Chapter 1

I want to be a nice person, but everyone is just so stupid.

-Travis’ secret thoughts

Travis

I looked around the house, wondering how this had become my life.

Seven years ago, everything was okay.

Seven years ago, I was living the dream.

I had my own business that my brother and I had purchased with help from my father. Dante was my partner. We opened a club together. I had a wife and kid.

And now…nothing.

My wife was no more. I had a kid that hated me because her mother poisoned everything that came out of her mouth.

And, now there was Dante who was so far in the deep end, head barely above water, that I wasn’t sure whether he was going to sink or swim.

I was short a few drivers at our business, working fourteen-hour days at minimum. I needed at least three more workers and about ten more hours in the day to cover the workload that Dante had left behind.

And then there was Hannah…and my son, Travis Junior, also known as TJ.

“Anything?”

I looked over to find my other brother, Reed, standing in the doorway.

“He’s gone,” I said, sounding as tired as I felt. “Either he took my advice to heart, or he got out of here before I could give him any more of my recommendations.”

Reed grunted something.

“You need to give him time.”

I looked over to find my other brother, Baylor, standing there. He had a white piece of paper in his hands, and he was holding it out to me.

“I’ve given him time, Baylor,” I told him, taking the paper. “We’ve all given him time. Hell, I know he needs more time, but I can’t do this on my own. I know y’all are helping, and it’s nice. But he’s co-owner of this business with me. I can’t do anything without his consent. It’s the law…”

I trailed off as I got the first look at the paper he’d handed me, and the moment I saw it, my heart sank to around my knees.

“No.”

The word was pulled from the deepest part of my belly, and so angry and upset that it was a wonder that the walls of Dante’s house didn’t crumble around me.

“You need to give him time,” Baylor repeated.

I looked up at the huge floor to ceiling fireplace. It was gorgeous. Made of rough cut stone, it was something that I remembered Dante and his dead wife building to this day.

It’d been something to see, because his wife could barely even lift up the rocks as she handed them to him.

In the center of that fireplace was a photograph of Dante’s family. His wife. His two kids. Him.

They all looked so fuckin’ happy.

There was no way for them to know that a mere week after taking that picture, they would all die in a car crash caused by our very own sister.

That Dante would have to listen to his wife and two kids scream in panic until the line went dead and the car fully submerged while he sat in the tow truck next to me, alive and well.

“Tobias found the woman.”

We all knew the woman that Reed was talking about. The woman was a woman that Dante had slept with. Once he’d done the deed, he’d said words, she’d packed up, and he’d gone back to the falling apart man that we were left with after his wife and kids were killed. Only, he hadn’t realized that he left a little piece of himself behind in the woman.

“Well, maybe that’ll be the lifeboat in this sinking ship of a life we have,” Baylor murmured. Then, the words we weren’t meant to hear, came. “But I doubt it.”

“Let’s go,” I said, looking away from the photo. “With this, I might be able to get shit done and remain out of jail. But I don’t think this is the end. This is only the beginning.”

***

Four hours later, I walked into the house.

Hannah and her daughter, Reggie, from a previous relationship, were on the floor putting a large puzzle together.

The second I came through the door, Reggie was up and running at my legs.

“Hey there, girly girl,” I murmured to the little tot that looked so much like her mother that it hurt. “How are you doing tonight?”

Reggie was an eight-year-old bundle of energy that was the absolute cutest thing that I’d ever seen in my life. And that was saying something because I had some cute kids.

TJ was all me, from the top of his curly-haired head to the bottom of his long toes. My other daughter, Alexandra, from my first marriage, was also my mini-me, only in female form. She had beautiful long curly hair, piercing eyes exactly like mine, and skin the color of mocha chocolate, thanks to her Puerto Rican mother’s heritage.

But Reggie?

God, she was all Hannah. Long, curly blonde hair, bright blue eyes, skin that always had a slight tan. She was literally what you would think about when you thought of a beautiful child.

There was no doubt in my mind that she would grow up to be a breathtaking adult.

And when that day came, my heart would literally ache.

“I made a one hundred on my sight words,” she declared. “And I can read like Mama!”

I looked over to Hannah, who was staring down at the puzzle instead of looking at me, and my heart squeezed.

God, I was ruining everyone’s lives.

I didn’t know what to do!

I was stuck…and it was all Allegra Levaux’s fault.

“Maybe you can read to me instead of me reading to you tonight.”

Reggie’s face lit up with wonder. “I can do that?”

I started to chuckle and then dropped a kiss onto her head.

“Yeah, baby. We can do that.” I winked at her, and she giggled.

“Come help me and Mama finish this puzzle,” she ordered. “It’s a five hundred piece one of Elsa. Mama says she hates them.”

I knew she hated puzzles.

I was a puzzle.

One she couldn’t figure out.

The only problem was that there was no puzzle to figure out. I knew what was wrong with me.

She knew what was wrong with me.

It was something that I couldn’t fix…not and continue seeing my other kid.

Allegra, my other child’s mother, was a vindictive bitch.

The moment I met Hannah, she’d started turning Alex against me.

What had once been my baby girl, my mini-me in everything that I did, now hated my guts.

And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Either I left Hannah and TJ, or I didn’t get to see Alex.

It was a lose-lose situation. One that I wasn’t sure that I could ever possibly win.

“I can help,” I offered, walking to the back of the couch and placing my hand on the back to steady myself. “Just let me get my boots off.”

They were covered in grease and grime from the shop.

One of our new trucks had been damaged during a call, and I’d had to help fix it up to get it back into service.

It’d taken an hour out of my approved time with Alex, and at this point, I couldn’t say that it was bothering me.

There was only so much you could take of your daughter saying she hated you before you believed her.

Walking into Reggie’s warming embrace was like summer compared to Alex’s winter.

You’d never be able to tell that Alex and Reggie were the same age.

Alex was quiet, withdrawn, and quick to rile.

Reggie was loud, rambunctious, and never met a stranger.

They were both eight years old, and neither one of them had their father in their lives.

Though, that wasn’t my doing on Alex’s part.

I tried to have a place in her life. Even though the last year Alex had done nothing but spew nasty words at me the entire time she was with me, I still picked her up on Wednesdays and took her out to eat. I still picked her up on the weekends and took her to Dante’s place to spend the weekend with her.

I couldn’t take her home, though.

Hannah, Reggie, and TJ were in my home.

We may not be together, Hannah and I, but we were a family.

I wanted Hannah more than my next breath, but with Allegra’s threats, and Alex’s proof that she wasn’t threatening me, I didn’t have much I could do.

So Hannah was just my roommate.

Hell, I was barely ever here.

TJ was now two months old, and in daycare because both of his parents worked.

I wanted to be able to give my child the time and devotion I’d shown Alex when she’d been a baby, but at this point in my life, it just wasn’t feasible.

An hour after I put TJ to bed, Hannah stopped by the couch with an armful of laundry and asked me what I knew she would ask me.

“How did your night with Alex go?”

I looked up from the paperwork that I was filling out at the coffee table and saw her beautiful eyes on me.

God, it was like a shot straight to the heart.

“She said she hated me no less than a hundred times. Screamed that I was hurting her while we were out having pizza, and told some lady that I’d kidnapped her.”

Hannah’s mouth fell open in shock.

“You’re joking.”

I closed my eyes, dropped my pen, and let the remembrance of the hellish night sweep through me.

“No, not kidding at all,” I moaned into my hands. “I guess I’m just lucky that the police department is still under construction.”

Two months ago, corruption had been discovered in our local police department, and it’d been shut down pending further investigation. A month ago, the choice to reopen, but hold an election for the chief of police, had been decided. They’d also concluded that everyone in the department was being terminated, even the ones that weren’t convicted of any wrongdoing. They’d sat idly by and let whatever happened, happen.

The next Chief of Police would be the one to choose his staff.

The election had been a week ago, and the new chief was building his department. It took time, though, and thank God for that.

“What happened?”

Hannah dropped the clothes on the back of the couch and circled it, stopping beside the chair that was at an angle to the couch, and planted herself in it.

I tried not to watch the way her shorts rode up her thighs, or the way her breasts that were full of milk for our child practically spilled out of her shirt.

She wasn’t wearing a bra, either.

I swallowed and looked back down at the coffee table.

All the numbers that I was crunching were blurring together.

“The lady at the counter that had checked us out knew me. Knew that Alex was my child.” I sighed. “Since she’s the owner, everyone was a whole lot more forgiving. Plus, you know how Tanny is. She’s so freakin’ grandmotherly that nobody would dare challenge her word.”

Hannah’s mouth twitched, but just as quickly, that humor fled.

“You need to do something here, Travis.”

I knew it.

She knew it.

We all fucking knew it.

I just didn’t know what to do.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” I admitted. “I’m literally hanging on, doing everything I can, but it’s never enough.”

She didn’t come to me. Didn’t put her hands on me. Didn’t even twitch.

God, I wanted that so badly.

But Allegra had already proven that she would do just about anything to keep me exactly how she wanted me.

If there was an award for most awful ex-wife, Allegra would win it twice.

She didn’t want me. She divorced me a year after Alex was born, and that was a shocker.

I’d thought that everything was going great. Sure, I was a distracted man at times since I was helping grow a business with Dante, but I was still home every night by five, home on the weekends. She had a nice house, good clothes covering her back, and a cleaning lady that came in once a week to make sure Allegra didn’t have to stress herself.

Then, one day out of the blue, she’d decided to leave.

There’d been no convincing her to stay, and I’d been left feeling incredibly confused.

Alex had been, too.

And for her, I’d decided that the best thing to do was not to fight it. To get our lives back to normal—or as normal as two adults and a child could be when they were no longer a family—and make sure that Alex never wanted for anything. But she did that staying with her mother.

We’d worked out a visitation schedule without lawyers. We’d split as amicably as a man could when he didn’t want to leave his wife, and things had become our new normal.

Only Allegra was a bitch. This I found out over the next seven years as I started to get out in the world. To be happy again.

The moment that I slept with my first woman after Allegra, Alex missed her first Wednesday visitation with me. Because Allegra, supposedly, ‘forgot.’

It only got worse after that.