Hold Me Like a Breath Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’ll have Jake go to college with him, and I’ll come hang out with you.”
    Carter hung up, still cursing. “We have to do the pickup.”
    Garrett’s grin disappeared. “No one else can do it?”
    He shook his head.
    â€œPick up
what
?” I asked.
    Carter opened his mouth, but Garrett put a hand on his arm. “She’s
seventeen
, she wants to go to school. Let her be seventeen. There’s plenty of time to get her involved later.”
    â€œWhen
we
were seventeen we were already sitting on council, visiting the clinics, meeting with patients. She can’t even tell a kidney scar from a skin graft—she needs to catch up.”
    â€œ
She
can make her own decisions,
she
is sitting right here, and
she
is coming along to whatever this mysterious pickup is, so she’s already involved,” I snapped.
    â€œYou are
not
coming,” said Garrett.
    â€œWe don’t have a choice, unless you want me to leave her on the side of the highway. This is our exit.” Carter was clutching his cell phone, shaking it as if that could erase whatever the text instructed him to do.
    Garrett groaned. “You’re staying in the car.”
    I hid my smile by looking out the window. It had gotten dark while we were driving, the dusky purple of summer evenings. On the estate these nights buzzed with a soundtrack of cicadas and crickets, but there was no nature outside the car. Nothing but concrete and pavement and cinder-block industrial construction. We pulled into a parking lot. A poorly lit, empty parking lot.
    â€œWhere are we? What are we picking up?” I examined Garrett’s stiff posture and the bright gleam in my brother’s eyes. “Does Father know about this Business errand?”
    â€œNo, and you’re not going to tell him,” Carter answered.
    â€œOh, really? So what am I going to do?”
    â€œStay in the car. Lock the doors. Keep the windows up.” Carter turned around to look me in the eye. “This isn’t a joke, Pen. If I’d known this was going to come up, I would’ve left you at home.”
    â€œPlease, princess,” added Garrett in a soft voice, but his eyes didn’t leave the windshield, didn’t stop their scan of the parking lot.
    â€œFine, but when you’re done, you’re filling me in. Then
I
can decide if I want to be part of it or not.” It was all false bravado.Each one of Carter’s statements tied another knot in my stomach; Garrett’s plea pulled them tighter.
    Carter dumped a half-dozen mints from the plastic container in his cup holder into his mouth—like his breath mattered, like this was a date not a disaster. He waved the container at us, but we shook our heads. He crunched the candies and said, “Gare, you’re hot, right?”
    I blurted out, “You can turn on the A/C, I’m not cold,” before I caught on: Garrett pulled a gun from a holster below the back of his shirt.
    They laughed, but it wasn’t funny to me. I’d been to too many funerals—they’d been to more. I wanted to ask how long he’d been “hot.” If he always had a gun on him. Had he when we went mini-golfing at Easter? Or the time last summer when I slipped on the pool deck and he’d carried me to the clinic? No. He couldn’t have then. He’d been wearing a swimsuit too—there’s no way he could’ve hidden a gun.
    So what had happened in the past year, and why was he carrying one now?
    Garrett was Family, he was a Ward, but he wasn’t supposed to follow his brothers’ footsteps. Or his father’s. They were enforcers, but he didn’t belong in their grim-faced, split-knuckles ranks. That was why he was in college with Carter—Garrett was going to be his right-hand man when my brother took over the Business.
    Not a thug with a gun.
    â€œStay here, Pen,” Carter said again, then slipped out into thenight. His