Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 110550 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 553(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110550 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 553(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
“Very good.”
Hollywell gave me an unneeded tour of the building, but I didn’t mind it. A few things had changed in the days since I’d been gone, and even though he didn’t introduce me to anyone, it was good that he didn’t think he could hide me away in an office under a mountain of silk. Talia and Damien would inevitably find out that Mackenzie Blaine has returned to Caddell House. When that happened there would be fireworks.
Hollywell held open the door, ushering me onto the floor. Designers busied at their stations—some scribbling on a pad and others sticking pins through fabric on a mannequin. At my old station, there sat Lyla Dawson, fussing with the beads on a dress while barking orders at one of the women in her crew.
Naomi wasn’t ignoring her on purpose. She was quite caught up... staring at me.
I smiled at her—the same smile growing wider as Lyla looked up at her, and then at me.
“Hello, everyone,” I called, voice carrying through the silencing room. “I’m back.”
Chapter Six
Genny
“You can’t be serious, FGH.”
Bugsy reclined on my couch, one leg slung over the back and the other on the floor. Candace spun beer caps off their bottles, using that leg as a target.
“Unfortunately, I’m deadly serious.” I stretched out on my desk like I was sinking into my favorite beanbag chair, enveloped in the rightness of being where I was supposed to be: in my office, in my bar, in my borough. “My taste for the finer things almost led to my downfall.” I knocked back a swig of beer and belched. “Trackers sewn into my clothes. That’s how they found me in my safe houses twice. And it’s how... they knew the right warehouse to bomb.”
The three of us fell silent at the mention of Frenchie and our girls. The Cardinals lived a dangerous life and none of us expected to walk away from it unscathed, but in the years since I founded the gang, they were the only girls I lost.
For a good chunk of the Harlow population, joining a gang is the only way to secure protection. They certainly couldn’t rely on the cops to protect them. Harlownites lived for decades under the fist of the Kings and the corrupt cops who lived in their pockets. The trust there was blown up and scattered into ashes. As a result, young women who wanted to ensure they could walk through the streets of their neighborhoods at night without a soul daring to touch them, joined behind power, and there was no power greater than a Merchants’.
I welcomed them all when I claimed this borough as mine. Every woman who couldn’t stand falling in with the drugged-out junkies peddling coke on the corner. Those who refused to line up on the sidewalk, waiting for cars while their pimp watched from the shadows. All of them who needed the protection, but didn’t need the future as a hollowed-out, soulless husk that awaited them if they fell in with traffickers, murderers, and kidnappers.
We were not a club of angels. My girls have broken almost every law on the books. Still, they knew if they joined with me, I’d never ask them to hurt innocent people, reduce themselves to my obedient bitches, or let a single person hurt them without getting it back tenfold.
The women of Harlow, in and out of the Cardinals, were under my protection.
And the fucking clothes I shoved on every day undid that in a few months. The whole time, the biggest threat to my girls has been me.
“The Brotherhood will pay for this,” I hissed. “I can promise you that.”
“Let us help, boss,” Candace said. “You don’t have to move out of Harlow. You said Vito is one of them. We’ll pick up all his friends and wring them out until their secrets splatter the floor with their blood.”
I barked a laugh. I was always particularly fond of Candace. She was barely higher than five feet, rocked size-zero outfits, and boasted the sweetest little cherub face with the button nose and full lips. None of that gelled with the violent, bloody declarations that spilled from those lips on a daily basis.
“That’s the problem right there,” I returned. “If Vito’s friends are waiting around to be picked up, it’s because they don’t know anything. They’d have to be even stupider than I give them credit for to dangle out in the open while Vito is on the run.”
Bugsy snatched a cap out of the air and threw it back at Candace. “Is it just me, Eve, or do you think they are that stupid?”
I mouth-shrugged. “Fair enough. Pick them up.”
My phone buzzed across the desk. I half expected it to be one of my many brothers or the woman they were all so obviously in love with, texting to know where I was. I don’t know why my mother insisted on giving me so many siblings.