Obsidian Faith (8 page)

“Thanks, Brenda.” Trevor said. “I’ll look forward to them.”

Shanice clung to him and cried like she’d never see him again. “Aw, squirt,” Trevor said, patting her back.  “It’s not the end of the world.”

“It’s just... I’m going to miss you so much.”

“I’m going to miss you, too. But you can email or Skype me.”

“And text and call sparingly,” Brenda said. “Remember you just got that new cell phone for your birthday.”

“Oh yeah,” Shanice said, pulling away and rummaging through her little purse. “Here, put your number into my phone.”

Trevor obliged her.

She grinned through her tears. “One for each other, and each other for one?”

“One for each other and each other for one.” He recited it back and really meant it for the first time in a very long time.

Chapter Thirteen

While off at USF in Tampa, Trevor was just far enough away to have some freedom from his uncle. But that didn’t stop Phil from calling and threatening the Baileys until Trevor agreed to do more work for him. The jobs got bigger and bigger, and the amounts ballooned.

Trevor thought he could immerse himself in college life and ignore Phil. He began to refuse to pick up when he called, and didn’t respond to his emails or text messages. Maybe Phil would give up and wouldn’t bother having him do his hacking projects anymore.

Was he wrong. Phil and his pet mobsters took the ride frequently to Tampa to submit their requests in person. They were on campus so much, they were on a first name baisis with Trevor’s friends. A fact that pissed Trevor off tremendously. The projects they had for him got more and more risky, more and more intricate, but Trevor had honed his skills even further now that he was getting a formal education as a computer programmer.

Trevor had almost completed his sophomore year when Phil hatched the plan that got Trevor in deeper with organized crime. His uncle actually showed up and dragged him out of class for that one.

As he followed Phil out of the computer lab to his car, Trevor saw they weren’t actually going to Phil’s car. There was a limousine idling at the curb in front of the building. As they approached, Frick got out and opened the door.

Phil scooted inside, but Trevor stood looking around, wondering if he should bolt. He figured they’d catch him anyway, and he was really not ready for a beat down, it being so close to finals and everything.

Trevor slid onto the leather seat between his uncle and Frack. On the other bench seat was the man he only knew as the Boss, who he’d met once when he began programming the slots for the guy. Frick got in and sat on the seat with the Boss.

“Hey kid,” Frick said. “The Boss is about to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

The Boss glared at Frick. “This is not The
Godfather
, asshole.”

Frack and Phil laughed, but Trevor wasn’t in the mood.

“Shut the fuck up,” Frick said. Apparently the little guy didn’t like being laughed at.

“All of you shut the fuck up,” the Boss said, then addressed Trevor. “I’m sure this young man and I have better things to do than listen to you morons laughing it up.”

“I was in a computer lab,” Trevor said. “I need to get back so I can finish.”

“We’ll make this quick and painless,” the Boss said. “I understand from Phil and my men that you have a unique skill which could make us all multi-millionaires, and I’m including you when I say all. How does that sound to you? It’s Trevor, right?”

“I’m listening,” Trevor said. He may be talking to the leader of the Orlando underworld, but he was not going to answer like a punk.

“We want to clean house. A one-time deal where we take as much of the unclaimed funds from each state as we dare, which Phil here estimates could be approximately one billion dollars. Split five ways, minus the money I’m willing to front you for equipment, that’s a little less than two hundred million for each of us. Are you game, Trevor?”

Trevor knew from previous stories he overheard from Frick and Frack, the Boss was not someone to be trifled with. “Sure, but let me tell you, this is going to be a massive undertaking.”

“Give that to us in man hours or something,” Phil said. “Since this project is going to benefit you too, you might want to scrap school.”

“That’s... no way. I have to stay in school,” Trevor said.

“You’ll have so much money, kid, no one will look down on you not having a college degree,” Frack said. “I don’t got one, and look at me.”

“Yeah, look at you,” the Boss snarled. “A degree will help a man look legit when he’s got to launder a large amount of cash. Trevor is right. He needs to stay in school.”

Trevor breathed a sigh of relief when the Boss agreed with him, because he didn’t know how he was going to get out of the mess they were trying to put him into just yet.

He answered the previous question posed to him by Phil. “It’ll take a couple of years to make a program like that viable. Then it has to be tested, and troubleshooting sometimes takes longer than the programming. I can’t work on it eight hours a day, but I can promise you I will work on it every day.”

“That’s all we can ask for,” the Boss said. “I’ll get whatever information you need from us when the time comes, but right now if you’ll begin the process, Phil will help with the research. These two numbskulls will get to work on new identities for all of us and those significant others we want to take with us. You got anybody like that, Trevor?”

Trevor almost broke into a cold sweat, but he held it together. “No.”

“You playing the field a little, eh? That’s what a college boy should do. No need to tie yourself down until you’re older,” the Boss said.

“What about the Baileys?” Phil said. “Don’t you want to include them in your outrageous fortune?”

“They don’t mean shit to me,” Trevor lied.

“Who do you think you’re fooling? You know, that Shanice has gotten so fine, I wouldn’t mind... ” Trevor’s fist connected with Phil’s nose before he could finish his sentence, and then he pounced as blood dripped all over the front of his uncle’s pricey suit. Frick pulled Trevor off while Frack grabbed Phil.

“She’s a kid, you asshole!” Trevor screamed. Shanice was all of fourteen at the time, and Trevor had just intervened on her behalf the last time he’d been in Orlando when a boy who’d been obsessed with her since elementary school had begun to spread rumors about her. Owen Nettles had promptly forgotten Shanice’s name after Trevor put the fear of God into him.

The Boss, who hadn’t moved during the brief skirmish, glared at Phil. “We don’t mess with kids, Kyle, and if I ever hear you have... ” He left it there.

“So, Trevor Kyle, do we have a deal?” The Boss extended a hand for him to shake as if it were a foregone conclusion.

Trevor knew that it was, but he would play their game for now—as though he had a choice? He extended his hand.

“We have a deal.”

Trevor all but stopped visiting or talking to the Baileys after that because he never knew if Phil and his henchmen were watching, and they’d already proven they would hurt them—or worse—if Trevor didn’t do what they said.

Phil, pissed over Trevor embarrassing him in front of his mob friends, threatened Trevor until he extended their reach into North and South Carolina, where he funneled enough to keep Phil, Frick and Frack in gambling dough for several months at a time. If they ran low, they’d pay him another visit. Meanwhile, he was working on the program for the Boss which he’d dubbed The Grand Scam, and he’d also been thinking about how he could go about extricating himself from the deal.

In his senior year, Trevor began to leave little markers that he knew would eventually get him caught. He was tired of being a pawn. He figured he’d rather be the fed’s prisoner than continue stealing for a cruel man who’d never been a father to him.

Chapter Fourteen

It was four months before his graduation when Shanice bummed a ride to USF with some girls who used fake IDs to get into frat parties. When she and her friends arrived at his frat house, the party had been in full swing. He’d been playing a game of beer pong with a few of his brothers, and they were scouring the floor for some girls to dance with.

“Hey, Trevor. Look at the hotties that just walked in the door,” Bryce said. “Four of them. Four of us. Problem solved.”

Bryce went over and pulled the exotic beauty Trevor had his eye on to the dance floor. Her coloring was similar to Shanice’s, but she had a bod that couldn’t possibly be attached to Shanice.

The last time he’d seen her it had been over Christmas break when he was a sophomore, and she’d still been as thin as a reed, with arms and legs too long to belong to such a tiny person. She’d been pissed at him, as usual, because he kept telling her it wasn’t safe for her to come to his uncle’s house, but she’d kept seeking him out, even though he’d told her they weren’t brother and sister any more.

Then she giggled over something Bryce said, and he knew it was her. She was all grown up now. He walked out to the dance floor, where Bryce was grinding on her like a dog in heat, and grabbed her arm.

“Shanice?”

A crooked, sexy grin lit up her face, and she abandoned her dance partner. “Trevor!”

He scooped her up and she held onto him so tightly, Trevor hated himself for having disappointed her over and over again. When he finally eased her out of the embrace, he leaned over to talk into her ear over the music.

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” she said. Then her beautiful face got serious. “You didn’t come home for Christmas. What was that all about? I mean, I get you don’t want to be my surrogate brother any more, but Isaiah, Brenda, and the twins, they still love you, too.”

“Let’s not do this here,” he said. “Come on.”

He led her through the throng of partiers and took the back stairs off the kitchen up to his room. Couples in various stages of making out occupied every spare corner in the house, a sight which usually didn’t embarrass him, but it made him very uncomfortable with Shanice there. Of course, she was a different Shanice from the one he’d last seen, who could now put any of the college girls to shame.

He tried, unsuccessfully, not to look at her perfectly shaped ass as she walked ahead of him, or the tiny waistline just above it, or... . Finally, they got to his room and he let her in ahead of him.

The noise from the party was dulled but not totally gone. He grabbed a couple of water bottles out of his mini fridge, opened one, and handed it to her. Then he downed a huge swallow of his own. It was time to clear his head a bit for this conversation.

He gestured toward a chair, but she chose the bed, so he went to the chair.

“Do Isaiah and Brenda know you’re here?”

“What do you think?” she said. “You leave me no choice but to sneak off to see you when I can, because you never come see us anymore. Why is that?”

It broke his heart to say the words, but he gave her the same bullshit answer he’d given her the year after Dave and Elena died. “I’ve grown up. We’ve grown apart. There’s no blood connecting us, Shanice. You need to live your life and forget about me.”

Her eyes filled and tears spilled down her face.

“What happened to us being the two musketeers? One for each other and each other for one?” They’d put their own spin on the musketeer phrase when they’d first moved to Orlando and lived on the same street. With their adoptive families so wound together and going to the same church, they’d believed they would be together forever.

“That changed when Philip Kyle got custody of me. Now you need to go back home, before you get into trouble here.”

“I won’t get into any trouble with you looking out for me. Besides, we just got here, and my friends aren’t ready to go.” She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. “It’s okay if you don’t want to see me. I’ll just go downstairs and dance with some of your hot college friends until my friends are ready to go. We can act like perfect strangers if that’s what you want, but I’m not leaving right now.”

With that, she stood and stalked over to his door. He rushed over and barred her from leaving.

“Just stay in here and hang with me,” he said. The only alternative he had was to unleash her among his horny frat brothers.

She smiled knowingly. He wasn’t fooling her. “Sure,” she said, like that had been her plan all along.

They played video games together like old times and talked until they were practically hoarse before she got a text from one of her friends asking where she was. They were going to take a cab to the hotel. She texted back and told them she’d meet up with them the next morning.

Trevor didn’t think anything of it when he gave her a new pair of his pajamas to sleep in, and they tucked in for the night in his bed.

Morning was another thing. When he awoke with a stiffy crammed against her derrière, he was mortified and was certain she’d be traumatized by his body’s involuntary reaction. He jerked away from her, almost falling off the bed.  She turned to look at him, unfazed.

“Have a tic-tac, Trevor.” She pushed one between his lips as he looked at her slack-jawed. Apparently, she’d been awake before him.

Trevor cowered underneath the comforter, bending his knees so she wouldn’t see it tented by something else. He rolled the tic-tac around in his mouth before he spoke.

“Good morning. Sorry about that.”

“I’m going to nursing school when I graduate. I’ve already taken college-level anatomy. I know all about natural bodily functions,” she said with a smile that could only be characterized as naughty.

Trevor stood, careful to keep his back to her as he adjusted himself, conjuring up images to help him hurriedly deflate. When he turned to face her, Shanice covered her face with the pillow and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Trevor wasn’t sure if he should laugh with her, and therefore at himself.

She moved the pillow. “Whatever you just did, didn’t help.”

He looked down, and sure enough, he was at half-mast. She collapsed into a fit of giggles. Again. That did help. There is nothing like being laughed at by a girl to calm an overactive libido.

Trevor picked up his pillow ostensibly to cover himself, then thought better of it and threw it at her. Shanice tried to dodge it and fell off the bed. The force of her landing knocked the wind out of her mid-laugh. Concerned, Trevor ran around to the other side of the bed and helped her up off the floor.

“Are you okay?” His voice came out husky, when he realized his body was flush with hers. She looked both adorable and sexy grinning up at him. Despite his desire to continue to think of her only as his surrogate sister, Trevor felt an undeniable attraction.

Shanice threw her arms around his neck and went onto her tiptoes. He bent his head to lessen their height differential, meeting her soft, rosy lips for the first time. Just as her tongue tentatively touched his, he pulled away, swallowing his tic tac in the process.

“Trevor... ” She moved back into his arms, wrapping hers around his waist. “We’re not really sister and brother, you know.”

“I know that.” He peeled her arms from around him, and stepped back, because his dick was getting confused, and that wasn’t a good look on him. Not in front of Shanice. Besides he’d promised Isaiah he wouldn’t return his daughter’s affections while she was still under the age of eighteen. “But we shouldn’t be doing
any
of this.”

He put some distance between them. “Let’s get dressed so I can take you to breakfast.”

Shanice sat back down on his bed, pouting visibly. He didn’t like that he’d had to reject her, but it was the best thing all around, considering how he was still under Phil’s thumb and if his uncle or Frick and Frack got wind of her being there, her family could still be in danger.

He went into his bathroom and hopped into the shower. After he’d cleaned himself thoroughly, he turned the water to cold, hoping it would help keep him from reacting to Shanice, the girl he’d always loved like a sister, who was now very much a woman.