I made sure to reset all the security alarms, walked up the metal stairs to the loft, and took a minute to shove the frat dude’s money into the safe I’d built into the wall. The safe was nicer than all the furniture in the entire loft. It was also full of ill-gotten gains that I was waiting on Nassir to filter through his clubs and turn into usable money.
I didn’t love being in business with Nassir Gates. I didn’t trust him, hated the way he manipulated and used people to his own ends, but he was the only person who could take the money I was earning from running numbers and make it clean. Nassir ran every club, every bed of sin and debauchery, that existed in the Point. He set up illegal fights, had a legion of girls he ran out the back door of his businesses, and as much as I didn’t like him, I needed him. I wouldn’t mess with girls—with selling sex—but someone had to, and Nassir had no morals and zero qualms about getting his hands dirty. We had an uneasy alliance going, and so far, it was working. Dealing with Nassir was like walking through a minefield every day—dangerous, deadly, and filled with hidden threats I would never see coming. I was always waiting for him to turn on me.
I went to the freezer, took out a bottle of Oban I had stashed in there, poured a healthy amount into the bottom of a rocks glass, and threw myself onto the couch that doubled as my bed. Sure, I could move, find a place that was cleaner, farther out of the heart of the city, but I liked it here. I felt safe here. No one was coming into the garage, breaching the compound without me knowing about it, and after the beating, the way my body had broken when Novak and his goons had found me, I needed that sense of security to sleep at night.
This was so far from the life I was born into, so different from where most people who knew my parents and knew my past ever thought I would be. I hadn’t been born with a silver spoon shoved in my face, but an entire goddamn platinum service set choking me from the get-go. My parents were rich. Disgustingly, filthy, unholy rich. They lived a life a luxury, untouched by need and struggle, uncaring of what was happening to those not so well-to-do.
Until I was sixteen, I was numb. Entitled, spoiled rotten, stuffed full of self-importance and overindulgence. I didn’t feel anything. I existed in a bubble where anything I wanted, anything I needed, was handed directly to me and I never questioned the greater world, things beyond my mommy and daddy’s fat wallet.
One night I had been on a date. The girl I chose not to remember, but everything else was crystal clear. My dad had given me a Roush Mustang for my birthday. I was showing off, thought I was the shit, untouchable and unbeatable, until I took a wrong turn and somehow ended up lost on a road that trailed between the Hill and the Point. I was at a stoplight, trying to find directions on my phone, when the window on the driver’s side shattered and hard hands had reached in to pull me out of the car. I remembered the girl screaming, remembered smelling my own blood as I scrambled against flying fists, but more than anything, I remembered feeling alive.
I was nervous, I was scared, but I wasn’t going to give up the Mustang without a fight. It was the most “real” my life had ever been. All the numbness melted away. I got a lucky punch, saw the big, dark guy go down at a weird angle with all of his weight falling onto his hands. Bone crunched in an ugly way, and I collapsed in the middle of the street across from a kid who was no older than me, but looked like he had lived a hundred more lifetimes.
Bax was holding his wrist, blood oozing across his face and out of his nose, and he was just staring at me. The girl got out of the car and screamed she was calling the police and all I could do was marvel at how fast my heart was beating, thrill at the adrenaline that was coursing through my body.
“I never thought a pretty boy like you could throw a punch like that. Even if it was just lucky.”
It was the best compliment I had ever received. I flicked blood and hair out of my eyes and asked him if he needed a ride to the hospital. It was strange, he had just tried to carjack me, had beat the crap out of me, but it was a defining moment in my life. Bax, his life, his world, woke me up and I couldn’t go back to my fluffy dreamland.
I wasn’t as immersed in the underground as he was. I didn’t have the street cred, the attitude to pull it off. But I was smart and I was an asset, and before too long, we were a team. I didn’t steal cars, didn’t break the law, but when he needed help, I had his back, and I liked to think that long before he fell in love with my sister, I was his voice of reason. It was exciting; living hard like that opened up a whole new world to me. There were girls, women really, who showed me things no teenage boy should know. There were drugs, there was excitement and challenge around every corner, and it was a blast until things got too deep.
Bax was taking more risks, Novak was using him more and more. We were getting lost in the mire and poison that was the lifeblood of the Point, and I wanted out, wanted to save us both before we went under. Only Novak was far smarter than I ever gave him credit for and far more twisted. He wanted Bax and had no qualms about using me to get to him.
My father, like most rich men, couldn’t keep his junk in his very expensively tailored pants. Dovie was my half sister, born to a junkie who got paid off after agreeing to abort her. No one should trust a junkie; the next fix matters more than anything else. Dovie was lost in the system until she wasn’t.
Novak used her, used my dad’s need to keep his secrets, to play me. My dad paid Novak to have her killed, only Novak double-crossed him, recorded the entire conversation, and pulled me into his dark and twisted game. There was no way I was going to let anything happen to my blood, my sister, even if I didn’t know her, so I blackmailed my dad, pulled Dovie out of the system, and agreed to Novak’s twisted scheme that had been designed to tie Bax to him forever.