Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 139088 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139088 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Hearing those words hurt my heart, way down deep in a way I wasn’t sure that hurt would ever heal.
I couldn’t imagine anyone saying that…but a father to his son?
With nothing else in my arsenal to fight this, I pushed into him as deeply as I could get, moaning, “Oh, Knox.”
“Yeah. That was fucked up, but it was one hundred percent my pops. So it also wasn’t surprising.”
“Still.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Still.”
God.
Knox kept at it.
“Before and after my brothers started to make their way into the family business, they were bullies. Mean to the bone. Kids at school were terrified of them. They brought that shit home, turned it on me, Dad egged it on. I think he thought they’d mock and beat the normal out of me. The boy who wanted to play football and hang with his friends and play video games. The only time I made my dad proud was when Crew turned that on Gypsy, and I gave him a black eye, a bloody nose and a loose tooth.”
The only thing in this convo I wasn’t surprised about was that he went to the mat for his sister.
“Is your sister, I hate to use this word because it’s not really you, you’re extraordinary, but since you used it…is she normal too?”
“She was. Then I went away and they got her.”
Crap.
“Oh, Knox,” I repeated, this time it was nearly a whimper.
Lame, but what else could I say?
“Not sure it was them who got her, though. Dad had another guy in his crew. Rocco. Before I left, I’d met him. I’d come to know him. Did not like him. When I was there, he didn’t even glance at Gypsy. After I left, I realized why he didn’t was not because of Dad, but because of me.”
“So…they’re a thing?”
“One thing I learned about Gypsy, or maybe women in general, was, you don’t talk trash about the men in their lives. Maybe, if I was close, she’d listen to me. But I left. She wasn’t happy I left either because I left her to them. Even so, she knew, if I’d stayed, they would keep at me to fold me into their crap. I had to leave, one way or the other. And she was sixteen when I left. I couldn’t take her with me.”
“No,” I agreed.
“I called. I emailed. But my finger was off the pulse.”
Wait up.
Was he…?
“Are you blaming yourself she got hooked up with this guy?”
“I was the only one who looked after her.”
“What about your mom?”
“Long gone.”
One thing I knew from the tone of those two words, the topic of his mother had to wait for a different moonlit conversation. One I wasn’t looking forward to, but still, on another level I was because I wanted to know everything about him.
The good. The bad. And what I was learning was the very ugly.
So I grasped the only straw available to me.
“I know she was young, Knox, but she’s also her own person and responsible for her own decisions,” I said. “She saw you get out. She knew there were paths. She didn’t have to hook up with this Rocco guy.”
“They started dating the day after her eighteenth birthday. He was thirty-two at the time.”
If she were a few years older, not a problem. It wasn’t an age gap I’d want, but it wasn’t skeevy.
A girl of eighteen?
Yuck.
Not good.
“Bit of a predator,” I said carefully.
“At least he waited until she was legal,” he replied in a way it was clear he was reaching long to find some silver lining in that sitch.
“Do you still talk to her?”
“She wants me to come home.”
That got me up on an elbow. “Say what?”
He pulled me back into his arms.
“She wants me to come home,” he repeated. “She says Rocco has taken over the crew. Dad is semi-retired, but from what Gypsy says, it sounds mostly like Rocco humors him. She says, now, they’re a big deal. They’re heavy hitters. He even has legit shit running alongside the other shit. She says Crew and Poe are dufuses. Good with their fists, they can follow orders, and they might be a year and a half apart, but they still share a brain cell. She thinks with me and Rocco partnering up, we could all make it so we can buy an island when we’re forty and retire.”
“She’s trying to recruit you?”
“Yep.”
“You, former army, current badass investigator?”
There was a slender thread of humor in his tone, but at least there was humor, when he repeated, “Yep.”
“And you’re disabusing her of this notion.”
There was more humor when he replied, “Oh yeah, I’m disabusing her of it.”
“Don’t make fun of my vocabulary. It isn’t like you talk like a caveman.”
“I’m not making fun of you, honey. You having so many words and using them is a massive turn on.”