God help me.

“You’re sure you’re both done then?” I asked again.

Carlos didn’t look at me, but the hand holding his phone twitched as he mumbled, “Yeah.”

Vince nodded.

Good enough for me. With that, I turned around and headed back toward my office, hearing them trade muffled words with each other and not giving a single fuck. Maybe I should have eavesdropped, but… it didn’t really matter, did it?

I was going to need to tell Peter about that little scene so he’d keep an eye on them.

By the time I made it back to my office and sat down in my chair, I convinced myself to try and focus again. Shoving the rest of my thoughts and feelings about everything other than work aside, I refreshed the page of the MMA news site I was on and instantly regretted it.

POLANSKI REQUESTS REMATCH, IS READY TO REGAIN TITLE

Noah.

Ugh.

I had already forgotten he’d lost his fight three days ago. I’d fallen asleep watching it, and the only reason I knew he’d lost was because my grandfather had mentioned it—with a gleeful little look in his evil eyes.

I fucking loved that man.

I snickered at the memory and clicked on another link, not in the mood to even read Noah’s name, and made myself read the next post down the list on the MMA site’s homepage. Then I made myself read it again because I couldn’t remember a word of it once I had finished. Something about an upcoming event between two well-known fighters that I didn’t have history or beef with.

It was at the end of the second read through that a soft knock on my door had me looking up and smiling at the man already coming in, hands shoved into the pockets of his black track pants. I could tell instantly by the expression on Peter’s face that he had already heard about the two idiots in the locker room. No surprise there. He had a radar for stuff like that.

I wrinkled my nose at the man who was basically my second dad. “At least nothing happened,” I told him, knowing exactly what he was thinking.

His face, his coffee-and-cream skin still youthful looking even in his sixties, twisted up into a look of distaste. “What was it over?” asked the man who emphasized the importance of discipline and control on a regular basis. He stopped behind one of the chairs in front of the desk that Grandpa and I shared.

I shrugged, feeling a familiar pinch at my shoulder again. Damn it. “Vince said something to Carlos. Carlos got butthurt.” I rolled my eyes.

That got me an eye roll out of the deceptively serious man. There were a handful of lines at each of his eyes and down the sides of his mouth, but he was still almost as fit as he had been almost thirty years ago when he’d come into our lives, unaware that he was going to become the third leg in our family. “I don’t know what to do with these children sometimes.”

“Let’s call their moms and tattle.”

Peter snorted in that laidback way that was everything about him. You never would have figured that this almost slender, just slightly above average height man could take down just about any man’s ass if he wanted to. I had always thought of him as kind of being like Clark Kent. Quiet, kind, and laidback, he seemed like the last person who would have a seventh-degree coral belt—black and red actually—in Brazilian jiu-jitsu by day and help me with my math homework at night.

“Did you see Gus this morning?” Peter asked.

“Just for a second. He was on the phone with someone talking about joining a basketball tournament for the elderly.”

My second dad grinned and shook his head before the expression dropped away and he asked, “Are you okay?”

I shrugged both my shoulders.

The way Peter narrowed his eyes told me he knew I wasn’t exactly lying or telling the truth, but he didn’t pry. He never pried too hard. It was one of my favorite things about him. If I wanted to tell him something, I would, and he knew that. And there were very, very few things I didn’t tell him.

Just the big shit.

I had just grabbed my stress ball from where it was sitting beside my keyboard so I could put it back into its drawer when Peter snapped his fingers suddenly. “I got this message from the front desk a minute ago, saying you referred him to me,” he said as he stood there. “But I’ve never heard of the guy.”

“What’s the name?” I hitched my shoulder up again and rolled it back, feeling that pinch again. Since when did I get all these random aches and pains from just sleeping wrong? Was this what happened when you hit your thirties? I needed to start going to my physical therapist. Maybe the chiropractor too.

Peter didn’t hesitate to stick a hand in his pocket and pull out a bright pink Post-it note. He drew the scrap of paper away from him before squinting at it. “A… Jonah Collins?”

I dropped my shoulder back into place and stared at him.

Fucking shit.

Chapter 2

“Hey, it’s Lenny again. Where the hell are you? I went by your apartment and banged on your door for half an hour. Let me know you’re alive, okay? I’m worried about you.”

I hadn’t known when I’d woken up that morning that my life had been about to change with that name coming out of Peter’s mouth.

But it happened.

And he had to have known when I stared at him silently, feeling almost faint for probably the second time in my life.

I had no idea what to say. What to think. How to even react.

Growing a magical penis out of nowhere would have been less surprising than Peter saying the Fucker’s name.

But what hit me the strongest—the hardest—was the knowledge that time had finally run out.

It was a testament to how well Peter knew me that he reacted the way he did. Carefully, being watchful as he did it, he pulled out the chair in front of the desk and took a seat, neatly, an example of the effortless control he had over his body. I doubted it was my imagination that he seemed to almost brace himself.

“You don’t like him?”

Like it was that easy. Whether I liked him or not.

I didn’t even realize I had raised my hands up to my face before they were scrubbing over my cheeks and forehead, sliding back through the ponytail that I had thrown my hair into that morning because I hadn’t been in the mood to do much else. I hadn’t appreciated all the years that I’d made it a priority to sleep eight to ten hours a night; that was for fucking sure.

The “Elena” that came out of Peter’s mouth was the gauntlet he threw down between us.

Not Lenny. Not Len.

Peter had gone with Elena, pulling out the dad card he rarely used.

I was fucked.

The option to lie to him didn’t even pop into my head. We didn’t do that. None of us did. There was just stuff we… didn’t say to one another. We didn’t ask each other certain questions because there was that underlying factor that we knew we didn’t lie. If you didn’t ask, you didn’t know. And if we wanted you to know, we would tell you. It was the way that Grandpa Gus, Peter, and I had always been. We didn’t ever have to say it, but the trust between us was reinforced with miles of rebar and concrete.

Because in thirty years, there were only a handful of things I hadn’t told them about. And I was sure that there had to be a handful of things they hadn’t told me too.