Page 9 of Oh, Hell No

Fuck. Like I would be able to actually take a knife to her. Why wouldn’t she talk?!

“Has Wilder gotten a lock on her phone? Can he see if it’s being tracked yet?”

Wilder Jones was the mastermind behind all the interwebs within the family. He worked directly with the boss in Florida. For him to be put on this only said just how invested Blaise Hughes was with getting the money and Perry Gerard. And that I had been the one to trust him. I’d missed it all.

My hand tightened on the phone, and I heard it crack under the pressure. I forced myself to ease up on my hold. I didn’t have time to go get another burner phone, and telling Linc I had broken this one wouldn’t go over well. I was already in the line of fire here. I had to get the girl to talk.

“Wilder has her phone on his supercomputer. He said there have been no dings that someone is tracking it. The moment it happens though, he will call you.”

“Okay,” I replied.

“Get some sleep. You need to be ready when and if you get thatcall.”

“I will be,” I told him.

The call ended, and I tossed the phone onto the royal-blue velvet tufted sofa.

Although the furniture in here looked like expensive antiques, they were all in excellent condition to be over a hundred years old. I had yet to find a normal, comfortable place to sit in the six different sitting rooms that looked like they were for lounging. What had the wealthy old Southerners needed with all these rooms that appeared to be for sitting in and nothing else? What a fucking waste. They didn’t have pool tables, televisions, or even a poker table. Just the fancy sofas and elaborate tables, fireplaces, and crystal lamps. There were also a lot of books. Maybe I could read.

It was the twenty-first century. Why didn’t the Louisiana branch of the family have a fucking game room or television in this place? If they used it for the prison below, then you’d think they’d have more things to entertain themselves with in the rest of the place.

At least there was plenty of whiskey. I appreciated that it was Carver’s Bootleg Whiskey. Even the Louisiana family knew that Mississippi had the best whiskey in the South.

The burner rang again, and I jerked it up, hoping it was Wilder with news that Perry was tracking Winslet’s phone.

“Yeah?” I said, anxious for this to end.

“You good?” Bane’s voice came over the line, and I wanted to groan in frustration. Not that I didn’t want to talk to my friend, but right now, he wasn’t who I needed to be calling me.

“No,” I snarled, grabbing a bottle of whiskey and going over to sit on the fancy-ass couch. “Why are you awake? It’s three in the morning, and you’ve got a wife to be curled up in bed with.” Which seemed to be his favorite pastime other than fucking her and playing with Hawkins, his five-month-old son, who wastechnically his nephew. But seeing as his brother was dead and he was married to the baby mama, Hawkins was his son.

“Hawks is teething. Sleeping like shit. I just got him back to sleep and wanted to call you to see how things were before I went back to bed.”

“I thought that Halo had magic tits that put him back to sleep,” I drawled, then took a long swig.

“Yeah, well, he was nursing too much. Doc had us put him on some cereal shit, and it fills him up more. She’s weaning him from night feedings, and I’m ready for her tits to be mine again. Not that I want Hawks to suffer, but when he’s six months, I’m thinking the little man can move to a bottle.”

I chuckled. It was fucking hilarious, hearing Bane Cash talk about nursing, bottles, and baby shit in general. Never would I have imagined he’d become this man.

“Why is that funny?” he asked, sounding more like the bastard I knew.

“I needed the laugh. Let me have it.”

“Is she a raging bitch?”

My mood soured again. I wished she were a raging bitch. This would all be easier.

“No,” I replied, then took another drink.

“Ah, so that’s the problem. Attractive and nice. It’s hard to hurt them when they’re like that.”

He would know. But then he’d been on a path of vengeance when he went after Halo. Holding a knife to her throat hadn’t bothered him at all. Although that memory tortured him now.

The last time someone had brought it up—which was Than Carver, his dead brother’s best friend—Bane had held him against a wall by the throat while I ate my breakfast and watched. Lucky for Than, his older brother walked into the room, and Ransom had calmed Bane down, threatening to go tell Halo if he didn’t let him go so Than could breathe. We allkept our mouths shut about the things he’d done to Halo before he fell into fucking infatuation with her. Now, he was married to her sexy ass.

“She’s got to be lying,” I said, setting down the bottle to pick my cigar back up from the tray I’d placed it in. “But she’s real…low maintenance. I don’t know that the living arrangements down there are enough to make her crack. She wasn’t wailing about the fact that her stomach was rumbling so loud that it echoed or that she would have to piss and shit in a bucket. I’m mentally preparing myself to physically hurt a female who can babble on about food from a Sam’s Club café like it’s fine dining.”

There was silence.

---