wheel and the slight tension around his brown eyes.
We drove to a gated storage unit facility on Bourne Avenue. Godfrey got another message that had the code for the gate, and after Rogue entered it in, he pulled inside. I watched out the window, the cool fall air blowing barren branches around haphazardly as I tried to catch my breath. Everything seemed so normal and yet ominous all the same.
There was no one else around, just rows and rows of uniformed, metal storage units. The lack of people made it all seem creepier.
“What’s the number?” Rogue asked.
Godfrey rattled off the unit number, and I found myself pressing closer between Luis and Bonham. They must’ve sensed my nervousness, because Luis threw his arm over my shoulders and pressed a kiss to my temple, while Bonham nudged me with his elbow and gave me a steadying look. “You can stay in the car,” he offered quietly.
I shook my head. “I’m coming with you.”
Bonham nodded like he expected that, and then Rogue pulled the SUV to a stop. He looked at me through the rearview mirror. “We never know what we’re getting rid of, but it’s usually documents. Sometimes we’re given computers to wipe, but that’s mostly Bonham’s expertise.”
I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. “Why here?”
“It’s always a storage unit, just different places,” Godfrey explained. “My father has a guy who takes shit from the scene of the crime and dumps it here, and then we deal with it after my father goes through it. Luis's family owns most storage facilities in Savannah, so it comes in handy when people start asking questions.”
What a well groomed ecosystem. Had Mr. Taylor come up with this, or had they?
My eyebrows rose. “So your daddy looks at the evidence first?”
“Of course,” Godfrey said bitterly. “He doesn’t just get criminals off with his stellar lawyering skills. He also collects information in case he needs to use anything later for trade deals and backstreet bribes, or even some good old-fashioned blackmail.”
“Has it always been this way?” I asked. “Using the Salvador storage units and all these…protocols? It’s all so organized.”
“We had to be. Our first job together was scary as fuck. We thought it was a one-off, something to get Mr. Taylor off Godfrey’s back,” Bonham explained.
My heart clenched again as the image of Mr. Taylor punching Godfrey seared through my vision. I kept seeing the pain on Godfrey’s face, and the force of his father’s hits. “But it wasn’t enough, was it?”
“No,” Godfrey answered, his tone curt. “It’s never enough. And now he has enough blackmail on us to make sure this cushy little side hustle happens for as long as he wants it to. He’s implicated all four of us. We’re not minors anymore. We’re adults, which means we’re fucking stuck. We could do some seriously hard time for the shit we’ve done.”
“But he forced you,” I argued.
“Come on, Scar,” Luis said, looking over at me with his dark eyes. “The courts would never believe that.”
My lips thinned in anger on their behalf. Mr. Taylor was a son of a bitch.
“Alright, Bonham, grab the shredder,” Rogue interrupted, before opening the car door.
We all piled out, and as we stood in the cool fall weather, I pictured stacks of boxes piled high in the medium-sized storage unit. I imagined incriminating evidence, teeth in ziplock bags, and blood-stained clothes. Even though they had assured me that most of it was bank statements, it still made my imagination go wild. The people Mr. Taylor got off were no joke. Some had been charged with some pretty hefty crimes. As much as the guys wanted to brush off the intensity of these jobs, something told me that it went much deeper than that. Hell, Rogue killed a man without a second’s pause. You didn’t get to that point by simply shredding papers. Exactly what else had they been forced to do?
Despite my wild imagination, when Godfrey and Rogue stood in front of the garage door and unlocked it, I never expected to see a single manilla file folder lying flat on the cracked, concrete ground. I looked at the guys in confusion, trying to figure out if this was normal. With how much organization it seemed to take, I was thinking we'd have more than a single file folder to work with. Was all of this really necessary?
"Is this normal?" I asked in a whisper as Rogue moved closer to inspect the folder.