who he would bring with him to go pick up the shipments of H when it came in.
And the other person...
"No fucking way," I hissed.
Seventeen
Elsie
The door opened and closed four times when I was in the office, the sound reverberating around all the metal walls. I flinched every time, my shoulders going up toward my ears, my heart starting to hammer in my chest. The first two times, nothing happened. Someone must have just went outside and then came back in. The second and third times, there was an automatic hush to all babble outside the office and I figured that meant that the boss was there.
A few minutes later, the door opened and I froze. But it was only Trick. "Come on," he said, sounding suddenly tired.
Pretty sure I had no choice, I slowly got up and moved toward him, stepping into the doorway and following where he was taking me which seemed to be toward the group of three people standing in a circle. One was D. Another was some guy I didn't recognize. The third was...
"No," I hissed, stopping mid stride and drawing the full attention from the trio.
I wasn't absolutely positive at first.
But then the second that they all fully turned toward me, oh yeah, I was sure.
Freaking positive actually.
"Elana?" I asked, my voice a strange, raspy sound.
Her hair was different. It had been long and blond when I had last seen her and now it was cut in a long bob, brushing her shoulders, and dyed a deep, rich brown which only made the gray eyes she'd inherited from our father pop all the more. She had on plain black slacks, spiky heels, and a tight gray sweater that stretched over her, admittedly much larger than mine, boobs. I hated to admit it because, Lord knew, if she was in the Third Street gang's warehouse on Kennedy then she was not in a good place mentally, but she looked good. She was standing straighter, her eyes looked clear, her hair cut and color really suited her. She looked like the best version of herself.
"Elsie?" she gasped and I figured she had no idea I was there. She turned back toward D so fast that she actually blurred to my eyes. "What the fuck happened to her?" she demanded with so much viciousness that D actually went back a step. Hell, I even felt myself straightening and she wasn't talking to, or looking at, me.
It was right then though, watching D flinch away in fear, that I understood.
Elsie wasn't there because she was looking for some heroin.
She wasn't even there because she was being extorted.
She hadn't fallen in love with one of the men in Third Street.
No.
Elana was their boss.
Elana had somehow replaced Enzo.
She was in charge.
She was in charge of a street gang.
My sister.
"Elana, what are you doing here?" I whispered as she took another step toward D, shoving her hand into his chest hard.
"That's my goddamn sister you brainless piece of shit!" she yelled and all eyes in the warehouse moved between us, I guess comparing us. Normally, before she changed her hair, there was an unmistakable resemblance. But now she had dark hair and gray eyes and I had blond hair and blue eyes. If you weren't looking for a similarity in our bone structure, it was easy to miss.
"I didn't know, E. I didn't fucking know!" D yelled back, but it was in actual fear, not anger. And I was left wondering what the hell she could have possibly done to make brainless, violent brutes actually fear her. A woman. A woman who grew up privileged who didn't raise a hand to someone because it would ruin her very expensive manicure. "She was snooping around the warehouse last week. I chased her, but I lost her and then I came across her tonight. I figured you'd want to know why she was snooping around."
"Oh, gee, I imagine she was looking for me. And in what universe does bringing her here for questioning involve fucking up her face and knocking her on the ground?"
"She hit me in the face with a gym lock!" he defended.
"Wow. Wonder why? Maybe because you kidnapped her? Maybe that's why she wo
uld hit you. Idiot. I'll deal with you later. Go help unload the truck," she demanded, waving a dismissive hand at him. It was the first thing she had done since she walked in that seemed like my sister. She was always doing the dismissive hand wave whenever she was done talking to someone she deemed too idiotic to entertain or when she trailed off while telling a story.
She turned back toward me, the anger draining from her face as she gave me what I would consider an apologetic smile. "Else..." she said in the old, familiar way she used to. But it was coming from the lips of a stranger.
True, I was glad she was alive.
But she was alive and she wasn't in a too-drugged-out state to pick up a phone and tell me she was alive. She was walking, talking, and ordering around gang members while still in town, while easily able to reach out and let me know she was okay.
So I was glad she was alive, I was also almost unreasonably pissed.
"Do you have any idea how worried I've been about you? You just up and disappear with no note, no call, no nothing, leaving your bird to starve in his cage and having me hire private investigators and get chased down the road by thugs!" I shrieked, only stopping when I realized one of said thugs was still standing beside me.
"Okay," Elana said, holding out her arms wide in a welcoming gesture. "Come on, let's go talk in the office..." she suggested.
But then the door opened, the sound making me cringe and my head snap over to see who was coming in. I relaxed slightly when I saw it was just D and two other guys carrying big cardboard boxes. They piled them on a table behind Elana as she slowly moved toward me, head tilted, like something about me was confusing her.
My attention went back to D as he reached inside the box and pulled out a plastic wrapped pile of smaller white and green boxes. I felt my stomach muscles clench. SinuEase was written clearly across the front. And I knew that name. I knew that name. And I knew that it was produced by Matthewson Pharmaceuticals. Matthewson. As in Rhett and Roman Matthewson. As in my best friend and his father.
My entire body went rigid, fire flooding my veins.
"You bitch!" I screamed as she got close enough, slamming my cut open wrists into her shoulders.
She stumbled back a step as I hissed in pain. Elana seemed more intrigued than angry. "Did you just call me a bitch?" she asked, almost sounding amused.
Alright, so we were sisters. And, well, we'd thrown the b-word around a few times when we got into fights over the years, but mainly in our adolescence when we were too immature to remember to filter ourselves.
"You stole from Roman!"
"Calm down, Else. It's not like I'm hurting his bottom line. They're insured to the hilt. They won't even miss this stuff."
"They're missing it. They're missing it and suffering a PR nightmare because of it. That stuff is heavily regulated because people use it to make..." I trailed off, my head snapping to our sides where all the people were pretending to not listen while they worked.
And what they were working on?
Yeah, they were cooking meth.
Meth.
That was why cold medicine was regulated and watched so closely, because it was the main ingredient in making meth.
"Are you fucking serious?" I asked, my voice low, as I looked back at my sister.
"Else..." she tried in her big-sister soothing voice.
"Don't Else me. You're working with a street gang and stealing from a mutual friend so you can cook meth? You have a trust fund! You don't need to..."
"Office," she barked at Trick who reached for my arm, holding it tight, and pulling me back toward the office. I struggled at first, but there was no use. By the time he pushed me inside and Elana followed in, I had stopped trying to get away. Trick left, closing the door behind him and Elana leaned against it, crossing her arms.
She watched me for a long minute. "I needed to get out."
"Out?" I repeated.
"Yeah, out. I was so over all of it."
"All of what, El?"
"Everything. Dad, the money, the cocky rich guys, the job I hated, the house that came with strings, all of it. That entire life."
"You could have just... walked away at any time, Elana. No one was forcing you to live in that house or drive that car or work that job or date those pricks. Those were choices you made."
"Choices," she laughed, shaking her head. "God, are you still that naive?"
"I'm not naive," I bristled. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I saw a bit of our father in her. It was in the condescension in her tone, in the way she made little, expertly placed jabs, knowing just where to poke to cause the most damage. In spending her life rebelling against him, she couldn't see that she had inherited some of his worst traits.
"Do you really think you have any independence? Why aren't you living in that small, unpretentious townhouse you really wanted? Why are you working in energy? Why do you still go to that ridiculous family dinner every Sunday?"
She had good points, she really did.
"I don't go to dinner anymore. Dad and I had a blowup. About you actually."
"About me?" she asked, and I could hear the neediness in her voice and wondered if she heard it herself. She wanted, she needed to know what our father thought or said about her.
"Yeah because I was mad that he wasn't looking for you and he called it a non-issue," I said and my voice was a little bitter as I dropped the last part, knowing it would hurt her.
Her lips tipped up but there was a deadness in her eyes at my words. "What did he have to say about the trust?"
"That you probably just emptied it and took off with some guy."
"He always had such a high opinion of me."
"Yeah and way to lower yourself to his expectations."
"Ouch, sis," she said, shaking her head. "You've never been so nasty before."
"Well I never had a drug dealing selfish brat for a sister before either. What is this? You want to stick it to Dad by what? Creating a criminal empire?"
"Could you imagine the look on his face when he found out?" she asked, smiling at the idea. "He would blow a gasket."
"Seriously? This is all because you want to piss off your father?"
"This is all because I'd never get free of him if I didn't make my own life! All the dinner parties and the charity events and the way he kept trying to make me get together with his business partners and..."
"Oh, please," I groaned, rolling my eyes. "He had no plans on trying to force you to marry anyone."
"Seriously?" she asked, laughing a little cruelly. "You really think he sees us as anything other than chess pieces he can manipulate across a board until he gets a checkmate. Grow up, Elsie."
"He never tried to set me up with anyone."
"He never had to!"
"What are you talking about?"
"Come on, there's naive and then there's plain dumb," she snapped and before I could open my mouth to object, she went on. "He didn't need to set you up with anyone because you already did that for yourself."
"I never seriously dated anyone he approved of."
"No, you didn't," she said with a smile. "But you were awfully cozy with Roman Matthewson weren't you?"
"Dad never wanted me hanging around with Rome!"
To that, I got another eye roll. "Reverse psychology, much? Dad's a pro at that stuff, Else. He knew that the more he objected, the more you would rebel and get close to him. He's been waiting about a decade for Rome to get his head out of his ass and make a move already."
I felt my stomach twist at that as well as the likely truth behind it.
"Too late now," I heard myself mumble.
"Too late?" she prompted and for a second, all she was was my sister.
"I'm seeing someone. Roman knows and he wasn't happy. He's giving up on me. At least in that way," I admitted, taking a deep breath, the pain of hurting the person I cared about probably the most causing a sympathetic agony inside me.
&nbs
p; "Stock broker? Lawyer?" she was teasing me, but there was a hint of malice there too. I had dated mostly professionals in the past. It was what I knew. It was what was familiar. I never thought there was anything wrong or close-minded or ridiculous about it.
"Tattoo artist," I corrected with a chin lift.
"Look at you, still doing your little rebellions," she mocked.
"Oh for God's sake. Not everything is about Dad. I met a man. We hit it off. Dad was never a factor."
"He's always a factor. Every time I went on vacation, he had something to say. Every time I went to a charity event with a man he didn't like, he made his feelings known. Every time I went to buy a new car, he had to bitch about the one I chose..."
And that was about all I could take of her woe-is-me-ing.
"Oh, poor little rich girl," I hissed. "I feel so bad for you that you got some flack when you bought a car worth six figures and you got some lip about it. And it must really suck to travel the world and go to swanky charity balls and date handsome, successful men. I feel so bad for you."
"Don't you dare go..."
"No. Don't you dare go trying to convince me that this little stunt of yours is anything other than the actions of a privileged, entitled, spoiled little girl. You wanted to stick it to Dad and be free... you'd have left every cent of that trust, let the bank have your house, the dealer have your car, and you'd take off to some new city and bust your ass building a new career and a new life free of him. That is how you stick it to him. This," I said, waving out one of my damaged hands, the blood crusty and filled with dirt, "this is just a little girl begging for Daddy's attention."
"I never wanted his..."
"You always wanted his attention. You wanted his attention and approval and it ate at you that you never got it. So what did you do? You looked for that attention and approval in the revolving door of men in and out of your life."
"Shut up!" she yelled, advancing toward me. It should have been scary and maybe, in a small part of my brain, it was. But while she might have been some criminal and drug dealer and God-knew what else, she was also my sister. It was hard to be truly terrified of someone you once watched throw up two bushels-worth of cotton candy when she got off a roller coaster and sing into her hairbrush while belting out Beyonce. There was just no way I was going to shrink away from the person I had shared my entire childhood and adolescence with.
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