“Are you okay?” I asked, because it was much easier to focus on him than Van.
He nodded but didn’t say anything, so I doubted that was true.
“Holy fuck! What the hell?” RJ’s voice rang in the room.
I stood and raised the gun, then let it fall to my side again as RJ came limping toward me as fast as he could with the curtain across the door fluttering closed behind him. He opened his arms, and I ran over and buried myself against his front.
“What is going on here?”
I shrugged and sagged against him as he took the gun from my hand, and maybe I shouldn’t rely so much on a man who didn’t trust me, but I promptly lost my shit and began to cry because I’d never seen a dead body and I was pretty sure Van was finished.
10
RJ
Winter sobbing wasmy least favorite thing in the world. His breath sounded like he might not catch it again, as if he was dying a little with every heave of his slim body, and I held him closer as I surveyed the damage that had been done. Shuffling around, I slipped Vance’s pearl-handled revolver into my waistband.
The room didn’t seem like much of one anyone really lived in, and I wasn’t sure if it had been stripped of everything except the bed, a lamp, and a long rack of clothes against one wall, or if it had started out that way. The man curled in a ball on the bed had my blood boiling because he was here with Vance, and I raised my Glock to point it at him.
“No,” Winter said, voice scratchy. “Pinky saved me.”
The man in question chuckled in a dire way and jerked his chin to get his floppy brown hair out of his eyes. “It’s actually Piers. Pinky was the only thing I could come up with when you asked.” He shrugged. “I don’t think well under pressure. I didn’t expect you to care about my name.”
There was something sad about that—not thinking anyone would want to know him—but I wasn’t friends with Vance’s fuck toy, so I kept an eye on him, even though I allowed Winter to win me over as he gestured at me to put my hand down. I stopped pointing the gun directly at Piers.
I didn’t holster my weapon, though, because fuck that.
“Where’s the cash? If Vance sold everything he stole from Winter, you should know, right?” I stomped over to Piers, but I was very aware of Winter watching my every move, and I didn’t want him to be afraid of me after everything that had happened to him recently. I reined in the urge to punch this weasel in the face. He cringed away from me when I got closer, and my heart twisted. He was still sitting on the bed naked, except for a blanket. Whatever Vance was to Piers, it looked like he’d been with him when Winter bumbled in, and now Vance was dead. I patted his shoulder instead of smacking him. He blinked at me, still scared. I had no doubt I was the villain in his mind.
“Will you shoot me if I say I don’t know where he put the money?” Piers asked in a small voice. “Vance didn’t trust me with things like that. He didn’t trust me at all.”
“What do you know?” I growled, guilt clobbering me upside the head.Trust.Vance didn’t trust the boy he fucked. I hadn’t trusted Winter. Maybe, in the end, we’d been too fucking much alike. “Also, the police are downstairs in the lobby, so you’re going to have to go down there and convince them to go away,” I said quickly to Winter over my shoulder. “You need to go douse your face in cold water. Get a bandage on that cut. Change your clothes. Hurry!”
“Oh shit,” he gasped out, touching his red splotchy cheeks lightly with his fingertips.
Piers sat up straighter when I gestured with the gun for him to start talking. “Uh.... Well, there definitely was cash. There were three duffel bags and a laptop. Some of the money was converted into crypto and stored on a computer.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I grumbled. Was this really our fucking lives right now? Why couldn’t anything be simple? “You might as well be speaking gibberish, kid. I don’t know anything about computers.”
Piers smiled and his eyes crinkled in the corners, which made him seem a little more innocent and made me feel less like rearranging the face someone had already punched too many times. “I do. If you find it, I can help you get the crypto turned back into cash.” He winced when I raised my hand, but I only put the gun back in my holster.
“You’re sure you can do that?”
He nodded immediately.
“You better be. But we have to find the money and the laptop first?”
“Yes, sir,” he whispered, then rubbed the back of his hand across his nose as he sniffed.
“You don’t know if it’s in this building somewhere or where he stashed it?” I could already feel a headache starting behind my eyes.
Piers curled forward and his shoulders shrank as if he was worried I would hit him, and that had me officially feeling like a prick.
“Stop that,” I snapped and took a step back. “If I was going to hurt you, I would’ve shot you already.”
Winter hustled over to the bed and already looked better. He’d cleaned up a bit and had a large Band-Aid covering the gash on his temple, which had been bleeding when I arrived, and he wore a clean black sweater and pants. “I don’t have a lot of time. You’re really going to help me?”
Piers shrugged. “Yes. I didn’t like what Vance was doing to you. Usually, he steals money from people who were taking it from others first, and I didn’t care too much about robbing assholes like that blind, but you weren’t doing anything wrong,” he said softly. I hated it when Winter darted in to hug Piers before he spun and headed off.
