Page 88 of Beyond Rosy Irish Twilight

“You’re trying to knock me out,” he snapped.

“Jesus, it’s just fucking Tylenol. I know you can’t take anything stronger than that and work.”

Chase glared at me and I shrugged. “I had to take something too.”

“I really fucking hate you,” he grumbled, taking the pills from Lock’s hand.

Lock turned to Patrick. “What about you? Do I need to give you something?”

“I’m right as rain.”

“Yeah? Let me see your shoulder.”

Patrick stiffened, narrowing his eyes at Lock.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He sat back down. “Let’s get this shit sorted before Chase passes out.”

“You said it was Tylenol,” Chase snapped.

“I also said you were smart. I guess I lied.”

I would have found that funny, but I didn’t want him to pull the same shit with me. “We have a problem with Ambrose.”

“You can say that again,” Edu snorted. “That guy has some serious control issues. I counted twenty guards around his property.”

“It’s worse than that. He’s drugging his wife. Jade told me that her mother had a mysterious illness. It turns out, she’s sick, but Ambrose is sedating her. He said she could recover if he allowed it.”

Now that we were all sitting down together and discussing it, the anger came roaring back. And it was clear, all the guys felt the same fucking way as me.

“Why would he do that?” Brock asked.

“Because she was going to snitch on him too. He didn’t exactly come out and say it.Jade is more like her mother than I realized. I think that’s what he said. He doesn’t want to kill her because of Jade. And he didn’t want to kill Jade after what she did because of her mother.”

“So, this is his weird way of having a conscience?” Edu asked. “Fuck, that’s worse than death. I mean, is she even aware of what’s going on? Is she trapped inside her body just waiting for someone to rescue her?”

“I don’t know,” I shook my head. “But Jade thinks her mother is seriously ill. The doctors are all telling her they don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

“So, is he blackmailing the doctors or are they on his payroll?” Lock asked.

“We need to find out. In the meantime, we need to listen to the recordings from his office. I’m not completely confident that he’s not just making shit up to test me. But if he’s serious, we need to talk about how to proceed.”

“Well, we have to get the mother out,” Lock said. “There’s no question about that. He’s basically killing her.”

I glanced around the room at the other guys. Scottie seemed to be on the same page as Lock, but Chase and Patrick looked more wary. As for Edu and Brock, I couldn’t tell where they stood on the issue.

When I didn’t immediately say anything, Lock narrowed his eyes at me. “You want to fucking leave her there?”

“Do we have a choice? If we go in and rescue her, that blows this whole thing out of the water.”

He stood suddenly, his nostrils flaring as he stared me down. “Are you fucking serious? You’re going to put this operation ahead of a woman’s life?”

“It’s not just the operation. Do you realize how difficult it would be to get her out of the house? Even if I wanted to say she could stay here, Ambrose is using her illness to hold over Jade. If I told her, what good would it do? She’d go storming in there to what end?”

“To fucking save her mother’s life!” Lock shouted.

“But we have no way of getting her out,” Chase cut in. “You heard Edu…twenty guards.”

“And even if we went in with everyone in our organization, Ambrose would retaliate. We don’t have the same connections or numbers as him. He would annihilate us.”

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