Go Full Circle (A Go Novel Book 5)

by Scarlett Finn

  Heading into the apartment building, they rode the elevator to the floor beneath Ophelia’s and went into Brash’s apartment, where she’d been staying for the last month.

  Hers was the guest room. So, after raiding the liquor cabinet, she went through to her bedroom with Penzance close behind her.

  “Are we really going to do this,” he asked when she put the liquor bottle on the floor and went to the closet to take off her shoes.

  Harlow was careful about standing half in the closet to block what she was doing with the drug pouches and USB that had been secreted in her shoe. Slipping them in a space between a low shelf and the wall, she made sure to move her pile of shirts closer to cover the useful slot she’d discovered while first investigating the room weeks ago.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” she called over her shoulder.

  “You gonna take a shower?”

  She heard his shoes hit the floor and turned to see him lying across the width of her bed. “We’re not having sex,” she said, sliding the closet shut at her back and going across to climb onto the bed.

  Kneeling in the middle, she kept her feet hooked off the foot of the mattress.

  “Ophelia told me to spend the night… I think she’s gonna tell me to stay a lot.”

  When he reached a pointed finger to her knee, she slapped it away. “And you’re going to make excuses to stay here as little as possible.”

  “If I’m here, I can protect you from Brash.”

  That was a good point. If Penzance was on their crew, if he had their stars, she would be begging him to stay with her every night. Backup meant strength in numbers.

  “You’re asking me to trust you in my bed,” she said, moving onto her side, propping her head on a hand above a crooked elbow. “Yet, you have never hinted that you trust me.”

  The look on his face was one of wry amusement, but she thought he might be a little bit impressed too. “What do you want me to do, honey? Get naked and trust you not to touch my dick?”

  Disgust screwed up her face. “I don’t want to see your dick, let alone touch it…” Swaying forward, she touched his chest. “I want to see this?”

  “How ripped I am?” he asked and rolled onto his back to pull off his tie. “I keep in shape. You’re going to love this.”

  “I guarantee I won’t love it.”

  Tossing his tie over his head, he began to undo his shirt buttons. “You will. Bet I’ve got ten pounds on Ryske.”

  “Well, that’s impressive,” she said. “Think about cutting down on the Twinkies.” When he scowled at her, she smiled. “I don’t care about your muscles… Have you got tats?”

  “Sure,” he said and finished unbuttoning his shirt to show her his ink.

  Once they’d spent a half hour comparing tattoos and discussing the process, Harlow remembered the alcohol she’d left on the floor and rolled off the bed to get it.

  “So, I have a question,” she said to the shirtless man on her bed as she unscrewed the bottle cap.

  “Okay.”

  Harlow took a swig from the bottle and went back to kneel on the bed, thrusting the bottle toward him as she did. “What really went down between you and Charnock’s granddaughter?”

  Groaning, he took the bottle and several long mouthfuls like he was downing water after a run, not hard liquor. “Why do women always want to make drama out of sex?”

  “I didn’t know you had sex with her.” The bottle dropped an inch and he just glared at her. “Okay, so I figured you had sex with her. But I wasn’t asking about drama, just a run down.”

  “We got hot and heavy, her grandfather thought she was too young to settle down. I started talking marriage… so he paid me to leave. Worked great for me. I did the gold digger bit in front of him, sweet talked her on the side, and boom, I get a check.”

  His next drink was as long as the first. Handing her back the bottle when he was done, Penzance flopped onto his back and stared up at the ceiling.

  When she took her next drink, she tried to see what he was seeing, but there was nothing there. He hadn’t moved or spoken for a clear minute, he just lay there, staring.

  “You cared about her.”

  “Hmm?” he asked and rolled his head to look at her. “Em? Yeah, sure, I guess. Much as we care about them all.”

  “No, not we,” she said, lying on her side again, her fist around the neck of the open bottle that she held between them. “You cared about her… You loved her.”

  “Not all of us are as easy as your boy,” he said and sat up to snatch the bottle. “We don’t lose our perspective just because a pretty pair of eyes enchants us.”

  Rolling onto her back, Harlow drew a line from the strap of her dress down the neckline to her cleavage. “It wasn’t my eyes that enchanted Ryske,” she said. Penzance’s gaze dropped to her chest where she kept trailing her finger back and forth. “You’ve been doing this a long time, just like him. Maybe you’re ready for something new.”

  Still distracted by her finger on her breast, it took Penzance a few seconds to snap out of his daze. “Something like settling down? Is that what Ryske told you?”

  Those two words weren’t exactly Ryske’s style. “Ryske has never told me he’s ready to settle down.”

  Even though his plan with the pool hall was a sort of suggestion he wanted to move away from the life he’d had, it had never been put to her like that. Probably because he knew better than to make promises he might not be able to keep.

  What other people might consider a dangerous lifestyle was just the norm for Ryske. Even if he did slow down and give up the grifting, he’d still never be a white picket fence kind of guy. But Harlow couldn’t complain about that; he’d been upfront about it.

  “I didn’t love Emma, not like you’re thinking.”

  She shifted onto her side again. This was the closest she’d come to getting real answers from Penzance. Harlow had the time to probe him… and there was liquor. There might not be an opportunity like this again.

  “Then how come you always get this kind of far off look in your eye whenever I talk about it or someone mentions it?”

  The way he breathed in made her think he was going to deny it. But his exhale was one of surrender. “Because sometimes life sucks, Har, and that’s just the way it goes.”

  A truth, perhaps, but she didn’t see how it was relevant to her question. “I’m sorry, you’re going to have to expand on that,” she said, sitting up and crossing her legs. “Life sucks all the time. I don’t get all quiet and brooding about it.”

  That wasn’t a judgement. Penzance was too warm to get away with brooding anyway. Even when he said nothing, he was approachable.

  Still, he was wearing a frown when he grumbled, “No? And I bet Ryske is Mr. Chatty about his shit.”

  Others might not think so; Anwen wouldn’t. But Harlow knew a different side to the man who worked hard to shut out most people. “Ryske is completely honest with me, when he’s not lying to me.”

  It took Penzance a minute to catch up with what she’d said. After replaying it in his head, confusion was all she could read. “What?”

  Sometimes being honest could send people skidding past. It wasn’t all the time that they realized they’d missed anything. Penzance wanted to understand, so she explained.

  Opening her mouth, Harlow took a long breath. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she said. “You’re not Ryske. And he’s also not the only man I have in my life. Every man is different. Every person is different. If I’m worried about someone or I want information from them, I approach them as them, not as some generic entity. You come across as a pretty straight forward kind of guy. So I figure if I want to know something about you, I should just ask, which is what I am doing… Do you recommend another approach?”

  Wearing a smirk, he leaned closer. “Why don’t you try the Ryske way with me, see how it works out.”

  Ha, she didn’t think he’d like that as much as his expression suggested. “You think
I blow him to get information?” Hooking her hands on the foot of the bed behind her, she leaned back. “Withholding works better.”

  He laughed and drank. “No way could you withhold sex from him.”

  Harlow wasn’t discouraged and hitched her chin higher. “Shows what you know,” she said. “I am excellent at withholding.”

  No, she really wasn’t, but she knew that confidence could cover a multitude of sins. Harlow had done it, withheld sex. Not consciously… or even voluntarily sometimes, but there were times she and Ryske had refrained from doing the dirty. In her experience, it was easier to refrain if one of them was dead or in jail.

  Except her confidence didn’t convince Penzance. “Well, I’m not withholding. Information that is. Being with Emma was fun, being around people, going to parties… schmoozing. There was always something going on, something to get ready for.”

  Clarity made her swoon a little. It wasn’t love that made him disappear into his head. It was memories of being part of the circle, being part of any circle she guessed. With her family, Harlow often resented the whole process of getting ready, judgement from her mother, piling into cars, and being packed off to some glitzy event.

  But she took for granted what it meant to belong. It was something she’d always had, whether it was with family, work, or these days with her crew.

  Harlow inhaled. “You’re lonely! Oh, Penzance, you…” She paused and tilted her head. “Why do they call you Penzance?”

  “Oh, your boyfriend never told you that?” he asked. “I’m pretty sure he’s the one who came up with it… It’s ‘cause I’m a pirate, that’s what they say anyway.”

  “You rob people on boats?”

  “The first part, yeah.” His proud grin was joined by a nostalgic laugh. “Though I guess there have been a few antics on the high seas, yeah. I like shiny things, loot, I guess. It started when we were kids. I’d hoard my slice of whatever we’d taken… The guys said I should bury my treasure like a pirate.”

  Hearing him talk of the guys, she sensed there was still fondness there, or maybe he was sentimental about the memories.

  “This was when you lived in the neighborhood… Your family are from there?”

  “My Aunt Audrey raised me,” he said. “She used to sling drinks in Floyd’s.”

  “That’s how you got to know Dover and the guys?”

  “Yeah. That was like our hang out. You know the den in the back?” She nodded. “That was our base of operations. We’d plan shit while Floyd and Audrey were out front… They didn’t know half the crap we got up to. Least we liked to think they didn’t… We used to sneak out the back window and cut down the alley… We’d get up to all sorts of shit around the neighborhood and then sneak back in.”

  Harlow would bet that Floyd and Penzance’s aunt probably knew more than they let on. But, like her, knowing the guys were together, looking out for each other, would have given the adults confidence that they’d be okay.

  19

  Reflecting on what the ragtag bunch of boys must have been like, Harlow was sort of sorry that she hadn’t known them then. Though in her neat little uniform with her perfect ponytail and pleated skirt, she might not have known how to handle such a band of ruffians.

  Ryske would’ve liked her though. For different reasons than he liked her now. Harlow was raised to be polite and prim. While she did rebel, she wouldn’t in public, not back then. If Ryske and his crew came to ruffle her feathers, she’d have retreated into her manners, and probably amused the hell out of him.

  From happy speculation, her mind took a different turn that made her smile fade. “That window saved our lives.”

  There was a pause.

  “I heard about the fire,” he said, obviously figuring out what she meant. “How bad was it?”

  Floyd’s had been his base through his teenage years. Whatever went wrong between him and his crew, the building wasn’t to blame. It seemed he had fond memories of the place.

  “Bad enough that Dover had to remodel the whole lower floor,” she said, feeling like she was breaking news of a friend’s demise.

  “Basement?”

  “Wiped out for the most part,” she said, taking the bottle and wishing for oblivion.

  Harlow was proud of everything Dover had achieved in the remodel. But she would never get over that moment when she’d realized Ryske was still in the blaze and he wasn’t coming out.

  “Shit.”

  That didn’t quite seem to cover it. “Dover and Ryske saved most of the den though and upstairs made it. We got new furniture.”

  Her optimistic tone probably wasn’t fooling anyone, but she went with it anyway.

  “You live there full-time?” Penzance asked.

  She raised a hand to the ceiling. Her reality at the moment, wasn’t exactly what she’d made it. “I live here full-time.”

  But he wasn’t distracted from his question. “In the car with Noon, you called it home.”

  Harlow conceded. “It is home,” she said. “I love it there… I love being there. I love the way it makes me feel.”

  “You love the bar or you love Ryske?”

  “Why can’t it be both?” she asked. Sensing they might be heading into heavy territory, Harlow lightened it up by narrowing one eye and wobbling a flat hand back and forth. “I’d say it’s about sixty-forty.”

  “Toward the man or the building?”

  She pointed the bottle at him. “I’ll leave that to your imagination.”

  Harlow was drinking when he spoke again. “I get what he sees in you.”

  “That’s because you’ve been drinking,” she said and leaned back to put the bottle on the floor at the end of the bed. “You don’t want to say anything to me that would upset Svetlana.”

  “Lala? No, we’re not… It’s not exclusive.”

  In a singsong voice, Harlow teased. “I think she likes you.”

  “Svetlana is paid to like men. She’s good at what she does. Damn good.”

  “I’ll take your word for that… And you wouldn’t consider…”

  “What’s your obsession with my sex life? No, I wouldn’t… Way back, when I was a dumb kid, I followed her around for a few months. Promised to take care of her, begged her to stay off the game… I was an idiot. She taught me a lot about relationships… about the cruelty of women.”

  “We’re not cruel… not as a rule.”

  “Maybe not as a rule, but she was harsh with me… She was right. Like I said, I was an idiot.”

  She grinned. “An idiot in love?”

  He scowled at her. “I think every person who is in love wants everyone to be in love. It’s not that easy. Life is—”

  “Shit, yeah, you said that already.” Prodding his knee, she clenched her jaw to scold him. “Why didn’t you just come home?”

  “I swore when I walked out of Floyd’s that I would never go back.”

  “But you were a kid… an idiot kid. What did you know about the world or the way your life would turn out? Why did you even leave?”

  “Floyd got my Aunt Audrey pregnant,” he said, which made her clamp her mouth closed. He sneered. “Yeah, that shut you up fast, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “You… he… Dover’s dad got your aunt pregnant?” He nodded. “What happened?”

  “He wouldn’t do right by her. No one even knew they were together. No one knew about the pregnancy ‘cept the three of us. I went to him, told him to do the right thing. He tried to calm me down, but I wouldn’t listen… I stormed out of there mad and I never went back. My aunt and me blew out of town that night.”

  “My God,” Harlow said.

  It was so shocking that she almost couldn’t comprehend that it could be true. But he’d never lie about something so shocking… something she had a feeling that Dover would be able to confirm or deny.

  “Yeah, so you talk about not trusting you, that’s the biggest secret I got… Don’t even know which of the guys know it. Don’
t know if any of them do.”

  Ryske didn’t. If he didn’t then Noon definitely didn’t. Dover would be more likely to confide in Ryske than Maze, but only by a hair and if there was drink involved…

  The more likely truth was that Dover had never betrayed his father’s confidence and hadn’t breathed a word to a soul. Harlow wished she’d known this before seeing him tonight. She just wanted to give him a hug and comfort him, even though the secret was more than a decade old.

  “Well, wait a second, where’s the child? What happened to your Aunt Audrey?”

  “She was in a car wreck six months after we left. She didn’t make it.”

  Harlow was almost afraid to ask, but had to. “And the baby?”

  He shrugged, his focus dropping to the bed. “They saved it. It went into the system.”

  “It?”

  Lifting his head, he made eye contact. “Don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. I said I’d step up, but I was in trouble with the law back then. Petty stuff. But with no job, no place to live… I wouldn’t have given me a baby either.”

  “Didn’t they track down Floyd?”

  Another loose lift of the shoulders. “No idea. I was basically laughed out the room when I suggested stepping up, so I blew town. Never looked back.”

  Running away seemed to be something he excelled at. But it wasn’t his fault that the authorities wouldn’t give him a baby when he was really just a baby himself, probably just over the age of majority.

  Even if the authorities had known who the child’s father was, he might not have been deemed a safe bet. Running a bar that was notorious for its links to crime and criminals wouldn’t scream stable environment. Floyd may have had priors himself. Dover would’ve been old enough to voice his opinion and decide where he wanted to live. A baby didn’t have that voice.

  Courts could be fickle and fathers were often seen as an inferior option, especially back then. And the sad truth was babies, even newborns or premmies were quick and easy to house. The child had probably been matched with a foster family, maybe even an adoptive family, before he or she left the hospital.