Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
“Why would she be stalking your place?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
Webber turned down the street that led to the gated subdivision I lived in and came to a stop at the iron gates. He inputted the code that all of my brothers knew and waited for the gates to swing open.
I looked back at Dru to see her staring in awe at the houses that we were passing.
“Why is she stalking you?” I pushed.
Dru’s eyes slid to mine before she said, “I found out that her fiancé was cheating on her with our aunt.”
Webber choked, and I tried really hard to look surprised as I said, “I’m sorry, what?”
“That’s why I was in DC,” she admitted. “Eugene is a lobbyist.” She settled a look on me. “You know that, though, don’t you? Because you were having dinner with him.”
“Yeah, but definitely not because I wanted to. He wouldn’t stop hounding me, and a few senators wanted me to have a meal with him so Eugene could share his ideas. I listened to them, and now I get to tell him and them that I’m not interested.”
Dru flashed me a grin. “That’s good.”
“What’s also going to be even better is that I’m quitting,” he announced. “I’m taking that plane crash as my sign that I’m not going back. The thought of getting on a plane anytime soon sounds abhorrent.”
Webber’s head whipped around and he stared at me in shock. “You’re leaving?”
“Leaving,” I confirmed.
His shoulders slumped.
Damn, I’d been a complete ass. I should’ve seen what I was doing to my family.
“How does that work?” Dru yawned. “You just go, ‘I’m done?’”
“I can step down anytime I want. The hard part of replacing a representative is on the state’s end, not mine,” I explained.
“Fuckin’ finally,” Webber said as he pulled into my driveway.
My fully packed driveway.
“Is everyone here?” I laughed.
I swear I heard Dru gulp.
I looked back at her and said, “As if you didn’t have enough excitement, my family decided to come over.”
“Your friends?”
I corrected. “My family.”
She smiled apologetically. “Are you sure you don’t want to drop me off at home?”
Over my dead body. “No. Stay.”
She swallowed and nodded.
She was terrified.
We got that a lot.
The Truth Tellers weren’t for the faint of heart.
We did illegal things, and the government was having a hell of a time proving it.
Everyone who was anyone knew what we stood for, though.
We ran on the mantra of an eye for an eye. You fuck with us, we fuck with you. There was no hesitation on our end, and that gave a lot of people pause.
Including, apparently, Dru.
But she’d warm up to us.
Everyone started out a little weary at first.
“Come on,” I said as I got out and opened the back door. “They won’t bite.”
She muttered something under her breath that sounded a lot like “I’m not so sure.”
I took her hand and led her up the front walk to my home, ignoring the small crack in the brick next to the door from that one time Tavi had dropped his bike and it’d chipped the brick there.
I also ignored the scuff on the hardwood floor from where he’d thought it would be funny to slam a hammer into the wood paneling when he noticed a spider.
There were a lot of those memories at my home, and if I let it, it’d overwhelm me.
Instead, I focused on the woman and how I wanted to pull her protectively into my side.
Nine
Ambitchous: the desire to become a better bitch.
—Dru’s secret thoughts
DRU
I didn’t want to go to work.
I was tired, my body hurt, and I was fairly sure I was about to start my period.
I felt like I’d been hit by a train…or fell out of the sky.
And I knew without a doubt that I’d get asked a hundred times today what happened to my face—you couldn’t hide the tiny little cuts all over me from tiny slivers of wood in that tornado that’d cut my face. Plus, they’d want to know how I got it, and it’d eventually get out that I’d been in that plane crash.
Yet, I walked down the length of Finnian’s driveway, barely able to keep my eyes open.
I’d called an Uber an hour ago, telling him to pick me up at the estate’s front entrance.
I’d have asked him for the code, but the man slept behind a locked door, and slept like a freakin’ log.
I’d knocked on his door for a solid minute before deciding that I wasn’t going to get him to open the door.
If he was even there.
I mean, at this point, he might not have been.
I didn’t actually see the man go to bed last night.
After all his friends left—Finnian had introduced them all to me—he’d led me to a room up the stairs and at the end of the hall straight across from his room.