Page 34 of Sinister Red
I light another cigarette as they enter the office, Stephanie giggling like a dumbass over nothing because Lewis Weston still looks nervous as hell and hasn’t said shit since he got out of the car. They reappear a few minutes later, a room key with a giant gaudy rabbit’s foot attached, and as soon as I get a good shot of their faces, I start snapping pictures.
The two of them leaving the motel office, walking past his unmistakable car, smiling at each other, leaning in close while Weston unlocks the room. I even get a shot of him kissing her briefly before they walk inside, the bastard sealing his own fate with damning evidence.
Evidence that won’t do me a damn bit of good, but I keep collecting it anyway.
I’m not really sure what the fuck I’m going to do with it to be honest, because it’s not like having it is going to change anything from the last six-and-a-half years of my wasted fucking life.
To say I was surprised when I got locked up would be an understatement, but I was even more so when the club’s lawyer—Darrell Sykes—couldn’t get me, or any of us, out sooner.
Between Abernathy and Withers, I figured we had it in the bag like usual, but I could not have been more wrong about that. The captain had no idea the Kings had been tied to the drug deal, had no fucking clue we had been connected to it at all because he’s usually the one that makes sure those things are never found out. And yeah, sure, we were running a big ass fucking shipment, but again, having Withers and his men on the payroll usually guaranteed we never got caught. I know why we did though, I knew the second my apartment was raided because that fucker Chad had been one of the captain’s men we thought we could trust, but obviously he defected or some shit since we got popped hard thanks to him.
Even still, I figured we’d do a few nights in lock up, and he’d get things sorted out with Abernathy, then we’d be out by the following weekend, but the judge was up for reelection and in order to keep himself, as well as us, safe and doing what we have been, he needed to save face. So, Marbles, Cy, Jackal, and me all got a minimum of ten years for transporting enough drugs to wipe out Colorado Springs as well as a few other charges they decided to tack on, like illegal weapons possession and shit.
But Tank wasn’t going to let that fly.
Once things cooled down, our president went to bat for us with a vengeance, and slowly but surely we started getting out ongood behavior.
Jackal was out first, serving only five years of his sentence, and that made the most sense because Gunner wasn’t going to let his boy rot for some bullshit. Marbles was out a few months later, but Cy and I didn’t get released until about a month ago. Apparently since we were the ones carrying unregistered firearms, it was harder to get us out and we ended up serving almost seven years in Englewood Federal Correctional Institution.
I don’t really give a shit about that though.
I’ve done my fair share of time over the years, the Wulven Kings have a reputation so we don’t get fucked with, and being locked up doesn’t really bother me.
It didn’t anyway, not until it ruined the best fucking thing I’ve ever had.
With a huff, I suck half my smoke into my lungs then smash it out in the ashtray of my borrowed ride, my eyes never leaving room four.
Goddamn Lewis Weston.
I could blame him for my current situation just as much as I could blame getting locked up for it, but at the end of the day, there is one person responsible for the way things went down and you better believe at some point I’ll be getting the answers I need.
The answers I fuckingdeserve.
And when I am finally face to face with Sofie Berk after nearly seven goddamn years, I will make fucking sure that she explains why the hell she ghosted on me, right before I drop the photos of her lying, cheatingfiancéin her lap.
Yeah, that was a real fucking slap in the face.
I barely knew we fucking broke up, let alone that she was dating other people becauseshe wouldn’t fucking talk to me.
Not only did Sofie stop speaking to me almost immediately after getting arrested, she didn’t show up at my hearing like I basically begged her to do, and about a month after I was sent to Englewood, her number was disconnected. After that, any information I got on the woman I was fucking in love with came in the form of messages relayed from Harlow to Marbles and then to me.
She changed her number.
She quit working for her dad.
Sofie applied to a school in Denver, got accepted, and switched career paths to some extent by becoming a pathologist at Denver Health.
That’s where she met Lewis Weston and the two got engaged last Christmas apparently, right before Roland Berk got shot at a WKMC scene, which is the only reason she came back to Sabine Woods. Sofie came home to take care of her dad and run his business while he couldn’t, and apparently Berk was able to convince her to stay, at least temporarily.
And the second I got out, I started looking into everything I could about Sofie and the life she created without me.
A life that was supposed to beours.
I confirmed everything Harlow had been telling me—which she only did because that girl is head over heels for Marbles and she thinks Sofie made a huge mistake when she cut me off—right down to her test scores in school and reputation at Denver Health, and then I started looking into her new man.
Lewis Weston is a plastic surgeon from Ohio who transferred to Denver in order to bring his practice further out west. He specializes in reconstruction for burn or traumatic injury victims, but has plenty of boob and nose jobs on the side, which led to quite a sketchy list of clients that were more than what they seemed. And sure enough, when I looked harder, I found a few of them who were reoccurring patients, ones he was seeing after hours or on the weekends. That didn’t mean a lot to me until I compared timelines and found a couple that overlapped with when he started dating Sofie, but it seemed to stop when they moved out here.
Or Weston did a decent job of covering his tracks when they first came to Sabine Woods.
