firms. “Grayson… things are just working out for those two. Don’t fuck it up for them. Alex will kill you if you put Regan on the opposing team again.”
“I’m not putting her on the opposing team. I’m using her connections to put you on the opposing team.”
“Huh?”
I realize I voiced my confusion out loud when Grayson responds to it. “Or should I say, ‘your father on the opposite team.’” His chair pops back into place before fingers stroking a keyboard boom down the line. “We’ve got enough evidence to take down your father, we just don’t have any fucker with big enough gonads to go after him.” I almost correct him until he adds, “Legally. If we weren’t agents, we would have gotten the job done months ago.”
He’s not lying. If you thought Madden was a sick fuck, there won’t be enough derogative words in your vocabulary to describe my father. Do you recall all those years ago when Grayson called me to tell me Melody was at the airport? Can you remember the name on one of the legitimate-looking invoices I pushed across my father’s desk while hunting for clues he had bribed the admission clerk at Browns?
No, me neither. I had completely forgotten about my dad’s business dealing with Kirill Bobrov until my mom asked for my help to locate numerous hidden assets she was certain my father was hiding from her divorce attorney.
The warehouses the Bobrovs and Castros distributed their drugs from weren’t owned by them. They were in my mother’s name. Their ‘rent’ went toward my father’s campaign for office. Even with their monthly rental agreement being thirty percent lower than comparable warehouses in the same location, not once the past fifteen-plus years did my father seek an increase in rent. He was happy with the agreement he’d made with the Castros, so why stir the pot when its contents aren’t close to burning. It’s not every day a married father of four gets first pick of any girl in an under-age sex-trafficking ring.
There are times I want to blame Madden’s issues on our father, but then I realize that’s a cop-out. Joey and I were raised in the same household, and we turned out okay. Even Phoenix has gotten on the straight and narrow. Some people are just born evil. Madden is one of those people.
Tired and somewhat uneased I haven’t had an update from Phillipa about Bobby yet, my restlessness gets the better of me. “What exactly are you getting at, Grayson? You’re kind of talking in riddles.”
My huff is barely heard over the shower switching on in the main room when Grayson replies, “Isaac has a beef with you.”
“That’s the understatement of the century.”
Grayson acts as if I never spoke. “So it’s only right if he can’t get you, he’d go after your family, right?”
I take a second to contemplate what he’s saying before jerking up my chin. I don’t see Isaac targeting Bobby, especially after I discovered he was telling the truth when he said the payments he was making to Ophelia were for Bobby’s trust fund, but I’m confident he’d have no issues pursuing other members of my family. His security team has been investigating Madden as well as I have the past eight months.
Grayson must hear my non-verbal reply. “So why don’t we help him along. Give him some info even someone with their head shoved so far up their own ass couldn’t miss.”
“You want to leak my father’s reports to Isaac Holt?” Surely, I’m missing something. This is a far stretch from how Grayson usually operates. It has me wondering if it’s even his idea.
“Think about it, punk. Isaac is friendly with Henry. Henry owns New York. If you want your dad to do time for his crime, this is an angle we should be looking at.”
He has a point, but it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow, though. One of my biggest downfalls when I spiraled headfirst into depression was believing nothing I did was ever recognized. I worked hard for years, yet I had nothing to show for it—no job, no family, and no Melody.
It took Melody weeks to show me differently, and Dr. Avery months to have me believing what Melody was saying was true. Will this have me taking a step back in my recovery? If I couldn’t hear Melody humming in the shower, unaware she talks more when she’s not wearing her implants than she does when they’re on, I would have said