CHAPTER SIX
Caymen
I’d been picking locks damn near my entire life.
See, both my parents had no business bringing a kid into the world, let alone fighting to get me back after the state finally stepped in and put me in temporary foster care.
They were addicts. And not in the ‘they struggle with addiction’ kind of way. They were junkies, pure and simple. They didn’t want to be sober. They didn’t want to ‘turn their lives around.’ They wanted to drink, shoot, and snort their way into oblivion.
My old man managed to hold down a job to feed the habit only because his uncle took pity on him and let him work construction.
My mom, well, she had a string of jobs for a while before she decided the easiest way to make money was on her knees or back.
So it was a string of Johns in the house as soon as my old man left for work each day.
Did he know?
I wasn’t sure how the fuck he didn’t.
But he never said anything about it.
As for my mom, well, she used to shove me in my closet and lock me in so I didn’t bother her while she was ‘working.’
The problem?
She would go from sucking or fucking right out to get her next fix. Forgetting about me being locked up. With nowhere to pee, nothing to eat, sitting in the dark on the hard floor until I found an old bobby pin on the floor.
I’d seen lots of shows at that point with people using pins of all sorts to pick locks. So I set my little seven-year-old hands to work.
The first time was unsuccessful, no matter how hard I tried.
I didn’t get out until my old man got home from work, heard me jiggling the knob, yanked the door open, then dragged me out while yelling at me for ‘getting myself locked in the closet.’
But after that, alone in my room while they partied with their friends in the living room, I practiced. And practiced. And practiced.
Until I could get out within seconds of trying.
So working on Noa’s lock was—literally, in my case—child’s play.
Straightening to see her standing there in nothing but a towel with a big-ass gun pointed at me, that was a brand new fucking experience.
And I liked it a lot more than I would ever admit.
As I looked, a bead of water dropped off one of her waves and slid down her chest, curving around her breasts, to disappear between.
I was hard from just that.
I didn’t know what this woman was doing to me, but I was fucking game, man.
“You turned my cameras up?”
“Expecting someone else?”
“Are you alone?”
“In here, yeah. Technically, no. My brother is parked down the road a bit.”
“Club brother?”
