Page 39 of Carter's #Undoing

Fourteen

CARTER

“Why the fuck didn’t you guys tell me you would be here?” I asked after we all witnessed Serenity dash away from the door and up the stairs. I’d hoped it was to put on some clothes. Preferably an extra-large sweater and jogging pants since I didn’t really want my friends seeing the after-sex look she had going on.

I knew Serenity was sexy like that all the time and I hadn’t even had sex with her recently. But prancing around in some short shorts without a bra was for my eyes and my eyes only.

“We didn’t tell you because we wanted to make sure you were still on your shit,” Scotch said.

I looked over the deck at the fallen drone. “Yeah, well, if you want to waste a few hundred dollars for me to shoot down drones it’s your money.”

“I told this muthafucka it was a waste,” Jackie-D stated.

“Scotch wanted to hit you up with three drones,” Cap added. “Then we reminded his ass we still had to trek through the damn tunnel just to get here.”

“Did y’all really have to disconnect the camera in the tunnel though?”

Hennessy laughed. He was always fucking with some shit. “Relax nigga, you should be back online now.” He glanced in the direction Serenity had just been. “You brought her through that tunnel without her waking up?”

I nodded. “Yeah, and I’m glad I did. She would have lost her shit otherwise.”

“You damn right,” Hennessy agreed. “Scotch said it was something else, but he’d never been all the way through.”

Scotch had a cabin at the bottom of the crater, and although I still didn’t know why they were here, I trusted these men with my life. However, they wouldn’t be here—especially four of them—if some shit hadn’t gone seriously wrong.

“Y’all wanna come in for some beers?” I asked.

They each shared a look before Cap kicked it off by walking inside. Everybody followed suit. I opened a few beers and passed them around my kitchen table. “Okay, fellas, what is it?”

Scotch glanced up the stairs. “Are you sure you don’t want to take this conversation to your basement?”

I shook my head. “Serenity already knows so much.” And what I didn’t tell her, she probably read in my letters. “When she’s ready to come back down, I’ll introduce you all, but for now, just get to it.”

Scotch smiled upon realizing I’d taken his advice. Yet, his smile dropped when he said, “We lost eyes on Rodney’s crew a couple days ago, and I think he knows you’re alive and that you’ve double-crossed him. Our contact told us that his goons realized you were the hitman they hired to kill her, so now, he’s out for blood.”

“When is he not?” I said.

“Right now, we think they assume you’re down south or on the East Coast,” Jackie-D added. “That’s why we’re here, in case what we heard is false and they find your location.”

Hennessy took a swig of his beer before explaining, “We’ll be staying at Scotch’s cabin for the next few days for added security. But we think if they don’t show up then—”

“We sniff them out in a different setting,” I stated.

He nodded. “Exactly.”

Crossing my arms over my chest, I leaned against my counter, my mind on everything at once.

“We’ve done this shit a million times,” Scotch said. “Bruh, we just treat it like we did in Mexico last month.”

“That was different,” I stated. “I want to keep this mess as far away from her as possible.”

Cap nodded. “We know. Ain’t none of us newbies to this. But we get that you got extra skin in the game this time, so we got you. Pretty sure Ms. Serenity is standing in the stairwell wondering when we can stop all this business talk so she can meet us.”

I looked to the stairs, my eyes quickly roaming up and down Serenity who was wearing jeans and a black tee.Not baggy lounge wear, but it will do.She even pulled her hair up in a bun, exposing the beautiful slope of her neck.A neck I should have put some damn hickies on.I shook off the teenage thought because it was unnecessary. My friends knew how important she was to me.

“Hello,” she said with a slight wave to the room. She looked nervous, and honestly, I couldn’t blame her. She was learning all types of shit about me, and now, she was meeting four other guys who didn’t look like the kind of guys I used to hang out with when she knew me.

Back then, my friends could have been poster models for Ralph Lauren Polo. But these guys? They’d probably be mistaken for ex-convicts and didn’t have a model bone in their body.

---