Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 89145 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89145 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Even so, West had wanted a house, and honestly, I hadn’t been too keen to return to a hood like that. Wasn’t it at least part of the point of parenthood to give your kids a better upbringing than you’d had yourself? Within reason, obviously.
I guessed that made me a hypocrite too. I was so protective and defensive about where I came from, all while I sure as fuck didn’t wanna go back.
My dream had always been to have a cool apartment in Center City. Instead, I’d ended up in the deadest part of an affluent suburb.
I loved my place now, but I couldn’t say I was gonna spend the rest of my life there. We were an outdoors family in the sense that Trip and Ellie loved to run around barefoot in the grass, Trip had probably been a fish in a former life, and we tended to spend all summer out in the sun. So…maybe I’d find a compromise at some point. A house in the city with a backyard. Maybe close to a park. Definitely with a pool.
And there we go again.
“I guess we always want the best of both worlds,” I said. “No matter how unrealistic it might be.”
He hummed and returned with the mugs. “Yeah.”
I took a sip of my coffee and almost groaned. I’d forgotten how good his coffee was. He obviously bought some expensive shit, and he was the type of man who researched coffee machines before buying one. He could sit in bed at night and go through pages of reviews when there was a new gadget he wanted to buy, and then he’d show me a damn spreadsheet of his pros and cons.
I’d spotted a simple coffeemaker at Target for twenty-five bucks.
West gestured his mug at me. “That Speedy you’re wearing is the best of my world, just so you know. You won’t find that at the corner pawnshop where you grew up.”
I snorted a laugh and eyed my watch. He had a point. “It’s possible I’ve developed a thing for nice watches.”
He quirked a smile. “Is that a fact.”
I grinned faintly and took another sip of coffee.
West had his own collection of fancy watches, and he kept them in a mahogany display box in the closet. It’d been one of those things that’d become significant to me. Like, if we got dressed together in the morning, I’d watch him open the box and pick that day’s piece. One box, with room for twelve watches, and he’d had eleven for the longest time. The cheapest had cost about two grand, and it’d been a gift from me.
I’d been so fucking nervous about giving him that thing, ’cause the world of watches was wild. Those nerds could bitch about a detail so small that it wasn’t visible to the naked eye, and it could be something that made the watch ten grand more expensive.
He wore it sometimes, though. I mean, to this day. I knew he liked it, especially with a gray button-down.
“Life must be good as a gangster,” he noted.
I chuckled through a yawn. “I can’t complain. Even when midnight emergencies don’t make me a fucking dime.”
All jobs had downsides.
“Oh really. How does that…whole thing work? Do you get paid by the gig, the hour, or…?”
“Depends on what I’m doing.” I wasn’t wholly comfortable talking about the syndicate, but in the spirit of honesty… Plus, I’d stupidly brought it up. “Scheduling sit-downs for Kellan, which is and always will be my main gig, pays me ten Gs a month. On paper—as in, what’s in my contract at Finn’s security firm—it’s roughly six grand, so still comfortable. And then with the other thing I do, I get a cut, so it can be anywhere from a few grand to twenty. It’s still new, so I’m not raking it in just yet.”
He was too good at hiding his reactions, but I caught the way his brows lifted a little, and it was followed by wry amusement.
“Damn criminal,” he muttered into his mug.
I smirked. “I probably hang out with fewer tax evaders than you do.”
That made him chuckle. “You might be right. It’s seemingly the one crime my father doesn’t care about either.”
Fucking really? “You mean he…?”
“Oh no. I’m just saying he’s fully aware of how his own friends down at the club brag about how they avoid paying taxes.”
Ah. Yeah, I bet.
“Do, uh…” He shifted in his seat and hesitated for a second. “Do you rationalize everything in your head somehow?”
“About wanting to be a Son?”
He inclined his head.
“I did that at first.” I scratched my elbow. “For my morals’ sake—those I have left, anyway—I tried to come up with enough excuses to justify my choices. The biggest part is probably what the mafia looks like today. It ain’t like we target small shopkeepers and extort them like the mob did in the old days. Now, it’s… I mean, there’s always gonna be a big market for drugs and shite like that. Things still go down out on the streets—it’s just much smaller. The big money’s in cybercrime and major corporations. There’s a lot of corruption involved. Data leaks, security breaches…interfering with politics. And…most of that is so much bigger than what I do. I don’t understand half of it. I just know that the structure of a criminal organization has to look different today. Fewer crews on the streets, bigger office space for hackers and money guys.”