Page 122 of The Trust We Broke
His jaw clenches slightly. Barely perceptible.
Wraith opens the laptop and forcibly grabs De Bose’s finger to press it on the touch ID scanner to access it.
“Was it worth it?” I ask. “Lying to your daughter. Making her sign those papers. Making sure I rotted in a jail cell for something I didn’t do so you could erase me from the narrative of your family to keep the De Bose name squeaky clean. And while you were busy pretending I was beneath your fuckingfamily, you were doing business with a different motorcycle club.”
“You…No…No.” De Bose’s stammered words catch me off guard. They’re uncertain. Unsure. Panicked. But I push on.
I nod. “Oh, yes. Lucy knows. Not just about what you did to me, but she knows about the Rebels. About the money. About your dealings. She might not have the whole picture, yet, but the one thing you never accepted about your daughter? She’s fucking smart. She’s digging. And I’ll help her find out the truth about you and your connections to them.”
His eyes follow me. Even if his mouth can’t say the words, he fucking knows he’s cooked.
“Got any more secrets?” I ask him, soft and low. “Anything else you want to confess? Because you’re stuck, now. The Rebels are trying to make Lucy do what you no longer can. They’ve already tried to take her two times. Either the Rebels are going to come for you, or the law will. And neither will be pretty. Because if the law gets you, you’ll be locked up, like this, in a prison with men you condemned. Or maybe the Rebels will come for you to keep you quiet. If both of them miss, I’ll make sure one of my brothers doesn’t. My father is inside for life, and he’ll happily take your life in a heartbeat.”
Wraith puts the laptop in front of De Bose. “You better open some shit that’s worth our while.”
De Bose blinks. A single tear escapes the corner of his eye.
And a sliver of guilt pricks at me because, for a second, I think about the relationship I have with my father, and the one Lucy deserved to have with hers. But this man will never step up for her.
De Bose finally taps on the keyboard and pulls up his law firm website and toggles to a page that seems to be a series of head shots. When he finds what he’s looking for, he points.
It’s a photograph of Adam Shipley, the guy who was just here.
Then, he clicks a file folder on his laptop and opens a second photograph.
“Wes Granger?” I ask.
De Bose draws a circle, then points to Granger’s photo.
“What’s this got to do with Granger?” Wraith asks.
De Bose toggles back to the image of Adam before drawing the lines of what quickly look like a family tree. He points to Adam, then draws an ‘x’ where a son would go.
“Fuck. Adam is Wes Granger’s son.”
34
LUCY
“Your father’s a fool,” Wren says as they peer at their laptop screen.
I tear a piece off the cinnamon bun that Quinn put in the bag of baked goods for us. “You’re telling me something I know. But what are you specifically referring to?”
Wren doesn’t look up. “His need for a paper trail, whether in his notebooks or digital, has left him exposed. He’s connected this phone to cloud storage. Which, now that I have phone access, I can share the files and see them on my laptop. But, they’re chronologically incomplete. There are some years that are missing.”
Catfish stuffs the rest of a croissant into his mouth. “The average person uses the cloud all the time, though. Don’t businesses use it and shit?”
Little bits of pastry escape his mouth, and Wren rolls their eyes. “Please don’t talk with food in your mouth; it’s gross. Yes, people do. But if I was making a repository of potentially life-ruining data, I wouldn’t just stick it in the cloud for anyone to hack. But it’s more than that. The request to transfer the money from the club account was initiated from your father’s laptop.”
“Someone else must have done it, though. I haven’t spent any time with my father in years, but he was always useless with tech. It’s such a stretch to think he has the skills to do that.”
Wren nods. “I agree. Given the way your father organizes his files, I don’t think he is the one who did it. Any person who labels files as ‘final’ and ‘final v2’ and ‘most final’ is no technical wizard. My guess is someone else has access to his machine, somehow.”
Regardless of who did it, it’s the final nail in his coffin, and I know it. You can’t be involved in stealing from men like Grudge and hope they forgive you.
“Why green?” Catfish asks suddenly.
“Why green what?” I ask.
