Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 64917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Burn closed the laptop and leaned in. “You goin’ to her?”
“She told me she won’t be a pawn,” I muttered the words like gravel in my mouth. “If I show up on her porch after that, I prove the wrong man right.”
“You gonna let a mayor run you off a girl?” Loco asked, not mocking—astonished.
“I’m going to let the girl choose,” I shared, “And I’m going to take the mayor apart brick by stolen brick until she can see me without his smoke. Didn’t mean for feelings to get tangled in this shit, but I’m not gonna let her burn with the rest of them. She deserves better from me.”
Tower sat back, eyes narrowing like he was seeing if the plan fit. “That was the right sentence,” he stated finally. “I hate that it is, but it is.”
“Church adjourned,” I said, not commenting back to my VP who knew what a damaged man I truly was.
The gavel didn’t sound like Pop’s because my hand wasn’t his. It sounded like mine—heavier than I liked.
Avery Mitchell Corrections sits on the end of a road like a dare. Razor wire sketched against a big sky. I hate it. I went anyway.
In county, I could put cash in the right hands and get a minute in a back room if I needed to. In prison you get phones that smell like bleach and a clock counting out your heartbeats. I took a seat in a booth that has seen too many broken men and picked up a handset scratched to hell. The line clicked and went alive.
They brought my boy on the other side of glass with a guard who could have been nineteen if you scrubbed the mustache off him. GJ sat down. He looked older than the last time I saw him, which is a sentence I’m getting tired of telling myself.
“Dad,” he said, defeated more than before.
“Boy.” The word always came out rough. Not because it hurt. Because it meant too much.
“They moving me tomorrow,” he said, like he was telling me he’d switched classes. “Grip’s guys say it’s better. Less heat in the showers.”
“Good.” It wasn’t good. It was less bad. “You eating?”
“Yeah.” His eyes flicked to the corner of the room like he could feel something crawling there. “You hear from her?”
I had made sure my son was looped in before anyone else, like his mother, told him some half-cocked story about what I was doing. So he knew I had an entanglement with IvaLeigh Walsh. I swallowed. “She sent me a message.”
He watched my face the way men in cages learn to—like they’re picking locks with your eyebrows. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
I huffed a sound that wanted to be a laugh. “You get mouthier every year.”
“Comes with getting older,” he said. He leaned in, the handset cord stretching between his knuckles. “If she runs, let her. Don’t burn your hands yanking on a rope you can’t hold onto.”
“Who taught you that?” I asked.
“You did,” he shared, and smiled the wrong kind of proud. “You said never chase someone out of a building that’s already on fire unless they’re ready to come out. Don’t ever push a woman because when they push back the burn will always leave a scar.”
“I was talkin’ about sex and not forcing shit on a chick.”
“Same geometry,” he stated casually. “You do the math. I’ll do my time.”
“No,” I said, frustrated. “You’ll do my time while I figure out how to end it.”
He sat back. “You gonna kill a judge because I don’t see how this ends, Pops?”
“Don’t say that into that phone.”
He grinned then, a flash of the kid who used to put plastic soldiers in my boots and laugh when I cursed. It faded as fast as it came. “All jokes aside. You get him, Dad. But get him clean. I want out because we burned liars with truth, not because we added ash to the pile.”
“I hear you,” I agreed. It felt like another weight added but necessary.
The guard tapped the glass. Time.
“Keep breathing,” I reminded.
“You too,” he remarked, and they led him away like he was a danger because that’s easier than admitting he’s a man like everyone else.
I walked out under the towers and made myself feel the wire with my eyes. Men built this. Men break it. Both things are true, and the distance between the buildup and the breaking was always cost.
Back at the cabin, the world had moved half an inch without me.
The bed smelled like her hair because smells lingered like bastards. I didn’t lie in it. I sat on the floor with my back to the mattress and pulled out a pad of paper because sometimes the only way to make noise shut up is to write it down.
IvaLeigh,
You were never in my plan like this. That’s the problem and the miracle. I had a line to walk: son first, club always, judge and mayor piece by piece. Then you. You weren’t leverage. You were a hand on my chest that made the old wiring stop sparking long enough for me to see life smoothly for a change.