Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75373 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75373 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
The day of his death, the two of them had a screaming match that had almost come to blows.
David said he’d stormed out.
And maybe he had. Maybe Phil, his blood pressure up from the argument, had started to feel shitty, gotten in his car to go home or to the hospital, and simply had the heart attack the police and medical examiner assumed.
For the sake of sounding like a good person, I’d like to say that David breathed another day. But he’d attacked Dasha. Twice. He was connected to dangerous people.
He had to go.
And while Dom volunteered to handle the body, I walked out of the storage unit he was dead inside to make my way across the docks toward the one full of cocaine.
Because there was something still nettling me.
The garage totes from the day before.
The ones that felt different.
Dante was already there, leaning back against the container. “You’re curious too, huh?” he asked.
“Gotta have the whole story to give to Dasha when I go home.”
“Minus the whole killing a man thing.”
“Well, I can’t tell her what we did.” The Family was big on plausible deniability. We never wanted the women or kids getting caught up in any possible legal issues because they knew more than they should. So while many of them assumed and drew conclusions, we never confirmed if we could help it. “But I think she’s smart enough to know she never has to worry again. Let’s check this shit out,” I said as Dante handed me gloves, then slipped his own on.
We made our way into the unit, the late evening sun brightening the inside just enough that we didn’t need a light source.
I grabbed the lid of the closest tote from the day before, whipping it off, and let out a low curse.
“Fuck,” Dante said as well.
There weren’t baggies full of white crystals inside like with all the first totes.
No.
This one was absolutely fucking packed with cash.
Stacks upon stacks of money.
Dante reached in, grabbing a stack and fanning it.
“Tens and twenties. Mostly twenties. That makes this, what?” he asked, trying to measure the size of the container.
“It’s easily five hundred k to two million.”
“Even if all the ones yesterday were only a million…”
“It’s a shitload of money.”
And we still hadn’t cleared out all of the units. No matter what was in them—cash or drugs—it was going to be a fuckton of money making its way to Dasha, even after the South American crew was paid.
“You got yourself a sugar mama,” Dante said.
I didn’t give a fuck about the cash.
But I was happy for Dasha.
And whatever she wanted to do with that money.
“Speaking of, I’m gonna go get home to her.”
I snapped the lid closed on the tote.
All of that shit could be dealt with another day.
Dasha had been hanging out with my mom and brother all day.
I wanted to get home to her.
I wanted to tell her it was all over.
There were still things to do. Employees to fire. Cocaine to sell to an established kingpin. Money to count and hide.
But it could all wait.
I wanted to have a quiet night at home with my girl.
Dasha - 1 week
“What is it?” I asked. I looked between Santo and Luca, who were leading me into a building at the docks.
I hadn’t even been able to take in the scale of their operation—the hundreds or maybe even thousands of shipping containers piled all around, the men milling about working, the forklifts, the freighters pulling up and waiting to be unloaded—before they ushered me inside, then back into a windowless room featuring a long table.
And on that table?
Money.
Just piles and piles and piles of money.
“Is that real?” My voice gasped out of me as my brain refused to compute the amount that was laid out before me.
“It is,” Luca said.
“We checked every single bill to make sure,” Santo added.
“What… how… who…” Not a single thought was completing itself in my mind.
“What… about sixty million. Who… it’s all yours. And how, well,” Santo said, reaching for something in his pocket and then handing me an envelope. “This will explain it all much better than I can.”
“What is it?” I asked.
My name was scrawled on the front in blocky penmanship.
“It’s a letter from your uncle explaining everything.”
I barely got one sentence in before I found myself sinking into one of the seats around the table. A mix of shock and grief tore through me as I read my uncle’s words.
He recalled me coming to live with him, how my presence had given him a purpose his life had never had before. How sad he was to see me go, but how thankful he’d been for our time together.
He maybe had some choice things to say about my father that—while harsh—were valid.
And those feelings about my father were what eventually fueled his goal in life.