Page 99 of Banshee
I was free. I was a widow. My husband was dead. Only, I didn’t want to be free. Not from Banshee. I wanted him to claim me. I wanted to be his old lady.
“They took him, didn’t they?” I asked.
“Yes,” King confirmed. “Skinner will call to make a trade.”
“I have money!” I sat up straight in my chair. I had leverage Skinner didn’t know I had. He was motivated by money, and I had more than enough to secure Banshee’s freedom.
“What?” King asked, sitting back in his chair.
“I have money. Skinner’s money. With Pepper dead, I don’t need it anymore. Skinner can have it all if he gives back Banshee.”
“How much?” Cash asked.
“Almost a million dollars.”
“Why do you have Skinner’s money and where the fuck did it come from?” King growled. Diesel whined beside me, and I put a hand on his head. King had a right to be angry. I’d been keeping secrets.
“Um.”
“I asked you if you knew why they moved the fucking club, and you said no. You said it had nothing to do with you.”
“It doesn’t, I promise. Skinner doesn’t know about the money. Pepper was skimming. He cut his drugs with sugar and sold four times what he was supposed to. It was the reason he kept me around.”
“Explain,” King snapped.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I went to college for accounting. Numbers are my thing. Pepper knew that. He wasdyslexic, so not only could he not read well, but numbers got jumbled up in his head. He’d had some trouble keeping the weights and amounts straight, so I helped him one night.”
I turned back and glanced at my father, then turned back around to King. “It was how I avoided being beaten that night. I’d heard him mumbling the numbers, and I knew they were wrong, so I corrected him. That wasn’t the first time he’d punched me. I knew he would have done worse, but I convinced him to let me help.”
“How did that turn into almost a million dollars?” Jack asked.
“Once he realized I could keep the money and the weights, and all the numbers straight, he started cutting into the stash Skinner gave him to sell. He would quadruple each shipment, sell it, and give Skinner a quarter of the profit. The rest he had me put into an account.”
“Aspen, tell them about the last day,” Haizley suggested.
I looked at Haizley and took a deep breath as she nodded. “I was planning to leave. I had everything worked out; my bags were packed and stuffed under the bed. I’d taken the money and moved it to an offshore account. One Pepper couldn’t access.”
“He didn’t notice?” Colt asked.
I shook my head. “He rarely looked at the account. I guess he trusted me. When he needed something big, he would have me move the money into an account that Skinner knew about. But that last day was our anniversary. I’d planned to disappear, but he came home early. He wanted to buy me something for all the help I’d been to him. Only, he looked into the account, and it was basically empty.”
“You stole the money,” King voiced.
“I stole the money.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Aspen
“That’s why he left you alive,” Cash surmised. “If he killed you, he’d never find the money.”
“Yes,” I answered.
I sat quietly as King studied me. I knew he was reevaluating whether he could trust me. I’d come to the clubhouse as a victim. A woman afraid of her own shadow. A woman who said she was someone different from who she really was, knowing my connection to the biker world, to my father’s club, would require him to contact my father.
I’d lied to him for months.
“I’m sorry, King. I couldn’t tell you who I was. I couldn’t risk you calling my father. Or worse, calling my husband.”
