Page 39 of Stay Toxic

“He’s in a purple boat,” Nastya said out of the blue. “I noticed because it was so bright and sparkly.”

“Jesus,” I grumbled. “You would notice that.”

“How did you know it’s his boat? Did you see him?” Artur asked.

“I saw his girl in the bathroom. She was talking about ‘Cazzy’ and how ‘she had to get up at the ass crack of dawn’ when she was peeing and talking on the phone,” she answered as she pitifully threw the bait out into the water again. “I followed her out, and she got into a pretty sparkly purple boat.”

I wouldn’t normally bring my sister into Bratva business.

It was best to leave women and children out of it for the betterment of the world.

Once you brought them in, it was hard to keep them out.

Plus, my sisters were nosy as hell and sometimes couldn’t stop themselves from having gut reactions, whether those gut reactions would get them hurt or not.

Since Casmere Falliday was, according to Lev, a small-time player in the disappearance of my men—he was the one that allowed his warehouse to be rented for events—I didn’t see any harm in allowing Nastya to help me by being the female we needed for the tournament.

Past this day, she wouldn’t be helping anymore.

I didn’t trust my sisters’ safety to anyone—not after Maven was taken from us—and I wouldn’t put them in danger of any kind.

The first sign of this going south and I would definitely be pulling out of the tournament and finding out how to talk to Falliday about his warehouse rentals a different way. This way might not raise as many suspicions, but I didn’t care if I had to fucking kill him as long as I got my answers. Easy or hard. It didn’t matter as long as the end results were the same.

“I think hers is bigger than yours.”

I looked at my sister to see that she was staring at the boat next to us.

I glanced over myself and found Brecken posing with her fish. One of her brothers was taking a photo of her practically kissing it.

“We’ll see,” Artur said. “Catch another one and we’ll take these in since we didn’t get a second boat to do that.”

I shrugged and kept fishing and fuck if my gaze didn’t keep straying to the woman beside me.

Hours later, I’d shed my jacket, and we were all standing next to the platform waiting for our fish to be weighed in.

My gaze was on the coffee truck where I’d spotted Falliday.

I moved toward it, my gaze downcast.

When I arrived it was to hear Falliday and another man talking business.

“…kind of rentals do you do?”

“Cars. Boats. Motorhomes.” He shrugged. “I just started renting out my first warehouse, too.”

“How do you get into the business of renting out a warehouse?” another man asked just before taking a sip of coffee.

“It was something that sort of fell into my lap,” he answered, his eyes gleaming. “I started with just renting out my cars to traveling people. Some big wig that comes to Houston isn’t gonna want to get a shit car from a car rental agency. They want something exclusive.” He rambled on and on, talking about how he’d gone from one car to ten cars. From ten cars to seventeen boats and cars.

“Did you buy the warehouse with the profits off of the other rentals?” the coffee drinker asked.

I raised my hand up at the lady behind the truck’s window and said, “One hot chocolate, please.”

I would’ve done a coffee, but I was all coffee’d out. I wanted a steak with some tea.

But I knew that Nastya would love the hot chocolate, and I’d do anything to see my sister’s smile.

“Well, that literally just fell into my lap. Someone tipped me off that the taxes weren’t being paid on it, and I swooped in and paid them off. Worked with the bank, and by the end of that year, I was able to evict them from their place. From there, I rented out to the guy that tipped me off about the back taxes, of all people.”

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