Page 25 of The Last Time You Break Me

Once we clear the alley, I hit the dash and dialed Brodie, our clean-up guy.

“Sup,” he answered on the first ring and I growled. “Who did you kill and make wind chimes out of their ribs from this time?”

“Me and the princess had a tail. Some low-rent shifty guy. Said he was hired to follow us from an ad on Craigslist. I’ll fill y’all in with the rest later. For now, get your ass over to dive town and dispose of the body and his car.”

“Princess okay?” he asked with concern, which gave me the urge to rip out his vocal cords.

“Princess is here asshole and she has a name and it sure as fuck isn’t princess,” Lara hissed as she rolled her eyes and played with the gun in her hands.

The gun that made her come.

The woman is fucking deadly.

“Sorry, I mean yourEmpress Of Psychotic. Are you okay? Uninjured?Sane?”

That made her chuckle and I tightened my grip on the wheel while I flexed my jaw.

“Darling, you know I have never been sane. Get to it, me and the big man have work to do,” she instructed before she leaned over and hit the end call button on the dash.

Then she leaned back, pulled out a smoke, shoved her feet up on the dash, and took a deep toke.

The thing about Lara was that when she acted like this, you never got the sense of a stroppy, immature brat looking for attention, despite the fact I called her a brat a lot. But when she kicked back, stripped down, and had a joint of weed, cigarette, or a bottle of whisky in her hand, she appeared unapproachable.

Deadly. Dangerous and if you were in her close proximity, your radar warned you to stay away.

She brooded but was always relaxed and tried to please nobody but herself.

“Want a pull?” she asked after she smoked half the damn cigarette.

“Give me the damn smoke,” I barked while I took it from her fingers and inhaled a deep lungful myself. I held it, allowing the toxins to burn in protest against my lungs before I blew it out in a cloud of smoke and sighed. Some of the tension from the half a week faded away.

“So what’s the deal with this location? Think it’s our people cutting it? Or just one, sneaking something into the drugs?” she asked as I thought about it.

“Has to be bigger than one person. Especially one of our own. To pull off the guns and now the drugs? It’s a taunt if I’ve ever seen one. It’s a flag to wage war and right now, we are on the blind side of it.”

“We’ll figure it out. I know we will, I’m pretty good at pulling information.”

My skin ran cold and my blood boiled. “Don’t you ever, put yourself in danger like you did the other night.Ever, Lara.”

“No promises, big guy,” she offered flippantly before she turned to stare out the window.

“I mean it!” I snapped as I glared at her.

“No promises,Daddy,” she teased and I growled, face turned back to the road ahead as my anger only grew.

Chapter Ten

Lara

I Come First - Halestorm

We drove down the road about a mile away from the warehouse that was hidden underground. It was tunneled out and down there seemed like a different world. There were rooms upon rooms of workers storing and packaging our product. We had tropical rooms dug with slopes and special climate changeable thermostats for the plants of the cocaine.

Everything was ran down there with the intent for nothing but the safest cut drugs on the market.

As my dad said, it was not good business to kill off the fools that filled your pockets.

It was routine to turn all lights off and to creep into the main area of the location in the event that somebody located the premises.

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