Better when He's Bold

He looked like the weight of her words hit him like a physical blow and he slumped even farther over his drink.

“I don’t have the money. I just don’t.” He sounded dejected and pathetic. I saw Brysen roll her eyes.

Interesting he mentioned money since this fancy strip club wasn’t cheap, but I wasn’t going to point that out unless I had to.

“You’re pathetic. You poisoned Mom, you lost everything we had. You used me, and when it came time to pay for your mistakes, instead of facing them like a man, you ran. What kind of moron thinks they can hide from a bookie? Jeez, Dad, don’t you think everyone who can’t pay up runs? Race wouldn’t be very good at his job if he just let them go, now, would he?”

Brysen sighed heavily and told him in a tone that held no room for negotiation, “I want you to understand that this offer has nothing to do with me or Karsen. Frankly, I would like nothing more than to see you suffer just a fraction of the way you made the rest of us suffer the last year.”

He just gazed at his drink almost like he couldn’t hear her speaking. I leaned my elbow on the bar on the other side of him and lifted an eyebrow at him when he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “Better listen to her or this conversation moves outside with me.”

He gulped and looked back at his daughter.

Brysen understood that he owed well over three hundred thousand dollars, and by now, the interest on that had to be up over 75K. There was only one way to make it back and that was the same way that he had lost it—gambling.

“Nassir and Race are looking into setting up an offshore site. Online gaming that can’t be traced back to us and that can’t be shut down like a physical location. I’m talking high-stakes, no-holds-barred online gambling. The buy-in is gonna start high at a hundred K per seat. Race has a guy working on the security aspect of it, making it untraceable and making sure the funds are invisible, but he doesn’t want him to waste time with the actual programming of the site. That’s where you come in. Build it, run it, and the guys are willing to give you a cut after your debt is clear. Be mindful that it’s your neck that’ll be on the line if the feds hack into it, Dad. This is your one shot to get out from under your own stupidity.”

Her dad turned his head and looked between us with consideration. “What kind of cut would I get?”

Maybe I would crush his ball sack just for fun. I gritted my back teeth and narrowed my eyes at him. I answered because Brysen just looked disappointed and disgusted. “Ninety–ten.”

He made a choking sound in his throat. “Sixty–forty.”

I pushed off the bar and inclined my head toward the door. “Let’s go, Bry. This was a wasted trip.”

She swung her long legs off the stool and rose to come over to my side. She shook her dad’s hand off when he reached out for her. He scrambled to say, “Eighty–twenty is fair after the debt is paid.”

We had a stare-down for a long minute until I begrudgingly agreed. “Fine.”

I started for the door with Brysen in front of me and told him, “You will stay away from Brysen and Karsen, and you will grant your wife a divorce with zero headache or I will be back. You don’t need to come back to the Point to set the site up, but if you choose to, remember those conditions, and keep in mind if you decide to run again how easy it was to find you.”

That was the end of it as far as I was concerned. From here on out it would be Booker’s job to make sure the man was doing what he was supposed to be doing, and if he slipped up in the slightest, I was going to give the go-ahead to make him bleed—a lot.

I wheeled out of the parking lot and headed back toward the hotel where we were crashing for the weekend. It wasn’t a terrible drive, just a little over six hours, but I hadn’t been sure which way things were going to go with her father, so we had made arrangements at one of the casinos that was off the Strip to stay for a couple days.

Brysen reached out and curled her hand over mine where it was resting on the gearshift.

“You didn’t have to let him off so easily. Not for me.”

She might think that way now, but after how sideways it turned me to hear about my own dad’s death, deserved or not, at the hands of another, I knew there was no way I could do that to her.

“If he follows through, it’s a win-win. If not, then he can deal with the repercussions and we’ll just move forward like we always do. We’ll focus on your mom, making sure she stays on her meds, gets into therapy, and tries to stay on the path to recovery so you and Karsen have a shot at having at least one redeemable parent.”

I was doing the same thing with my own mother. We weren’t reconciled by a long shot, but with my dad gone and all the money tied up by the government, she had nothing and no one and I couldn’t justify keeping her frozen out. It was what my dad had done to me, and if I had learned anything the last few months, it was that I was going to be many different things, but being like my father was not one of them. I set her up in a condo in the same building the girls and I lived in, and told her that as long as she made an effort, tried to adjust to life in the Point, I would help her out. So far it was hit-or-miss. She was asking for money left and right, but she had also gone out and gotten a job in an office as a secretary to help support herself.

Seeing the conflict it created within me when I was forced to say no to my mom when she was being frivolous, Brysen took it upon herself to be the gatekeeper. She flatly informed my mom that any money she was asking for had to be approved by her first before I would hand it over. My girl had a way easier time shutting Lady Hartman down than I did, and the requests were coming fewer and farther between, and when they did come, it was for actual things she couldn’t afford.