Her Beast

“What do we know?” Beast asked.

“Frank has been spending some time with the local cops.”

Gritting his teeth, Beast nodded. Frank was one of the guys who helped with the lending side of the business. He knew a great deal, but what Frank also had was a problem with gambling.

Just in Beast’s casinos he owned nearly a million bucks, and that was just for the past few months.

If Frank thought for a second he was going to get away with trying to rat to the cops, he was in for a shock, not that it should be all that much of a shock, not really.

“I’ve already paid William off. Gave him ten grand,” Caleb said.

William was their informant within the police force, who helped to turn a blind eye to certain activities. He’d been working for the Carsons for a long time now, and they’d helped get him a nice big retirement settlement, just like he deserved for helping friends.

“What’s the deal with Hope Miller?” Caleb asked.

“Just helping a girl out.”

“You and I both know that’s not true.”

“We’re the ones that gave her father the gun.”

“So? We’ve given plenty of crooks guns. They’ve killed a lot of people with them as well. What is it about this girl?”

He glanced over at his brother and didn’t say a word. Caleb held his hands up.

“Look, I’ve never seen you look at a woman the way you look at her, and I say ‘woman’ and not ‘high school girl’ because I know you. I’ve seen her. She’s older than her years. I also know you’ve used Sarah a lot more in the past few days since you’ve met Hope. She gets to you, doesn’t she?”

Beast wasn’t about to tell his baby brother exactly how an eighteen-year-old girl had him feeling. Just watching her look through that sex book had given him a fucking hard-on that took all of his self-control not to do anything about, which pissed him off.

When he looked into Hope’s eyes, he saw her yearning for a man, especially the way she looked at that fucking book. She’d been staring at it as if she wished she was the woman getting a nice, big, fat cock.

“She’s nice,” Caleb said. “I’ve seen her, and she’s not like your usual women. She’s innocent.”

“How about you stop thinking about the woman living in our house and start focusing more on your work?” He didn’t want to hear any more bullshit about her innocence. Even though it wasn’t bullshit, he was very much aware of how naïve she was to her current situation.

She now lived in a house full of monsters with the only exception being Dwayne, but his time would come as he grew older. His own father had already destroyed what little innocence he had by the time he was fifteen.

Maybe he should be running Dwayne, but he couldn’t do it.

His nephew wouldn’t know the kind of life he lived growing up, and he’d taken him away from a life of violence, so he didn’t have to.

Time would come for his training. Until then, Beast, Caleb, and his men were capable of running the family business.

Pulling up outside of the warehouse, Beast climbed out, buttoning his jacket and pushing Hope and Dwayne to the back of his mind. He didn’t need to be thinking about the innocence in his life right now.

Stepping into the warehouse, he saw his men holding back as Frank stayed tied to a chair. This wasn’t new for Beast. Everyone who tried to rat on him ended up on this chair.

“Mr. Carson, I swear I don’t know anything. My wife!”

“Your wife is in the hospital with her jaw wired shut, Frank.” He grabbed a chair, spun it around, and straddled it. “Here’s the thing, she got there long before we got you, so I have to wonder if she was the one warning you about crossing me.”

He glanced down at the man’s knuckles, which were tied to the arms of the chair. The telltale signs of a fight were evident there with the split skin.

“You beat your wife, Frank?”

He’d met Delia a few times. A beautiful woman, a little … slow at times, but he imagined that was down to one too many punches in the head.

His own mother had gotten slow over the years, and then of course when body parts weren’t given the right amount of care, it made walking difficult. He’d been sitting at the table while his father mocked his mother’s inability to walk. He wouldn’t even let her have crutches to help, and he’d seen the tears.

Of course, his father had beaten her one time too many, and when Beast came home and saw the bloody mess on the carpet, he’d decided to give his father a taste of his own medicine.

He’d not stopped, and spent an entire week humiliating his father, making him go through the agony he’d put his mother through before he finally got bored and simply killed him.