“I’ll figure it out,” Nick muttered.
“Fuck,” Knight muttered in return. “Do not get your shit jacked trying to save hers.”
“There is no way to take care of my shit without jacking hers. I just gotta jack it so she ends up just hating me and not doing it wearing a fucking orange jumpsuit.”
“Fuck, maybe I’ll take these fuckers out,” Knight irately told his drink.
Nick watched him take a sip.
When he was done, he got his brother’s attention when he said, “Maybe this is penance for me bein’ an asshole. Havin’ it good growin’ up, unlike you, unlike Ma, and still givin’ her shit. Dad shit. You shit. Actin’ like a motherfucking twat. Maybe that’s it. Why it was the way it was with Hettie. Why shit went down the way it went down with Olivia. I don’t know. I could think on that for millennia and never know. I just gotta keep movin’ through it and hope I find a life where I walk over some threshold into my version of the perfect world.”
Knight opened his mouth to speak but he didn’t get in there because Nick didn’t stop.
“What I do know is, I might have been an asshole twat, but I learned not to be that. I also learned other things. From you. From Hettie. From Dad, Mom, Anya. And something Hettie gave me was how to read people. And I know to my balls, brother, that Olivia Shade deserves a lot more than just being saved from an orange jumpsuit. Her father being responsible for Hettie’s death, my mission to make him pay, to finish her job, bring him to justice, it can’t be me who gives her more. But to my balls, Knight, I know she deserves it.”
Knight heard him. Knight always listened. It was just in the last four and a half years Nick noticed he did.
And this time when his brother heard him, Knight offered, “You want anything from me?”
“I want this done so Olivia can be free to find herself some motherfucking happy. But you can’t help with that so you’re doin’ what I need you to do. Just bein’ the big brother I never let you be.”
“Not a hard job, Nick,” Knight said.
“Not anymore,” Nick replied.
Knight gave him another look then took another drink.
After that, thankfully, they dropped the subject.
Nick went home.
He did not sleep.
* * * * *
Knight
8:23 – The Next Morning
After making love to his woman and with her curled close, Knight had slept soundly.
But he woke with things on his mind.
So he made the call.
And he gave the order.
“Find everything. Do it invisible. Give it to me. And however you do it, it never leads back to Nick or me.”
“You got it,” Sylvie Creed, one of his closest friends and an ex member of his team, being ex because she now lived in Phoenix with her husband and kids, replied.
Knight hung up feeling better.
Sylvie and her man Tucker, both PIs, two of the best in the business, would get him what he needed.
Which meant they’d get what Nick needed.
Nick wanted to do this on his own.