I’m sure she does damn well, especially if letting her gorilla-size boss in when her mark turns his back to extort money is her MO.
I’m well within my rights to refuse, and well within my ability to break a dozen bones in this asshole’s body before tossing him to the curb, but right now I just want them to get the fuck out. I release my grip and the guy’s body sags with relief. “And here I thought it was true love,” I mumble, fishing a twenty from my dress pants that lay rumpled on the floor where they fell last night. Nowhere near the three hundred extra she’s claiming. “This is all you’re getting out of me.”
She scoffs at the single bill. “I could scream,” she hisses with defiance, the remnants of her crimson lipstick making her lips look touched with blood. Fire and fear smolder in her eyes as they trail over my naked chest, over the towel hanging low on my hips.
“Or you could take this money that we didn’t agree to, walk out that door, and pretend we never met. Which option do you think would be smarter?”
She doesn’t answer. She must be able to hear the unnatural calm in my voice, the lack of panic or worry. She must sense that I’m not her average score. I’d like to give her that much credit, at least.
“This scam of yours isn’t really smart, Alena.” I take three steps to hover within inches of her face. “You never know what kind of man you will end up trying to dupe.” Her pimp is behind me but I’ve long been trained to be acutely aware of a threat’s movements, even when out of sight. So I’m ready for his last-ditch effort to save his reputation when he lunges at me. A quick shift and elbow to his solar plexus and fist to his nose—my eyes never leaving Alena’s—stops him abruptly. “And you never know what that man might be capable of.” I promise you, Alena, it’s a lot more than even I ever dreamt of.
She shrinks back now, terror etched across her face.
It’s too bad, really. More and more, I’ve been thinking that I need a home base, after years of simply drifting. Santorini might be the place for me. I would have been a great regular for her. “Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”
Her pimp spouts off a couple of words in Greek to her around his own pain. She snatches the bill from my fingertips and darts out of my apartment with him, slamming the door so hard that it rattles the wall, the dresser, and the knife lying atop it, causing it to slide off. It lands, blade-down, an inch from my left pinky toe.
I start to chuckle.
THREE
IVY
“He never changed even a bit, did he?” Ian swings his foot at the trash can. Not hard. Just enough to shift it.
I quietly watch my cousin from my perch on the front desk as he takes in his dad’s shop—the dusty collectibles, the grungy black-and-red decor, the wall-to-wall mirrors—for the first time in fourteen years. I was able to get crime scene cleaners in the same day that the police finished collecting evidence, which was a twenty-nine-hour process. It’s not like anyone’s in a rush to get the business back up and running. But the idea of Ian seeing the dark red stain where his father bled out was not something I could stomach, even if they were estranged. By the time Ian stepped off the plane from Dublin, you’d never know that a double homicide had taken place in here.
All the same, Black Rabbit feels eerily empty. Void of life. I guess that makes sense, since it lost its heart.
“He was Ned, right to the end.” Never warm and cuddly, never someone who changed himself to try to please others. He always knew who he was, and for that, he earned the respect of many people.
Including me.
But had Ned been someone else—someone who groveled, begged, who offered his attackers anything and everything he could—would they have spared his life? That question has been haunting me for six days now.