My Bestie's Dad Likes Me Wet-Chapter 139 You May Now Kiss The Bride

IVIN POV

She is not worth it.

She’s nothing but an expensive headache.

Pick up her brother, have him pay the debt, leave her.

Don’t get attached.

My own mind had been volunteering unsolicited opinions at me for the past twenty four hours more than it had bothered to in the last ten years combined and I would still very much like to believe that I was not the issue here.

That something external had malfunctioned, maybe it was the scotch.

Except that was the thing.

I don’t drink, not at celebrations, not at funerals, not at the kind of evenings that turn into mornings and leave everyone else reaching for something with alcohol in it just to get through the next hour.

I’ve only stocked to Water, always, only, without exception and yet here I was sitting in front of a glass of scotch I had poured and not touched.

I sat with it like it was company, because after Nala got into that car and the door closed and the car moved and took her with it I had walked back into the building and my men had been looking at me waiting for instruction and I had given the instruction.

Move everyone to the nearest safe house since Nala and her brother had effectively drawn a map to our location and handed it out, and then I had sat down and poured scotch I didn’t drink and just stared at it.

My phone rang again.

My boss. I knew his rhythm by now, the spacing between calls when he was angry. He was not going to be happy that a girl with no training had borrowed his wife’s phone access and had managed to compromise a location his family was using by making one phone call to her useless brother.

That conversation was coming and I would have it. Just not right now while my mind was busy feeding me advice I hadn’t asked for.

I put Gabriel on Ethan the moment things settled. Gabriel finds things. It is the only way to describe what he does, he simply finds things that people have gone to significant effort to make unfindable, quietly and thoroughly and without drama.

The report he came back with was not surprising in its bones, Ethan owed a gang ten million dollars, which was an ambitious number for a man of his particular caliber, but the how of it was what I needed to understand.

Then Gabriel sent the footage and I understood immediately.

The CCTV footage showed Ethan sitting across a table from the gang leader, and on his phone, a video he was playing for the man like a sales pitch. I zoomed in until I could see the screen within the screen and what was on it was Nala, on a beach somewhere, running and laughing with another girl, entirely unbothered.

The bikini was flimsy in the way that beach things are flimsy and her figure, that ridiculous perfect hourglass that she carried around underneath all that mouth and temper without seeming to fully appreciate the effect it had on a room, was on complete display and I watched the gang leader watch the video and I watched the number form behind his eyes and I understood exactly how Ethan had walked out of that meeting with ten million dollars and a smile.

He had sold her before she even knew she was for sale.

I set my phone down.

I was going to get involved. I want to be straightforward about the reasoning here because I have always valued clarity of motive and my motive was simple.

Nobody removes something from my possession before I have decided I am finished with it.

Nala was collateral on a debt.

She was in my custody, under my watch, mine to hold until her brother settled what he owed, and the fact that she had been taken from that position was an insult to a principle I held regardless of who was involved.

This had nothing to do with her specifically. It had everything to do with the fact that I do not lose things. I do not allow things to be taken from me.

It is a line I have maintained my entire adult life and I was not going to stop maintaining it because of a redhead with a bad temper and a complete inability to stay in one place without creating a situation.

That was my only reason.

The gang’s location was sloppy to find, probably because they’ve operated unchallenged for long enough that you stop respecting the people who might come looking.

I called Scar and told him I needed twenty men, bikes, the lower compartment equipment, I would not call my corporate crew in their pressed suits and radio earpieces. Those men were built for a different category of problem.

What this required was the kind of response that communicated very clearly and very permanently that certain decisions have certain consequences and I preferred my messages delivered in a language that didn’t require translation.

Gabriel had eyes on the church camera before I was even in the car. I watched the feed on my phone while we moved, watched them carry Nala through the doors with the specific loose weight of someone unconscious and something moved in my jaw that I chose not to identify.

I watched the man who tied the cloth around her face and committed his face to a specific folder in my memory, the one I will return to when I had time to handle what needed to be handled personally.

I watched the priest arrive with the gun already on his side, already afraid while they forced him into donning his robes.

Thenminutes later, Nala woke up.

I watched the confusion first, that moment where the body is conscious before the mind catches up and for just a second she was simply a person in an unfamiliar place trying to orient herself.

Then I watched her work it out in real time, watched the pieces land one after another across her face, the dress, the chair, the altar, the room, and I knew before she opened her mouth that she was going to say something that was going to make everything immediately worse because that was who she was — incapable of swallowing something that needed to be said, and the gang leader’s hand came across her face hard enough to rock the chair before she even finished the sentence.

I noted the force of it.

I noted everything about the way he did it, the casualness of it, the way he turned back to the altar afterward like it was an administrative task he had completed, and I filed all of it away in the same folder as the man with the rope.

My men were in position. I sent the signal and was watching the perimeter when I saw the boy. He should be Thirteen at most, working a screwdriver into one of my men’s bikes with the focused quiet of someone who had done this enough times to have developed technique.

His clothes were torn, his hands, quick and he was completely unaware that my car sitting opposite him had eyes.

He was nearly through the lock when I opened the door, my gun pointing at his forehead. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

"Drop it."

Everything hit the floor at once. He looked at me with the wide animal calculation of someone pricing their options very fast.

"I’m sorry, I swear I didn’t—"

"You’re not sorry."

He opened his mouth, closed it, and then did something I did not expect, which was to drop the performance entirely and just look at me straight.

"Look I was just trying to—"

"That church." I nodded across the road. "Walk in, tell them you need water, act lost and give me thirty seconds of their attention." I put a roll of tens on the bonnet without looking at him. "Come back for that when you’re done."

He looked at the money, looked at my face, made a decision and ran.

I watched him push through the church doors on the feed. Watched every armed head in the room swing toward the entrance and every hand twitch toward a weapon and then slowly, collectively, relax when they registered a skinny boy asking for water with empty hands.

I saw hope open up across Nala’s face when those doors came in.

I watched it disappear when she saw who it was.

The boy was ushered out, the door shut after him but every gun in that building has been pointed in the wrong direction, toward the front, away from the low windows behind the altar where my men were already through and moving into position in the dark.

The priest’s voice rang out again, resuming from where he stopped, I watched the gang leader straighten with the satisfaction of a man a sentence away from getting what he came for.

"You may now kiss the bride."

And that was my men’s cue.