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“Get everything on Jody Evans. Family history, clients, personal finances, all of it. I want to know if this is something she’s done before.”
“I got you.”
“And this stays between us. Nobody else knows until I say so.”
“Yup. You good?”
“No,” I answered honestly. “But I’ma fix this shit. Believe that.”
I sat on the shoulder with my ears ringing and my chest tight, trying to calm down before I got to my Pops.
The money wasn’t even the part that had me tight. I could make four hundred stacks in a day. It was that I let Belle in my life and the whole time she’d been running game on me like I was some nobody.
My phone pinged with an alert.
La’Belle
I’m back in the city.
I didn’t trust myself to see her yet.
Aight.
Three dot bubbles appeared then stopped.
She knew something wasn’t right, but she probably thought I was still mad about her impromptu trip.
My father’s words came back to me. Charming women are dangerous.
I brushed it off because I figured he was projecting his own wounds from my mother onto me and Belle.
Turns out he was trying to keep me from making the same mistake he did, and I was too busy being sprung to hear it.
Pops was in the sunroom when I got to the house.
His ass should’ve been doing the physical therapy exercises the PT gave him, but he was being stubborn. His feet were kicked up on an ottoman with the Financial Times and a glass of bourbon next to him. A blunt was hanging from his mouth.
“Should you be doing all that?” I asked, pulling up the chair across from him.
“What?” He ashed the blunt. “I shouldn’t have a drink? Enjoy a little weed?”
“I don’t think it’ll help you heal any faster.”
“It’s either this or take them fucking pills we sell. I’m not trying to become an addict at seventy.”
I shook my head and took the blunt to relight it.
He eyed me. “Why you come over here anyway?”
“I can’t come check on you?”
He grunted and picked up his glass to take a sip. “You find Solomon yet?”
“He’s been laying low, but I’m sure his nut ass will try to kill me next.”
“He wouldn’t kill you,” Pops said a little too quickly.
I narrowed my eyes. “Why you say that? Who’s to say he wouldn’t come at me to get to you?”
