“Time stamp,” Elliot spoke up. “Top right-hand corner.” Dulca’s eyes drifted towards it and grunted in approval before sliding the phone back across the table.
“Can I ask,” I said through gritted teeth, “why is it that you don’t want her taking your place?”
“She would’ve never taken my place. She’s a woman,” he scoffed like this should’ve been common sense. Little did he know, I wasn’t a bigot. “Besides that, she was headstrong and couldn’t take orders. I would’ve had someone over her head, but she would’ve never listened. And I wasn’t about to let her have access to all the family money.”
“You’re right. She would’ve never listened. But that’s only because she knows better than you,” I said, standing and holding my hand out to him. “Nice doing business with you.” He shook my hand without standing. Zero fucking respect for anyone but himself. “If I see or hear of a single one of your guys on our side of things without my permission, I will kill them.”
He laughed and pulled his hand from mine. “Yeah, yeah,” he said with another wave of his hand. I fucking hated it when people did that. “I told you we have a deal, so we have a deal, mutt. Just be sure to keep up your side of it. And tell my darling daughter hello for me, will you?”
Seb snorted, and I gave him a sharp look before Elliot led us out of the restaurant.
“That could’ve gone much worse,” Elliot said as we climbed back into the car.
“It was over quickly. Too quickly. He didn’t even put up a fight or question us,” Seb worried. I agreed with him. That whole meeting went too smoothly.
“Well, for now, we assume he’s telling the truth, but be on guard in case he has something up his sleeve. Maybe he does just want her out of their life that badly.”
“Badly enough to blindly trust a rival gang to keep her out of it?”
“I’m sure there’s more to the story,” Elliot said as he put his phone to his ear. “There’s no way he was willing to kill off his only kid just because she was a girl. I’m sure that contributed to the decision knowing how he is, but it has to go deeper than that.”
“I agree,” I said as I scrolled through my own phone, checking emails and making sure I hadn’t missed anything important in the last half hour.
“Hey,” Elliot said into his phone. “Everything is fine, calm down.” He rolled his eyes. “We’re done. We’ll be home in a bit.” He had called Scar? I was shocked, and I knew it was written all over my face just the way it was written all over Seb’s. Elliot listened to Scarlet for a minute and then, “Night,” and he hung up.
“Did you just call Scarlet?” Sebastian asked.
“Don’t say a fucking word,” he said to both of us with that deadly stare I had seen so many people shrink back from. But I just laughed.
“You were worried about her, weren’t you?” I asked. “You knew she was worried about how the deal was going to go down tonight, and you didn’t want her sitting there freaking out.”
“Fuck off.”
“Told you,” Seb said as he slid down in his seat to get more comfortable. “She’s our girl. All of ours.”
“Once again,” Elliot said, his temper clearly rising. His entire face had gone red. “Fuck. Off.”
Seb and I just laughed and went back to scrolling on our own phones, letting Elliot stew in whatever realization he had come to in that meeting.
“He called her a bitch,” I said after we had been on the road in silence for some time.
“And a slut,” Sebastian pointed out.
I sighed and scrubbed my hands over my face.
“I don’t think I have ever been so eager to spill blood than I was in that moment.” Seb and Elliot both grunted their agreements.
“I would love to get my hands on him,” Sebastian said as he played with the butterfly knife he took with him everywhere. He had that crazed look in his eyes he always got when he was thinking about torturing people. “Maybe one day me and my little pet can slice him up together.” He flipped the knife and caught it in the palm of his hand. “She might like to see him bleed.”
“She might like to make him bleed,” Elliot said, and I snickered a laugh.
How the hell we had managed to stumble across her, a woman that enjoyed bloodshed as much as ourselves, I had no idea. But I wasn’t complaining.