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CHAPTER ONE
Gage
Idon’t miss my brother. Half-brother. We weren’t close. You might think that’s a shitty thing to say, even admit to, but Max...how do I describe Max? He was Ivy League. Harvard, Princeton. Columbia. He was Carnegie Hall. I’m...King’s Crossing Technical College—the one in the slums—and a biker bar in the industrial park that has open mic on Saturday nights.
None of that means I didn’t love the guy, but him getting mixed up with the Maddoxes and the Blacks only proves my point.
Zarah Maddox.
She’s sleek, like a cat, you know? Like one of those jaguars that wears a collar full of rubies rich people keep as pets. I feel like I gotta pay a fee just to look at her.
And my brother was fucking her.
Yeah, completely out of my league.
Not that I want her, and this isn’t the case of protesting too much, either. I know my place. It’s a tiny apartment and aknocked-up woman in the kitchen waiting for me to come home and do her over the table.
Not that I have one right now.
The knocked-up woman.
Or the kitchen table.
I eat over my sink. You think I’m some kind of heathen, getting crumbs all over my floor?
Even if my dog is a canine vacuum.
I shift in my seat, a burger wrapper crinkling under my ass.
“Getting bored?”
That’s my old man. Max and I have different fathers, and I’m in business with mine. We hunt down runaway kids, tail cheating husbands, that kind of thing. It’s not much, but it pays the bills.
“She’s not going anywhere.”
We’re parked on the street in a nice residential section of King’s Crossing. By nice, I mean rich. People have yards here. Gated community. Pop put a taxi light on the top of our car and we’re waiting for the soon-to-be ex-wife of a wealthy businessman to meet her lover. This guy doesn’t want to pay the alimony he’ll owe her if the split doesn’t involve adultery on her part, and so far, the woman’s clean. Our client won’t take too kindly to the news he’s the only one that has a piece of ass on the side.
This is my life. It’s no wonder Max and I didn’t get along. Though his job as a reporter wasn’t much better. Only, he was paid more for digging shit up on people and he died a hero.
“Nope, but he’s paying so we might as well see what she does.”
There are worse things we could be doing, honestly, and a million worse places we could be staking out.
Pop settles behind the wheel and pulls his baseball cap lower over his eyes though it’s midnight and he’s not blocking out anylight. He rests his hands on his stomach. He looks like he’s about to take a snooze and let me watch for the woman alone, but I know my old man. He wants to talk.
“You see his lawyer yet?”
There it is.
“Nope.”
“Gage.”
I hate when Pop says my name like that. I’m disappointing him. “I know.”
When Max died, he left all his shit to me. Don’t know why, but he did. For the past year, his attorney’s been hounding me to go to his office, sign some paperwork, and pick up the key to Max’s apartment. His estate went through probate, but I haven’t done anything with the money he left me. I need to clean his place out, too. I’ve been throwing cash at his rent to avoid the inevitable.
I contacted Zane Maddox through Max’s attorney and arranged to grab the few things Max had with him when he was doing his own stakeout with all his hoity-toity friends. Some asshole took his cat without asking, but I’ve never been a cat person, and Baby, my German shepherd/husky mix, wouldn’t like sharing my attention. Because the guy did me a favor, I didn’t press the issue.