“I didn’t know if I should tell you, but I asked Diogo, and he seemed to think you’d wanna know.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Though, I bet he would have preferred to do it himself.”
His lips twitched. “Yeah, but he doesn’t have the answers to any questions you might ask. Nothin’s concrete, and I don’t got much else in the way of info, but I wanted to let you know ’cause he’s your brother. Even if he’s doin’ some fucked up shit, we don’t know why. What we do know, what you should focus on, is that he might be alive.”
I nodded mutely, struck dumb by the development.
Dane could be alive?
Alive and staying away by choice?
Alive and a criminal?
Alive and alone.
I had to tell Nova.
He’d know what to make of it all.
“Nova’s busy with the club right now,” Bat said in that way he had of reading a person’s mind. “But you can tell him when he comes to pick up tonight. You wanna skip work, though? Loulou and H.R. are on standby, you need them.”
Warmth flooded through my cold veins at the reminder that I had so many people in my life who were willing and happy to have my back.
I rolled up to my toes to press a kiss to Bat’s rough stubbled cheek. “Thanks, Bat.”
A flush stained his high cheekbones. “Anything for you, you know that.”
“You just want free babysitting again,” I teased, and my heart was even sort of in it.
He guffawed. “Actually, finally bit the bullet and hired a fuckin’ nanny. Thinkin’ my Old Lady could use a break from the kids.”
I sucked in a huge breath and let it out slowly, feeling unbalanced for what felt like the hundredth time in a handful of days.
I’d gotten complacent.
I should have remembered, as Ignacio had taught me so long ago, that things never stayed good long for the Davalos family.
And even though I had another family now, two, the Booths and The Fallen, that didn’t mean I was truly one of them.
At least, not enough to outrun my blood family’s bad luck.
LILA
Irina was restless.
She was usually a reckless, spontaneous woman who followed her whims even when they were ill-advised, so there was a normal, above-average restless cast to her energy every day.
But today was different.
She’d blown onto set in a tempest of negativity, casting the entire shoot of Baby Makers 2 with the pall of her terrible mood. It was getting late, and I hadn’t eaten lunch because Irina had sent me on an errand to get pink fur lined handcuffs when our set had broken. Nova would be there soon, waiting outside for me, and I wouldn’t be able to text him that I was running behind because Irina didn’t allow us to have phones on set. What should have been a three hours shoot was taking five hours because of her continuously outrageous demands. One of the girls, a sweet young woman by the name of Talia, actually broke down crying while she was giving head just because Irina berated her on the depth of her blow job until the poor girl gagged and sobbed.
It was ugly.
Despicable.
It made my stomach cramp, and the bottle of antacids I kept in my purse for this purpose was now empty because there’d been so many occasions to take them.
Lysander had growled and bristled behind me where he nearly always stood sentry, looking out for me, but also the girls.
He didn’t take the time to explain it to me, and I hadn’t asked, because frankly, I had enough on my own plate as it was, but somehow, Sander had ended up in the inner circle of the Ventura family.
Irina trusted her bruto, and thus, he was the only male in charge of her ‘girls’, the fifteen or so (depending on the week, and there was some, if not as much as I’d thought, turnover) Irina kept in her stable.
Stable.
Yes, apparently, that was the term for the set-up, a group of women prostituted by a pimp, or in this case, a vicious, woman-hating wife of a cartel boss.
It brought me little to no comfort, though, it was something, that Lysander seemed to genuinely care about the women. He was always putting out some emotional fire, trying to coax them away from further bad life choices like the drug addiction that ran rampant through the operation.
He had a soft spot for Honey.
I wasn’t sure if it was the connection to the club they shared or the fact that they’d both been relatively abandoned by it, but there was trust there, thick and tangible as a chain linked between their waists.
So when Honey moved in to do the next take and Irina accused her of being lacklustre, the room filled with static from behind me.
Honey herself didn’t seem to care about Irina’s censure. Her pretty eyes were dead as fallow earth as she paused, taking off her clothes to join the couple already fornicating on the bed.