Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
It was even harder to find out that you weren’t whole and would in fact spend the rest of your life catering to your disease.
I knew it was a bad mindset.
But with my parents literally dictating—and eventually Shasha, too—my personal life, and my health dictating my physical body, my whole entire soul had been tired.
My soul was still tired, and I’d known about my type 1 diagnosis for going on ten years now.
So no, my response to my health wasn’t what it should be.
This was something I could live with. I knew it.
I just didn’t fucking want to.
Was that so fucking bad?
I was allowed to have a bad attitude, dammit!
“Yes, Shasha,” I lied.
I’d keep up with it…today.
Maybe I’d address it if I started to feel bad. Maybe I’d have to go to the damn hospital.
Who knew?
My only saving grace was that none of my family was on my medical records. They didn’t know that I had a fake ID and I used it religiously. Or that I didn’t have any of them listed as my medical emergency contacts so that if I did find myself in the hospital, they wouldn’t know.
It was a pretty sucky thing to do but…yeah. I was living life how I wanted to live it.
I checked my numbers and rolled my eyes. Now it was high.
Of course it was.
Because my body was a dick bag.
I shot myself up with some insulin—I refused to have a freakin’ machine connected to me that gave me the doses because I was a self-harmer—and gathered my things.
“Sure you won’t take a guard?” Brecken whispered.
“Very,” I said.
“Call us if you need anything.” She patted my hand.
I blew her a kiss, then came to a stop at the front door when I realized I didn’t have a vehicle anymore.
I grimaced and said, “Do you care if I use your old car?”
She smiled. “I knew that I forced him to let me keep it for a reason.”
She hurried to the kitchen and disappeared around a corner.
She came back moments later with a set of keys.
I had to laugh because it’d been a hot minute since I’d had to use an actual key.
“Do you think that I could take the doors off?” I teased.
“Absolutely.” Her eyes sparkled. “But you have to watch the weather.”
“It’s also freezing cold,” my brother’s dark voice grumbled from behind me.
I flashed Brecken a grin and hauled ass to her Jeep.
She’d loved it, but upon marrying my brother, Brecken had gotten an upgrade in the form of an armored Yukon that looked like a tank.
Hurrying to the Jeep, I got inside and used the key to start it.
I had to giggle as I pulled out of the driveway and headed home.
Do you skateboard or snowboard? Neither, I charcuterie board.
—Nastya to Haze
HAZE
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked.
“You heard me.” John sighed. “Fuck.”
Fuck was right.
The woman in the box, hacked up by some sort of hatchet or similar object, had been a senator’s mistress.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “One, he wants us to keep the fact that she was his mistress on the down low. As if that’s going to be easy. But he also wants us not to investigate him?”
“His alibi checks out because of the Department of Homeland Security meeting he was in, which was super top secret. In addition, his wife has an alibi as well,” our boss, Sergeant Daniels, grumbled.
Sergeant Daniels was a good cop. I liked him a lot.
What I didn’t like was how he let people in position of power have leniency when he wasn’t willing to give that same leniency to anyone else.
Like, what did him being a fucking senator have anything to do with us investigating this case the correct way?
“What about their adult children?” I asked. “They might have an issue with their mother getting cheated on.”
“They have alibis, too.” Daniels replied.
Of course they did.
“So how do you expect this to play out?” I asked carefully.
Daniels did not disappoint.
He stood up and walked to a board that’d been set up across the room.
On the top was the victim’s photo.
She was cute.
A twenty-five-year-old female with flowing blonde hair, bright-green eyes, and a set of fake ass teeth.
I could see why the senator had gone for her.
The perv.
What had my heart beating inside of my chest like a jackrabbit was the photo of Nastya Semyonov.
“What’s going on?” I asked carefully.
“Senator Kennedy wants around-the-clock surveillance on the woman,” Daniels replied.
“For what?” I asked.
“Because he believes that she might’ve had something to do with it. He thinks that it’s because of the organized crime bill that he’s sponsoring,” Daniels said.
I snorted. “I’ve already followed all of the protocols here. I’ve investigated her purchase history. You can literally corroborate everything that she said to us. Even down to the defective ice maker she purchased.”
“We investigate her,” Daniels ordered.