I finally pulled up in front of his house twelve minutes after his call, jumped out, and sprinted toward his open door, hearing his loud voice.
“I don’t give a shit! Wake her the fuck up!”
“I tried,” Ford told Hut where they stood in the middle of the living room. “She told me to go fuck myself and rolled over.”
I shut the door behind me, the bang of it alerting them of my presence.
“What took you so fuckin' long?” Hut fumed at me, and I swear to god, it took all I had not to lay the little shit on his ass.
“I was visiting family.” I shrugged, not offering anything else up. It was true, and the closer to the truth I stayed, the less I’d fuck up my story.
“Go wake the bitch up,” he told me, raising his arms beside him and letting them slap back down against his thighs. “She was here, she knows something.”
“The bitch?” I asked, having an inkling of who he was talking about, but I wanted to make sure this disrespectful piece of trash was talking about his stepsister and not someone else.
“Yeah. Fuckin' Lola.” He stormed off into the kitchen, leaving only me and Ford, staring after him.
“Good luck,” Ford said to me, a ghost of a smile on his face. “She nearly clocked me in the jaw when I tried to wake her up.”
It was the first time I’d seen any sort of expression on Ford’s face, but not the first time I wondered if he was truly loyal to Hut. He seemed both hesitant and exasperated with him as he let out a breath and walked into the kitchen.
I darted my attention to the stairs and swallowed. Hut had made it as clear as day that we weren’t meant to have any kind of friendship with Lola, and yet, here he was, telling me to go up to her room and wake her up. It made it all the more obvious that the only thing that mattered was the drugs he sold.
The stairs creaked under my weight, and I stared down the hallway, noting the two doors on one side and three on the other. I opened up the first one, being greeted with a bathroom that was circa 1980s, and closed it. The next door revealed a bedroom that looked like it hadn’t been slept in for months. I switched to the opposite side and opened up the door to what I was sure was Hut’s room. The one next to that was a small closet, which only left the final door at the end.
I halted outside the door, listening for any sounds, but it was silent, so I rapped my knuckles on the wood, softly at first and then harder when there was no response.
“Leave me alone!” Lola shouted, her voice croaky and sleep-induced.
“Lola?” I ventured, cracking open her door. “It’s Brody.”
“Ugh.” Her arm lifted from under her blanket as she stretched her body out. “What do you want?” Her hazel eyes cracked open as she stared at me upside down.
I was enthralled with the way her hair fanned out around her. There was a raw beauty to her that I’d never witnessed before. She didn’t cake her face with makeup to cover what I was sure she thought were imperfections. Instead, she wore them like they were what made her, and she’d be right.
It wasn’t the perfectness I found attractive, it was the opposite. Each flaw should be cherished because they made her who she was.
“Hut needs to talk to you.”
She rolled her eyes and sat up, the strap of the tank top she was wearing slipping off her shoulder. Her slightly tan skin called to me, and I wondered if it would be soft to the touch, whether running my rough palm over it would have her sighing and begging me to touch her elsewhere.
Fuck. I couldn’t think like that.
She was a kid.
I was undercover.
I needed to get my thoughts under control and lock them away in a box never to be opened.
“Why?” She lifted off the bed and pulled a pair of jeans on. I diverted my attention, not needing to see any more of her than I already had.
“He said his stash has been stolen—”
“Motherfucker!” She leaped up and barged past me, her footsteps pounding down the hallway and stairs. “Hut!”
I followed after her, gritting my teeth, and telling myself not to look at her ass, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to. I was going to hell, that I was sure of.
“Lola?” Hut called back, but now we were in the living room, and she headed right for the framed piece of shit artwork on the wall. A safe appeared in its place, but the door was jimmied open, revealing a whole lot of nothing.