Page 22 of Overstaying His Welcome

The Gilded Ones were horrible. The things they've done would haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life.

While I was thankful to have taken out most of them, not eradicating them all wasn't an option. We might not be able to get to the lower-level criminals, but we could take out the big ones.

Usually when you cut the head off the snake, the rest of the minions would fall apart. They'd join local street gangs or try to reorganize themselves and pick one another off.

I had seen it time and time again growing up on the streets.

After my mother murdered my father, she and I wound up on the run for a bit. And then she had the audacity to marry another asshole who decided beating her was fun.

When she died, I went into the foster system. It was only after that when I strategically planned out my stepfather's death. It was untraceable, of course, because I wasn't going to end up in prison for that bastard.

Sure, I was proud that I'd taken him out, but I wasn't stupid. And of course, the foster system being what it was, I didn't last long there either. I ran away about a year and a half in, not ableto take it anymore, despite the family I was with being an okay bunch.

My grief at losing my mother was too strong, and my need to protect others far greater than I could handle.

I didn't want anyone else to suffer the way my mother had, so I came up with the idea of a security company.

I wanted to be the person who would take a stand to protect the little guy.

I wanted to be someone my mother could have called if she’d had the chance.

Someone who wouldn't care how much someone could pay and would go even further than the law allowed.

I've done that. NightShade was the company to provide this for people. We had helped numerous clients, some rich and some not.

In the process, all my men had found their significant others. They had gone through hell and back to get there, but each were happy. I saw it every day.

Anytime a challenge arose, we worked as a team, as a family. We took care of our own.

And whether Chance was official or not, he was one of our own.

I had hidden him away for years, hoarding him like a treasure. Soon it was going to come down to whether or not I could tell the others about him or keep things as they were until it fizzled out.

I knew his campaign would change everything the moment he told me. After delaying it for as long as possible, the time was finally here.

I often wondered what our lives would be like if we were different people. If we could have been together all these years instead of hiding away.

We would have been married. Maybe have children. Hell, at this rate, we would have had grandchildren.

But that wasn't what the universe decided for us. Instead, it put him in the hands of a politician who wanted a clone of himself. And it gave me a rough start so that I could try and help others overcome theirs.

“I need to head out,” I told him after sitting in silence for a few moments.

There was nothing else I could say to him, nothing he could say to me. And the mood before was lost, the sexual tension destroyed after realizing how much I'd missed.

Not only had Mordecai bugged my office, watching my men and staying a step ahead of us, but now Diestro had found out the one secret I thought no one else could.

Not even Memphis was privy to what was going on between Chance and me.

I knew he suspected that someone had my attention here at the city offices. He just never took the time to dig that info up.

“Be careful,” he told me.

My lips kicked up in a grin. “I don't have anything to worry about. It's you who needs to be careful. He will try to use you to hurt me.”

My voice was softer as I said it. I didn't want him to feel threatened by me, but I wanted him to understand how important it was to stay diligent.

“You still have security in place, right?”

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