Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 76065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
“You alright?” I asked as she rushed past me, holding a sweater to her chest.
“Yeah, fine,” she said, getting to the lockers, then reaching out toward hers.
It was then that I realized she’d actually put a lock on hers.
My gaze slid along the line of lockers, not seeing any others with locks. That was… strange.
“You having an issue with your locker?” I asked as she turned the dial to plug in her combination.
“What do you mean?”
“You locked it,” I told her as the lock came undone, making her pull it away, open the locker, ball up her sweater, and shove it inside the locker.
“Oh, yeah. Tips have been good lately,” she said, voice tight. “I just wanted to, you know, keep ‘em safe.”
That was a reasonable enough answer. Still, something was rubbing me wrong about it. I mean, I’d seen her purse just sitting on the table every day since she’d been hired. She’d never seemed worried about her money before. Which made me think something had happened that she just didn’t want to talk about, maybe not wanting to point fingers at coworkers.
“Kick, I need—“ Ricky said, rushing into the back, stopping short when he saw me.
“What do you need?” Kick asked, slamming her locker, and making sure she slid the lock back in and clicked it closed, despite it only being the three of us in the building.
There was no way she suspected Ricky of stealing from her, right?
I mean, no, the guy wasn’t part of my family, so he didn’t get the implicit trust those men and women got. But I trusted him with my business. The man would never steal from me or mine.
“My wife called,” Ricky said, voice just shy of frantic. “My boy is in the hospital.”
“Oh,” Kick said, her hand flying to her heart for a kid she’d never met.
“Go,” I said, nodding at Ricky. When he hesitated, I reached out, grabbing his shoulder. “Go. Family comes before everything else,” I said. “Kick and I got this,” I added, waving around the shop.
“Yeah, of course. Go. I hope everything is alright.”
“Let me know if you need anything,” I said as Ricky grabbed his jacket out of his locker, then rushed out of the back door.
“I, ah, I have this,” Kick said, waving toward the shop as a whole. “If you need to get going.”
“I’m not leaving you alone in a shop at night,” I said, shaking my head at her.
Bastian was usually around, but he’d been offered to work a job with Cinna and Dav, so he was off trying to make some money and gain more favor from Renzo.
“Okay,” Kick said, giving me a smile that seemed even tighter than before. “I have to, ah, finish cleaning up.”
With that, she moved away from me, casting another look at her locker before making her way out front.
I locked the back door before following her to the front, where I locked that door as well, wanting to make sure she was safe as she moved around, wiping down the counters and meat slicers. The chairs were up on the tables, the floor still shiny from mopping.
The place had never been cleaner since she started working.
“How’s Evander doing?” I asked when she caught me watching her.
“He’s staying in more,” she told me.
“Yeah? Something happen?” I asked, watching something dark cross her eyes. But she shook her head.
“He’s just been… clingier. I guess he’s finally warming up to me.”
That was a good thing. So why did she sound like she was about to cry about it?
I wouldn’t pretend to know a lot about women. Sure, the Lombardi family was the only one in the city—so far—to have female capos. And, yeah, I worked alongside them a lot. But Cinna and Saff kind of leaned into either their cold and ruthless—in Cinna’s case—or hot-tempered and impulsive—when it came to Saff. They never really displayed any other emotions. At least not around any of us. Which made sense. I couldn’t imagine it was easy for a woman working in such a brutal and male-dominated world like organized crime. They had to shut that shit down to protect themselves.
Outside of my work relationships, I’d never really spent a lot of time with women. Work had always come first in my life. Which meant time with women was on the short side and purely for fun. No distractions.
“That’s good. What you wanted, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, I just… damnit!” she yelped, snatching her hand away from the slicer, holding it against her chest as she squeezed it into a fist.
“You get cut?” I asked, making my way toward her. Those meat slicers were insanely sharp. Ricky was really strict about teaching the new guys how to use them properly so there were no accidents. I never stopped to consider how you could cut yourself while just cleaning it.