Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68937 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68937 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Dorie met me at the door as she walked up from the side of the building where she must’ve scored a good parking spot or she walked to work again.
“Let me ask you this,” she said. “Is it completely stupid to walk around in the middle of the bad parts of Dallas and expect to make it home safely?”
I looked at her curiously as I said, “For a boy? You’d probably be just fine. For you or me? No. I’d never be that unsafe.”
She blew out a breath. “You’re killing me. This is an ongoing fight between my boyfriend and me.”
The rest of the night was spent debating whether a woman who was strong like us could stand a chance against a determined male attacker.
Me? I’d said hell no.
Her? She’d said that both of us could fight off anyone we wanted.
We agreed to disagree.
For Christmas this year, I want my back to stop hurting.
—Dima to Shasha
DIMA
Being the right-hand man of a Bratva pakhan should be a lot harder than it was, but it seemed my brother’s enemies were behaving themselves. Meaning, I was bored.
Which had to be why I looked into the cameras I’d set up at her place.
When I’d first seen the man in her apartment, I’d nearly lost my shit.
But, after the phone call I’d heard between him and another man, I’d realized that the man in her place was related to her.
Oh, and she was about to lose her apartment.
According to the brother, the apartment’s owner had raised rent on her to the point where it would be near impossible for her to renew her lease.
That’s when I got into my computer and started tapping away, finding her apartment’s owners—which hilariously enough was a sister company to the one that I’d found out that she was the CE-fucking-O of.
The woman was all over the place, that was for sure.
After finding the right documents, I went through a few more channels and shared the information with her brother.
Oh, and by the way, the brother was newly released from prison, according to the words that’d come out of his mouth earlier.
Another fun fact I’d found out was that this Keely wasn’t just some random woman.
She was the sister of the brother that had just married my own sister.
How I’d missed that the first time that I’d met her, I didn’t know.
What I did know was that things were about to get very interesting.
One, she knew my face.
Two, eventually she’d put two and two together and figure out who I was—who I was related to.
Three, she might or might not lose her shit on me.
I couldn’t fuckin’ wait for that day.
I switched from the camera views at her apartment to the camera view of her at work and smiled.
When I was younger, I took college courses that were all over the place.
College was boring for me. I didn’t like all the courses that they wanted you to take to get that degree. I liked to hop around and get information from everywhere. I took a language arts course and immediately dropped out because it wasn’t something that I was looking for. Now, all the criminology classes were entertaining.
I’d learned about everything under the sun, and had I cared, I could’ve graduated with a degree in criminology.
But I hadn’t cared enough to do that.
As I glided through the camera views, I thanked my lucky stars, and Lev, my brother’s tech guy, for teaching me everything that I needed to know.
When I’d met Lev, I’d been intrigued by his computer skills, and I’d all but immersed myself into his life whether he wanted me there or not.
Once he knew that I wasn’t going to just go away, he’d taken me under his wing and shown me everything he knew, teaching me how to hack with the best of them.
Sure, I wasn’t as skilled as Lev, or even the Truth Teller’s MC computer genius, Apollo, but I could get by.
With those skills, I’d hacked into everything known to man that I could to get more information on Tequila ‘Keely’ Clayborne.
I knew her birthday, her birthplace, her credit score and her social media accounts. I knew everything—even the bad stuff that made me want to dig a man up and set his bones on fire.
I also knew that there was an issue with another man in prison—the same one that her brother had just gotten out of.
Tapping my fingers along the base of the keyboard, I idly wondered how hard it would be to kill a man in prison.
Probably not all that hard.
They got to go outside in the yard for some fresh air and sunlight, didn’t they?
I could probably kill him there…
“…You are not stronger than a man, Dorie,” I heard my woman say.
My woman.
Jesus, I was fucked in the head if I saw her as my woman and we’d had no other communication other than possibly fifteen words in a back alley behind a sex club.