Chapter 20

Mom: Watch your language.

Me: Oh, fuck. Sorry.

Travis

“You’re being a complete dick to her,” Baylor pointed out.

I flipped him off and walked to the truck that I’d unlocked for her.

“What’d she get out of here?” Baylor asked curiously.

“Her purse?” I guessed.

“No, she had her purse with her,” he said.

I thought about that for a moment. I didn’t know what she got if it wasn’t that. Maybe her water bottle? She’d been trying to drink more water lately.

I shrugged. “Then I don’t know. Not that I really care, either.”

He grumbled something under his breath that I didn’t bother asking him to clarify. I didn’t really want to know what my brother thought. What little he’d told me already this morning was enough for me to know that I didn’t want to hear any more.

He thought I was being an ass, and maybe I was.

But all in all, I was just pissed off.

I fucking hated the system and how things worked. I hated that Allegra was able to get the hell out of jail on her own fucking recognizance only hours after she’d had an accident that had put our daughter in a Life Flight helicopter hours away. I hated that she came up to the hospital acting like a concerned mother only a day later.

And the icing on the cake was what the judge had just done.

Who the fuck would give a woman that had almost killed her own daughter fucking jail time on the weekends so it didn’t fuck with her work? Work that she did with her own father, so they couldn’t even say she’d be fired due to missing.

Yeah, I wasn’t buying it.

Her father had done something.

Then, he’d then given Alex the choice to go home with her during the week while she wasn’t in jail—and we all knew how that would turn out. Alex would go, and then I’d get her back, and she’d be the same hateful kid that she’d been before her accident.

So no, I wasn’t mad. I was angry. I was furious. I was livid.

I was sad.

Then, after all of that had gone down, I’d walked out of the courthouse, intending to apologize to Hannah, only for her to ride out on the back of some other man’s bike. The same man that had been about to divorce my baby sister before she was killed.

Which meant now I was angry with her, too.

“I feel like it’s deserved, don’t you think?” Baylor asked.

I looked over to him and walked around the back of the truck, trying not to watch as Wolf and Hannah rode out of the parking lot.

“I think that she got a sentence,” he said. “It may not be what we were looking for, but I’m guessing it’s about as good as we could expect.”

I opened the truck and got inside, looking over at him.

“How do you figure?” I snapped. “I was hoping for her to be in there for at least two fuckin’ years.”

The lawyer said since Allegra had been charged with a DWI—driving while intoxicated—with a child passenger under the age of fifteen, that she could face up to two years in prison. And that was before all the assault charges were placed on her due to what Alex had faced after the wreck.

“She’s the county favorite,” Baylor replied. “Everybody knows her. Her father kisses everyone’s asses so he can schmooze them. Hell, just last month, he gave the judge a really good deal on a car.”

I started the truck and backed out of the spot, then accelerated a little too fast as I made my way home.

“Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that you’re lucky she got anything,” he continued, not noticing my shitty driving because he drove even shittier. “Plus, from the way Alex has spoken over the last few days, I don’t really see her voluntarily going back to her mother.”

I frowned and looked toward him momentarily to gauge what he was saying.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that over the last couple of days, she’s asked everybody and their brother if she has to go back to her mom’s, and when we say ‘no’ she looks all relieved and shit.”

I thought about that for a moment.

She’d asked that when we got her home from the hospital a few days ago, and then again this morning before she returned to school. When I’d told her that she wouldn’t be going back for a while, she’d looked relieved. In fact, she’d hugged me so hard that I worried about the state of her fractured ribs.

But she’d hugged me, and then had skipped away.

“I guess I can see that,” I murmured under my breath. “But it won’t be long before she’s asking to go back. I know she misses her.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong, too.”

I pulled onto the road that led to the school, and then past it to our house, and swung into the school’s lot instead.

I needed a fuckin’ hug, and I wouldn’t be getting one from Hannah. My daughter was going to have to hug me instead.

I sure as fuck didn’t want one from Baylor.

“Why do you say that?” I put the truck into park once I pulled into a spot.

“I think that she doesn’t want to go back,” he answered. “I happened to overhear her and Hannah talking, and she asked if she was going to get her own room now.”

Right now she shared a room with Reggie when she came over. We didn’t have enough rooms for them all to have their own room, and since at the time Alex hadn’t lived with us, I hadn’t seen a reason to buy a house with the extra bedroom.

But if she was staying with me permanently, then I’d definitely start looking for somewhere else to stay.

“Be back,” I muttered.