Page 98 of The Trust We Broke
I shake my head. “Wife works.”
He puts his hand around my throat, squeezing it hard. “Good.”
28
GRUDGE
“Something has shifted. We aren’t secure anymore. With the heat of the FBI raid, and the attack on me and Lucy, there’s something going down,” I say, looking at my senior members, who I’ve gathered in church once I’ve gotten Lucy settled with her laptop in my room.
Catfish chews on a toothpick. “It’s disconcerting.”
Jackal looks at Catfish. “‘Disconcerting?’ You swallow a dictionary?”
“Fucking an English teacher,” he says.
Wraith chuckles. “Your sister knows about that?”
“Hell no.” Catfish’s sister, Willa, is the principal of the school. “She’d skin me alive, if she knew. How was I supposed to know the brunette I met in the bar, with tits that defied gravity, was her latest hire?”
Atom laughs. “Maybe when you found out, you should have stopped fucking her.”
Catfish shakes his head. “Can’t…she’s got very flexible legs.”
Smoke slaps him on the back. “Better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all, or whatever that quote is.”
“Fuck me,” I mutter. “Can we get back to what’s going on?”
Catfish leans forward with a harmless smile on his face. “Why? Are you eager to get back to whoyou’refucking.”
The casual way he says it rubs me up the wrong way. “Watch how you talk about Lucy.”
“I’m thinking Lucy and Grudgey-boy might have reached an agreement,” Smoke says.
“About fucking time.” Atom throws his hands up like he’s singing hallelujah.
“It’s not…” I can’t think of what to say next. Saying my relationship with Lucy is not what they think, is disingenuous.
Wraith reaches for the gavel. “I’ll say it if our president won’t. All in favor of Lucy De Bose becoming Grudge’s old lady?”
“Stop,” I shout. “Not yet. There’s more to this than Lucy’s father framing me. He’s in deep with the Rebels.” I made a promise to Lucy. We’d do this together. I step outside the door to church and grab my phone to call her.
“Hey, Daddy,” she says. And I try to bite back a smile, in spite of what’s going on around me.
“Can you come to my office?” I ask.
“Oh, am I in trouble?” There’s a flirtatious tone to her words.
The smile arrives. “No. But I need your help, Nancy Drew.”
“On my way.”
It takes her a minute to get to church. She opens the door and walks in like she owns the joint. Don’t know how she does it, being five foot nothing, but she has a superpower that works magic on everyone around her.
I kick out the chair on my right with my boot. “Sit, Bug.”
Tentatively, she looks around, then takes a seat. “What’s going on?”
I take her hand. “We’re about to take a vote on whether you’re gonna become my old lady.”
