“Is that you complaining to me?” Orion growled. “Is that what this is?” He sliced his hand through the air. “And can we stop for a second to clarify something for a moment? Did you just tell me that our three younger brothers get to sit on their asses or go do something entirely different and they draw a salary no matter what? But we don’t?”
“No. That was the cost”—Devon used air quotes—“of our shares of the business. And that was the cost for Zane as well. He gave us his share in the business. Remember? That automatically entitled him to the board member’s salary since he was no longer getting shares in the profits.”
Orion stared at the television screen. He could not help but feel like Zane had gotten one over on them with that. How had Orion missed it? How had their mother missed it? Maybe Orion was so damn worried about keeping Tisha Olivares-King locked into her little corner by limiting her influence on the business that he had completely missed that portion of the will.
“Zane is a lot smarter than we give him credit for,” Devon said, his tone grudging. “I know he’s always seemed like nothing but a flirt, but I think we need to accept that the guy really knows how to read the legal fine print.”
Orion just snorted and shook his head at the idea of giving Zane credit.
“Read the legal fine print,” Devon murmured. He looked intrigued for some reason. What in the hell was he trying to come up with now? What other ridiculousness was about to unfold in the King family? “Do you think that the rumors now circulating around town about some urban legend regarding something they’re referring to as the Bigfoot Wolf have anything to do with Zane?”
“Zane?” Orion scoffed. Devon needed to remember that there was one very big loose cannon hanging about Dallas. “You’re forgetting Gemini. Gemini King likes scaring humans. He finds it amusing. He gets his enjoyment and entertainment from that sort of thing. I believe even Edward exploited that fact.”
“True.” Devon waved his hand impatiently at the screen. “They’re blabbing on and on about teen-aged vandals.”
Orion shrugged. “Don’t you remember that Landry Fisher was the one who got attacked a few years ago by teenagers? And then it happened a few days ago too. Of course they’re obsessed with it right now. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ll get over it.” And then something occurred to Orion that made him rethink everything. “Unless they’ve gone to Gemini with a request that he help them out with some kind vigilante mission.” Orion frowned at Devon. “Do you think you could see him doing that kind of thing? Really?”
“So you have no thoughts that our brother Zane might decide to take that into his own hands? None at all?”
Orion blew that off without even thinking twice about it. Devon didn’t know what he was talking about. Gemini was the problem. He had been and he would continue to be so. “All of the sightings of wolves whether they want to call it some bullshit Bigfoot thing or not are Gemini King. I know it. I’ve know about that bastard for years now. You have no idea how much of a problem he’s been and how much trouble he’s caused.”
Devon only shook his head. “Fine. Whatever. I’m just telling you that I think you need to keep an open mind.”
“About Gemini?” Orion whipped his head sideways and felt the need to take his brother’s head off. “Are you serious?”
“No! I didn’t say a freaking word about Gemini King.” Devon shook his head and rubbed both hands down his face. “What is wrong with you? You and mother are so damn obsessed with the idea that Dad was unfaithful. Gemini is older than you are.”
“And yet Dad was still married to our mother when he fathered the bastard!” Orion snarled. Every time he thought about it he got angry all over again. “Do you not see how much of an affect this has had on our mother? Don’t you see? Don’t you understand that half of how she acts right now, and all of her mistrust when it came to Dad, was all about this?
“Whoa there!” Devon gazed at Orion as though he were somehow seeing him for the first time. “You must be joking. You have to be. Are you really going to sit there and try to tell me that you think our mother was so deeply affected by Dad having a baby with another woman that she’s been a total beeyotch to everyone around her for the last—how old are you now? Thirty? Thirty years. Yeah. You think that’s the reason Mother has been a terrible person for thirty years? You are out of your ever-loving mind!”
He didn’t understand. None of them did. Tisha Olivares-King was a classic woman done wrong. She was the kind of person who didn’t let it go and that wasn’t good. Sure. But there was also no way that she was getting the credit she deserved for putting up with a husband who hadn’t loved her and had never really made the effort to try.
“Wait a second,” Devon said quietly. In the background the news station had cut back to the studio where the anchors were still talking about the unfairness of the school district terminating Landry Fisher’s employment when she was technically the wronged party. Devon pursed his lips and looked at Orion in a way that made him very uncomfortable. “Are you trying to tell me that you feel sorry for our mother? You’ve been what? Her lackey for all of these years just because she was wronged by our father?”
Orion did not even have to think about his answer. “Yes.”
“So what about Dad’s death? I’ve heard you get angry with our mother. I know that you’re perfectly aware that she was sleeping with his best friend.”
“Like he didn’t know!” Orion shot back angrily. “He knew about it and he never did a damn thing to make amends so that she would want to stop!”
“So basically you hold Dad responsible for all of Mom’s behavior,” Devon said with a sorry shake of his head. “That’s sick, Orion. Absolutely sick.”
Wait. That wasn’t exactly true. Well, not exactly like that. Orion’s brain was a bit fuzzy sometimes on exactly how he felt about their mother. She was their mother. She was his mother. She was the one who had always been there for him when his father hadn’t been. Their father—Big Mac King—had been hard on his eldest son. He had been a hard taskmaster. But in contrast, the other boys had seen a different side of their mother and father. Mother had never really loved her younger four boys the way she had the eldest, and their father had loved the boys more than he had Orion. It had been a fact.
“I wasn’t the oldest child,” Orion reminded Devon. “Gemini is our father’s oldest child. He’s the leader of the pack. He’s the big wolf. You don’t think I realize what that means?”
“Oh, so you’re worried you’ll be just like the rest of us?” Devon shook his head in disgust. “You don’t even care, do you? That she had him killed?”
“Who, Mother?” This was always where it got pretty hazy for Orion. He didn’t honestly believe that his mother would have had his father killed. “I think it was Tex. I think Tex might have been working on trying to get Mother to leave Dad, but I don’t think Mother had as much to do with that murder as we’ve all painted it.”
“And where, pray tell, did you get that idea from?”
Mum’s the Word
Chapter One
Kami Delgado rolled over and slammed her hand down on the alarm clock about thirty seconds before it started shrieking. Lying on her back, she stared at the ceiling. The room was dark. Pitch black. But that was also because it wasn’t really a bedroom. There were no windows in here. At night when Kami slept the suffocating blackness was almost overwhelming. But at least it was a room. A room she didn’t have to share with the billions of other people who occupied her parents’ apartment on the fringes of Vickery Meadow in Dallas, Texas.
Exhaling a huge sigh, Kami forced herself to sit up. Billions. Okay, so that was a bit of extreme hyperbole. There were not billions of people occupying the apartment. Just herself, her parents, and her seven siblings still living at home. Her eldest brother, Julio, had finally moved out and gotten a place to share with a half a dozen of their cousins. Personally Kami wasn’t sure that was any better than her situation.
She threw her
legs over the side of the bed and forced herself to stand up. It was three-thirty in the morning. Her bus ride to the building where she worked in downtown Dallas took at least thirty minutes even this early on a Friday morning. Groping the plastic deck chair beside her narrow cot, Kami found her work coveralls and began to pull them on. They smelled of orange oil and beeswax and dirt from her cleaning job. It was a smell that had become so familiar that sometimes Kami worried it was like her own personal perfume.
There was no mirror or dresser in her bedroom. Her regular clothes were stored in a refrigerator box that her father had brought home from one of his construction jobs. Orlando Delgado had fashioned the box into a closet of sorts with a metal rod sticking out both sides of the thick cardboard. If Kami was really careful the thing did not fall apart as she was trying to arrange her meager collection of casual and going out clothes. Orlando had joked that this was the best method of making sure a woman didn’t collect too much clothing. Kami disagreed. Poverty was the best way to do that, and her family had that one down.
The apartment was tiny. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, the small combined living and dining space, and then Kami’s little room. Kami’s tiny cubbyhole had once been a utility room. When the family’s washer and dryer had broken, Kami’s father had opted to let her move in there instead of buying new appliances. Now Kami’s mother did the washing in the bathtub and the drying on lines in the living room and Kami had a place to sleep away from her younger brothers and sisters.
Once her coveralls were zipped over her shorts and T-shirt, Kami shoved her wallet and her bus pass into her pockets and very carefully opened the bedroom door. Her work boots were over by the front door in a knot of shoes and boots that belonged to the entire family. It took only a moment to put them on and even less time to steal out the front door of the apartment.
The complex was fairly nice as far as apartment complexes went. Vickery Meadows was so densely filled with apartment rentals that the neighborhoods were almost entirely distinguished by what building a person lived in. People could live, go to school, get work, be born, and die in the same four-block radius without ever leaving it.
That scared Kami.
As she made her way out of her building and down through the darkened early morning to the bus stop, she thought of all of the things she wanted to do with her future. College. That was a big one. She wanted to be educated. She wanted out of here. She wanted a big house and no kids. She didn’t want a bunch of people depending on her to bring home enough money to feed the family. She just wanted to live.
The lights of the bus broke through the gloom of the early December morning. Dallas weather was wet. It didn’t matter what kind of wet. It was just wet. Humid in the summer, damp in the winter. And right now the sky was starting to spit bits and pieces of some strange form of half frozen precipitation as if the clouds were actually trying to work up enough energy for a once-in-ten-years snowstorm.
Kami hunched into her coveralls. They were thick enough. At least they usually were. And the canvas was waterproof. The dull blue color wasn’t bad either. It was just that the shapeless quality of them literally stole her femininity. But maybe that didn’t matter.
Several people jostled in close as the brakes on the bus squealed in protest of the stop. Not even the bus wanted to hang around this area. Not that it was a bad area. Kami would have called it depressed or maybe just depressing. She filed onto the bus with everyone else and swiped her pass. The bus pass had been a big deal. She’d had to do a lot of fast talking to convince her father that she needed to spend some of her hard-earned wages on a bus pass that could get her other places on the Dallas transit system. Papa hadn’t seen the need to go to a museum or a park. He’d figured it was better to spend the pennies it took to get to work and back and that was it. Once you were home you were home and there was no other reason to leave. Ever.
Kami dropped into a seat and covered a yawn with her hand. Around her the other riders did much the same. She recognized these people. She saw them every day. And sometimes she entertained herself with the knowledge that none of them knew that they were not going to be seeing Kami Delgado on this bus coming from this apartment in Vickery Meadows for much longer.
Kami Delgado had a secret. It was a huge one. So big that sometimes she felt as though her chest was going to bust wide open with the need to shout it from the rooftops. But she couldn’t say anything about it. Not yet. Soon, but not yet.
A big fat spot of moisture splatted on the bus window. It didn’t look as though the potential snowflake had much form. December. It was the first week of December. Soon the middle class and the rich would be throwing their holiday parties. There would be extra work to be had with the catering companies. Kami usually worked as many hours as possible during the holiday season. It was the only way to help her mother get enough money together to buy presents for the little kids. Her father made decent enough money at his construction job. It put a roof over their heads and bought food for the family. But when it came to the little extras that life often required, it was Kami’s paycheck that her parents needed.
Kami settled into the regular stop and go motion of the bus. Around her she could see her fellow travelers doing the same. They would brace themselves as the bus braked hard right in time to stop short on the curb in front of each sheltered bus stop on the route. Then as soon as the last passenger was on or off, the driver would slam on the accelerator and the process would start all over again. Kami didn’t know how to drive. She had never tried. But she did know that she could probably have done better than that, even in a bus.
In the reflection of the bus window, Kami could see her wide features and dark complexion. Her parents had come to the US from Mexico decades ago looking for a better life. They swore up and down that this was better, but Kami sometimes wondered if they weren’t just the same people living in a different zip code.
Kami had inherited their dark skin and thick black hair. Hers was curly. Not just curly but crazy. As in, right now she had wrapped a rubber band around the mess so tightly that it was nothing but a little topknot on her head. If she had dared to let it down she probably would have knocked out anyone within a five-foot radius from the sheer volume and bounce her hair possessed.
She was also short. Kami hated short. She was four-foot-eleven-inches tall and sometimes she felt like a midget running around Dallas with all the cowboys in their high-heeled boots and huge western hats. Even in heels she only looked normal height. Of course, her father told her it didn’t matter since she was going to marry a Mexican man—in particular, the son of his best friend—and that the young man was only five foot two anyway.
Kami tried not to think about that. Marrying a boy she’d known all her life as a mean-spirited bully with a Napoleon complex to match. But it did not matter now. Not really. Kami had a secret. She just wasn’t ready to share it with her father yet. He wasn’t going to understand. And she needed to wait until her younger brother, David, was old enough to get a job. David was turning fifteen in one month. He would be able to work then. With the earnings from David and from Juana, just a year older than David, Kami would be able to finally get out on her own.
Glancing up, Kami happened to catch a glimpse of the morning paper that her bus neighbor happened to be reading. There was a ridiculous headline about giant wolves spotted in Vickery Meadow and something else about teenagers needing to be careful when they were out after dark. Kami could not help but snort as she contemplated what kind of nonsense the world had come to that an actual newspaper would run a story about something so blatantly preposterous.
Giant wolves. Whatever!
The bus squealed to a stop in front of a huge building in downtown Dallas. The woman put her newspaper away. She had been reading the society pages. So many people seemed to find that stuff fascinating. Kami wondered if there was anything on the society page about the King family. The super rich family seemed to make the news an awful lot these days.
There wa
s no time to waste thinking about rich people and their idiotic problems. This stop was different than the hundred or so ones before it. This was Kami’s stop. She grabbed hold of the railing and held tight as the bus careened to a stop at the curb.
There were more buildings than just the King Security building here in downtown Dallas. That meant there were a whole lot of people getting on and off the bus right now. They jostled for position and finally formed enough of a line that nobody died on the way off the bus. It was a near thing though. Most of the people present were support staff like Kami. Janitors and secretaries, mail room employees, and cafeteria workers. Regular businesspeople didn’t go to work at four in the morning. At least not when it came to the usual, garden variety corporate flunkies.
Pushing her way through what felt like the daily horde, Kami headed directly for the office building labeled KING. It was the Dallas and international headquarters of King Security Solutions, Incorporated. Kami had been employed by a subcontractor as a part of the janitorial staff for nearly ten years. She had first gotten the job at sixteen and she had been there ever since.
The building was ten stories. Not enormous, and yet all ten floors belonged to the King family’s company and that was rather unique. They didn’t rent out a floor or two to someone else. At least not yet. Considering the disasters hitting the family one by one lately, Kami would not be surprised to find out that they’d decided to rent out a few floor just to pay the mortgage. Or rent. Or whatever. Kami had absolutely no experience with that sort of thing. Owning a tiny house seemed like a goal that was perpetually out of reach. The concept of being the owner of an entire building was almost more than she could wrap her head around.
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 72