Lady Luck by Kristen Ashley, now you can read online.
Chapter One
A Miracle
My cell rang, I snatched it off the passenger seat, looked at the display and it said, “Shift calling”.
Then I sighed.
Then I flipped it open, my other arm twisting so I could look at my watch.
Twelve oh two.
Shift was impatient, as usual.
“Hey,” I said into the phone.
“He out?”
My eyes went out the passenger side window, through the two guard towers, down the long tunnel created by two sides of high, cinderblock walled fence topped with razor wire circling through lines of barbed wire, the heat sweltering on the day making the air down that open, empty tunnel wave and shimmer.
“Nope,” I answered.
“Fuck!” Shift clipped. “What’s takin’ so f**kin’ long? He’s supposed to be released at noon.”
“Shift, it’s noon oh two,” I told him.
“Yeah, so?” he asked back, sounding pissed and impatient. “They’re releasing him from prison; I doubt he’s sticking around for a going away party.”
I doubted that too.
“I’ll call,” I promised.
“They got seven minutes,” he threatened and I stifled a sigh.
This was Shift. He was a thousand miles away. He was a full-time pimp slash drug dealer and part-time ass**le (though, that said, he put far more effort into being an ass**le than his other occupations) and he thought he had some sway over the California Corrections Department.
“All right,” I said.
“Call me the minute that brother breathes free air,” he bit off and then hung up.
I flipped my phone shut wondering, for the seven thousandth time, why the f**k I was doing this.
I came up with no answers except for the fact that when Ronnie was murdered, he’d left me with one thing.
Shift.
I would have preferred a vast estate, a fortune in jewels or, perhaps, nothing.
I got Shift.
And although after Ronnie died I wanted nothing to do with that part of his life, I wanted to move on, turn my back on it all, Shift wouldn’t allow that. If Shift got his talons in you, they went deep, attached straight to the bone, the tips sprung open into claws that sunk into your marrow and didn’t let go. Not for anything.
And Shift had his talons in me. I didn’t want it, didn’t invite it but there they were.
The good news was, he didn’t often scroll down to my number on his phone.
The other good news was, when he did, the shit he asked for was usually not that hard to do and it was never illegal. He knew me. He knew where I stood. He knew there was no f**king way I’d get involved in any of his garbage.
But he also knew I loved Ronnie more than anything in this world and Ronnie, for reasons only known to Ronnie, loved Shift only slightly less than he loved me (though, I had to admit, sometimes then and now, I wondered if he loved me slightly less than he loved Shift – but I didn’t often go there).