Playing for Kinley (Cruz Brothers Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

three other women, and at least one of them was carrying my child.
    They both loved giving me shit about it, too.
    “Don’t even go there,” I growled. “I’d hate to have to explain to the kids why their daddy has a bloody nose for Christmas.” Dawson laughed and Mason snickered into his Coke bottle.
    Assholes.
    The room became quiet then as we sat there in silence. We could hear faint voices coming from the kitchen but I knew none of us were paying attention to them.
    There was only one question on all of our minds.
    I chose to be the one to ask it.
    “You guys going to see them?”
    Knowing exactly who I was talking about, Mason just shook his head and Dawson remained silent, his jaw clenching and fists flexing.
    After another minute, Dawson finally spoke. “Last time I was down there, she was so strung out on the pills, she barely even recognized me. There was hardly any food in the fridge. And he was drunk, of course, giving me the usual shit about becoming a pig cop and accusing me of thinking I was better than him because I won’t let them see the kids.” Another few beats of silence passed before he added, “He’s lucky I didn’t break his fucking jaw. I don’t think I’ll be going back there for a while.”
    We all knew why we took turns stopping by our parents’ place every now and then. It was mainly to check up on our mother and to drop off a little money. Our mother may have been a pill-popping addict now, but she was once a kind, gentle mother who frequently shielded us from our father’s drunken rages. After years of him turning his fists on her, though, it became too much for her and she took to pills to escape from her depression.
    She’d tried to protect us from him for so long. But he needed someone other than just her to take his rage out on.
    So, he’d turned to us. His sons.
    It didn’t long for us to start hating him. And after all these years, the hate hadn’t gone away.
    Salvatore “Sal” Cruz had moved to the U.S. from Mexico when he was around ten years old. His parents had sent him up to Texas to live with his aunt and uncle to work, learn English, and try to get an education. He never finished his schooling but he did meet our mother Sandra, who was born and bred in Texas, somewhere along the road. How he was able to charm her into marrying him I had no idea. They moved around quite a bit and eventually ended up in Washington, D.C., where they raised the three of us.
    He had never held a job for long and spent a large majority of his paycheck on booze and cigarettes, rather than food or clothes for us. Throughout our childhoods, we moved from trailer to trailer until we eventually landed in a rental house that had become a dilapidated shack real quick.
    We were all fluent in Spanish but rarely spoke it around each other. Our father often spouted in Spanish when he was drunk and pissed off about something, so I think it always reminded us of bad times and unpleasant memories. We avoided speaking it as much as we could.
    We didn’t want to have any connection to the man, other than the fact that we bore the same last name.
    The only reason we even stepped foot anywhere near our parents’ property anymore was to make sure that Sal hadn’t killed his wife in a drunken fit. It sounded awful but we had tried many times to save her from him once we had all moved away. We had threatened him and done everything we could to make her leave him.
    But his claws were in her too deep.
    Either she truly loved a part of him that was so far gone now, it only existed in her memory of what used to be. Or she was too afraid of what he might do to her if she left. And after so many frustrating and exhausting years of tireless effort on our part, we gave up trying to rescue our mother from our father.
    The best we could do for her now was go by to drop off some groceries, hope we didn’t have to see him, and pray for a miracle that we knew would never come.
    “I went down there two weeks ago