Free Billionaire Ransom by Lexy Timms

between Craig and him. They hadn’t lived through being woken up, often in the middle of the night, handed a shiny black plastic trash bag, and told to pack it up or lose it.
    Others didn’t know what it was like to sit in cold offices, holding their breath as they were assigned to new homes and places. They hadn’t sat through countless adoption parties, those terrible mockeries of all the birthday parties they’d never had with balloons and cheerful, tasteless décor, and smiling couples who wanted a child.
    Except him and Craig.
    They had always been pushed aside and overlooked. Too old. Too cynical and bruised even then.
    They had made a family together, and then they’d extended it. They’d named the crew the Orphans so that everyone would know that they were still there, still alive, and that they’d become a fused unit.
    It hurt him way down in his soul that Craig betrayed him and the crew. Not just once, but time and time again. Morgan knew it was happening, of course; he’d watched as Craig muddled and messed things up. He had stood by, knowing he had hurt Craig by saying the things he had about Lisa, and that it was her death that had caused his aberrant behavior. Someone had to stop him eventually if he couldn’t stop himself.
    The other guys knew it too, but they could only excuse so much. That day at the bar in front of the Outkasts, if he had said Craig stayed, the Orphans would have gone along with it. They wouldn’t have liked it, but they would have been down for whatever happened, or had to happen, to keep one of their crew walking.
    That was the breaking point. It would have cost him every hard-won ounce of respect and loyalty he had gotten from his crew. Craig knew it, and so did every other person in their crew. Morgan could have kept Craig in, but it would have cost him his position as leader.
    And he wasn’t willing to give that up.
    It was his crew.
    And Craig’s.
    Damn it! Craig had lost his place the minute he’d crossed Nate.
    By then his crimes against the crew had grown too much, with no going back. Morgan knew he was banishing his best friend, and that he was not only doing it because Craig deserved it, but because he hadn’t wanted to lose his place in the crew. It fucking was burying him alive.
    Would it have been better to go down with Craig? To turn the crew over to Clive, with Craig still in, and him riding along demoted?
    He didn’t know. Pride fucking ruined it all. He had failed Craig in a lot of ways, and he’d failed his crew too.
    If he didn’t do something soon, Katie was going to be disappointed as well, or worse, wind up with a bullet in her pretty head.
    He grit his teeth as he swung the bike past a series of lackluster ‘novelty’ shops and strip clubs, winding down a series of streets that became a polluted glut of cheap housing, second-hand stores, railroad tracks, and mobile home parks clustered next to discount grocery and wig stores.
    He pulled into the pothole-riddled parking lot of the Pink Little… and gave the place a disgusted look. Everything about it was supposed to make the imagination fire up and work toward sex: The name, that suggestive and abruptly-ending thing, the garish façade of the decrepit place, the crumbling signs that stood up on the roof.
    It all just looked tired and sad.
    He shook his head as he dismounted from his bike and took the keys. Lisa had wound up here because she couldn’t find work anywhere else. She’d been fired from every other place she’d worked. Craig had put her in a nice home and bought her decent cars, and he’d given her every ounce of love he had, and this place—this shitty, rundown place—was what she’d really wanted out of life.
    Morgan would never understand it. He had felt sorry for her, but he had also come to terms with the fact that Lisa didn’t want to be helped.
    The door, steel heated by the sun, gave under his fingers and he walked into an aroma of beer, vomit, pine freshener, and stale