extra chipper as if she could prevent the lecture I was already prepared to hear from my brother.
“What the fuck is going on, Violet?” Truck’s voice demanded. “Mandy called me practically in tears, talking about gunshots and you running from the house and Jada being hospitalized. What the hell has my brother dragged you both into?”
It stabbed at my gut. Of course he would assume this was all my fault, and even though it was true, I still hated that he knew it. That I was the screw-up who’d brought tragedy and chaos into people’s lives once again.
I reached for the phone, but Violet moved away with it.
“Truck, first of all, that is a really shitty assumption. Second of all, Dawson saved my life tonight. Third, you should be more respectful of your FBI-agent brother and the work he’s been doing.”
I groaned.
“Are you in pain?” the doctor asked, and I shook my head. I couldn’t feel the arm at all. He’d shot me up with a local, and it hadn’t truly hurt to begin with. The groan was one hundred percent because of the cheeky blonde chewing out my brother in my defense.
“What are you talking about?” Truck said, voice lowering.
“Dawson. He’s an FBI agent.”
Silence took over the phone call, and the doctor looked at me with narrowed eyes.
“We done here?” I asked him.
He nodded. I put my shirt back on and joined Violet, pulling the phone from her hand and taking it off speaker.
“Truck, you there?” I asked.
“What is Vi talking about, Daws?” he asked quietly.
I took a deep breath. “I was going to call when I got home tonight, but things got out of control before I could.”
“Are you okay? Is Violet okay?” he asked.
“We’re both okay. I’ll have a scar that will be a better story than the one you tell about the fisherman who threw a hook at you.”
He chuckled. “That’s a damn good story.”
The laughter faded into more quiet. I cleared my throat. “So, I’ve been working for the FBI for four years. Undercover. We were trying to take down the Kyōdaina.”
“The Kyōdaina! Jesus.” His voice was full of shock. As a Coast Guard in San Francisco, Truck was on the receiving end of plenty of the syndicate’s activities. “I don’t know how to react to this,” he added on, and I heard the hurt in his voice.
I hadn’t told him something huge.
“I wanted to tell you,” I said. “But, you know, undercover means undercover.”
“Undercover doesn’t usually mean masquerading around town as yourself,” he said quietly. “Is that how Jada and Violet got involved?”
“Jada has always been involved. Her dad is the head of it all.”
“Jada’s dad?” Confusion littered his voice.
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“Tell me. Tell me it all,” he said.
I pulled Violet’s fingers into mine, and we headed toward Jada’s room as I told him as much as I could. About the yacht I’d designed and the role it had played in getting the syndicate to trust me, and how it had all sort of blown up in our face. I told him what Tsuyoshi Mori had said to Jada and tried to reassure him we were safe now that Ken’Ichi was out of the picture. He asked questions, I answered with as much truth as possible, and then there was more silence on his end.
“Is this because of me?” he asked.
“What?” I asked. Violet kissed me on the cheek, squeezed my hand, and went into Jada’s room while I stayed outside to finish the conversation.
“Mr. Dick and I made you feel like a screw-up, so you had to prove you weren’t,” he said regretfully.
It was such a mix of yes and no that I wasn’t sure I could express, but at the end of the day, I wouldn’t let my brother feel responsible for my actions and decisions. “I was a screw-up, Truck. I didn’t do this because of you or for you. I did this for me. So I could look myself in the eye every morning. But even then, it wasn’t for the right reasons. That’s why I might be getting out. Go back to being a simple boat builder from now on.”
“Simple millionaire boat builder,” he said after a moment.
I chuckled. “Well, yeah.”
“And the racing?”
“Dax and I will probably still race.” I didn’t add on that I needed to repair that relationship first. “But I plan on cutting that back some too. I have better uses for my time.”