Total pages in book: 19
Estimated words: 18216 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 91(@200wpm)___ 73(@250wpm)___ 61(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 18216 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 91(@200wpm)___ 73(@250wpm)___ 61(@300wpm)
We move fast, stumbling down the stairs to the top floor of the sorority house and then down the hallway, tumbling into the elevator. I gasp as the doors close, adrenaline pumping through me.
“Did we just… Did we just do that?”
Roarke nods, panting. “Hell yeah we did. How much? Those bags look bigger than I thought they’d be.”
Jensen snorts. “Fuck, man. A lot. Way fucking more than we thought.”
The doors open and we’re out, out the side door, out to their truck parked behind the big old house. I sit between them, the engine roars, and suddenly, I turn, mashing my lips to Jensen, and then to Roarke behind the wheel.
“We did it.”
“We were always going to.”
“You two…you know you guys pulled that off so—”
“No, angel,” Jensen shakes his head. “That was all you. We wore masks and just played tough for one night. You were the superstar. You were the fucking superhero back there. You put in months with those assholes. I—” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t have done that.”
“I’d have beaten some heads in months ago,” Roarke mutters, taking the truck out onto the road.
“I did it for Evan, and Ellen. I did it for us.”
“Now it's over,” Jensen says quietly. “And now, we won, angel.”
He kisses me again, and I lean over and kiss Roarke’s cheek as he accelerates down the road, away from the sorority.
“Let’s go home.”
Epilogue
Home is where the heart is. I know that. I could go anywhere with them and it’d be “home.” A home needs warmth.
And love.
And family.
And now, we’ve got that all.
The house is modest, but nice—out in the country about two hours from the city. It’s close enough for Evan to go to his physical therapy, and close enough for the therapist who comes and visits Ellen once a week.
And she’s doing so much better.
At first, seeing her attackers on the news, we thought it’d be bad for her—that she’d relapse and go for drugs again, or shut us away. But we didn’t have to worry at all, because it was like opening the shutters to a dark room and letting the sun in for her.
We sent the hard drives anonymously to the detective who’d looked into her case before. And now, he had a case.
A big one.
It was all on there. Thad and his buddies trying to spike Ellen’s drink. Melissa gleefully helping to take pictures of her. Really awful stuff. But they got even more from the cell phone video Melissa had been dumb enough to keep on that hard drive. They got Thad and those other assholes beating up Evan, of course, since that was part of the same recording. But, apparently, Melissa’s stupidity didn’t stop there.
…She’d taken videos of all kinds of stuff. Drug deals, and selling it, and her and Thad bragging about the auctions and about “getting him and his frat brothers some action” from them. There were bits on there of Melissa and him buying test scores. Hell, they had a dean of the college on tape buying drugs from them and then getting head from Kelly, in exchange for A’s.
…Needless to say, it was quite the scandal, and pretty soon, a Federal investigation opened on that whole horrible place.
Good.
But when they dragged Thad and his buddies and Melissa out of that frat house on the news, and Ellen was there watching? Well, she just smiled. And then she’d started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Roarke had growled. She’d always been like a sister to him and Jensen, and after all of this, they were even more protective of her.
But Ellen had just smiled.
“He’s a pretty guy. Thad, I mean.”
Jensen frowned. “And?”
“And prison is not going to be fun for him.”
Yeah, the Ellen we knew was already on the way back.
And so, the five of us have our family back. Oh, and the money? Well, Jensen wasn’t kidding. Not by a mile. The money was way more than we ever thought it would be.
We’d planned for five-hundred-thousand—maybe a little more if we were lucky. Well, we were beyond lucky. It shows just how serious of a drug trade Melissa and Thad were a part of that we’d underestimated. Because it turns out, between the auctions, and the grade buying, and the drugs, and all that shit, Melissa was sitting on a staggering four million dollars in her fucking sorority house bedroom.
How does that even happen? No idea, but also, I don’t care. She’s in jail now anyway for being an accessory to assault and for small drug possession charges. What was she going to do, complain that her millions of dollars in cash that she’d made selling cocaine at college parties was missing? Not likely.