Cruz exhales through his nose. “There’s always risk with every job, Ma.”
Coco cuts him a look sharp enough to shut him up mid-thought. She glides toward Bishop, with the controlled precision of a cobra, stopping just inside his personal space. Bishop doesn’t retreat, his shoulders squaring beneath his black t-shirt, arms folded across his chest, feet planted wide like he’s anchoring himself.
“You’re the oldest, Bishop,” she says with a soft tsk and shake of her head.
Bishop's chin drops a fraction of an inch, his jaw muscle flexing once beneath stubbled skin. His eyes never leave Coco's face, but something in them dulls, like a light dimming behind frosted glass.
Coco's painted lips curve upward—not quite a smile—before she pivots on her heel. The sharp click-click-click of her stilettosagainst concrete punctuates the silence she leaves in her wake, each step fading as the door whispers shut behind her.
The garage feels colder once she’s gone.
Bishop clears his throat and gestures to the table. “Let’s finish this.”
I slip the cash from my vest pockets—crisp hundreds still warm from the lockbox—then unzip my vest with a metallic hiss. I shove my hand between my breasts, feeling the cold bite of metal against flushed skin.
“Uh, Bells?” Lola asks, moving to stand in front of me, her body casting a shadow over mine, eyes darting nervously to the garage door.
“Rafe and I found something right before we dove out the window,” I murmur as I start pulling jeweled bracelets and necklaces from their wedged place against my skin. The diamonds catch the harsh fluorescent light, throwing tiny prisms across Lola's face as a sapphire pendant dangles from my fingers, swinging like a hypnotist's watch.
“Holy shit,” Lola breathes, reaching for it. She lets the pendant fall into her palm, the chain pooling between her fingers with a weight that feels more like a promise than a prize. “Are these real?”
I shrug, pulling another tangled strand of diamonds from my shirt. “Unless Highlight stocks their safe with costume jewelry.” My voice is dry.
“Dude. We’re gonna be fencing those for months,” Beckett says with a frown.
I exhale slowly. “I know. We’ll have to see if Marty’ll take them. He has someone new he’s trialing I think could work. Otherwise, we visit Shore?—”
“I'll take care of it,” Bishop interrupts, his voice dropping half an octave as he leans across the table. “In fact, I' ll fence all of it. It'll be easier if it's all through one pipeline?—”
“No.” The word lands between us like a grenade.
Every head swivels toward me.
I keep my hands where they are, resting lightly on the table. “We made a plan for a reason. We don’t change it midjob just because you feel like it.”
Bishop's jaw tightens, a muscle jumping beneath the stubble. His eyes go flat and hard as he inhales through his nose, like he’s internally calming himself down. He recovers quick. “It’s not about what I feel like. If all of it moves through one fence, there’s less risk of it getting flagged or showing up on the radar. We keep it tight, we keep it clean, we keep itsmart.” His gaze slices over to me.
But this isn’t his command center. I know better than to bristle, but my voice sharpens anyway.
“We had a plan, and we stick to it. Your fence gets exactly what we agreed, ours gets the rest. No one changes the split after the job unless it’s an emergency or the whole crew votes on it.” I look around the table, catching Gage’s eye, then Cruz’s, then Lola’s. “That was the deal.”
Bishop’s mouth tugs up at one corner, a smile with nothing behind it. “You want to be in this business, you follow the rules.”
I plant my palms flat on the table and lean toward him. “That’s not how this partnership works.”
For a second, the garage feels like it might implode. The air vibrates with the possibility of violence, of sudden, stupid escalation. Bishop’s eyes flick to Gage, then to Cruz, and then—just for a breath—to the closed door where Coco vanished. His lips flatten. I get the sense he wants to say something that will end me, but he holds it in, chews on it, and then spits out a new tactic instead.
“Whatever you say, Bellamy.” He lets my name hang in the air. “Remind me again: how are you planning to wash your cut of the cash?” His grin can only be described as smug.
Just one of these days I’m going to enjoy wiping that expression off his too-handsome face.
It’s a good question, and he knows it. The rules for moving money are different if you’re a Calloway—a family with three generations of experience and a network of cleaners, fences, attorneys for every flavor of risk, and a myriad of properties to run it through.
The Hales? We’re the new money in this scenario, and our methods are a little less streamlined. It’s always been a hustle of smaller, more frequent jobs, never enough to warrant someone on retainer, never enough to make clean-up look like anything but a favor from a friend of a friend, paid in cash.
Beckett handled first-pass washing—cash-heavy beach businesses, renovation invoices, favors owed and collected quietly. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked, and nothing stayed long enough to draw a second look.
“Same way we always do.”
