by S. Massery
I tilted my head to the side—a tell my father was trying to abolish—and I let my eyes skate around the rest of the room. Two of our men stood behind my ex. A black tie was knotted around his head, covering his eyes. His hands were tied behind his back, but nothing kept him in the chair except fear.
Anthony was the kind of man I thought I was supposed to like. He was a bully, he always had been. He tugged my hair on the playground when we were kids, called me names in high school, smoked pot and made out with girls against their lockers and watched me while he did it. Sometimes, his attention wavered toward nice, and that made me want him. I was ashamed of that desire, which crashed over me like ice in that warehouse.
We reunited two months after we graduated college, both back in Vegas with degrees in hand. He tried to convince me that he had changed—he wasn’t the hair-pulling playground bully from our childhood—and for three months, he pursued me. The relationship lasted four months, during which I learned that, yes, he was precisely the same person who had tormented me.
Still, hate and love were easy things to confuse.
“Do you know why we’re here?”
I looked at my father. He walked toward Anthony and pulled off his blindfold. Anthony’s eyes latched onto me, and I struggled not to react. He broke up with me two days earlier, and it still stung with the force of a whip against my back.
“We’re here for you to learn a lesson.”
Never talk back, a voice in my head whispered. Still, I asked, “What lesson would that be?”
He looked down at Anthony. “Tonight, you find out what happens to traitors.”
“Look, man—” Anthony started. The knife flashed in my father’s hand, balanced against Anthony’s throat. He swallowed, and his skin trembled against the blade. A drop of blood ran down his skin.
“Family is the most important thing.” My father looked at me. “Do you know what he did?”
I shook my head. “No,” I answered.
“Three nights ago, he followed you to my office, and then he followed me here.”
“Delia—”
“Don’t speak her name,” my father hissed. “One of my men caught him outside. He was speaking with Edgar.”
Edgar Castillo was the son of Jorge, one of my father’s sworn enemies. They stuck to their own sides of Vegas, and for good reason. The blood feud between our families had spanned generations. I wasn’t even sure they knew why they hated each other.
“We keep our valuable weapons here, daughter,” my father said. “Anthony was trying to undermine our operation. Family comes first—this is for you.”
He drew the knife across my ex-boyfriend’s throat.
In the following weeks, I realized that Anthony wore the same clothes on the day he died that he had worn on our last date. The clothes he wore when he dropped me off at Father’s office after dinner. It made me realize that his breaking up with me—an out-of-the-blue phone conversation—was probably orchestrated.
“You’ve been lost in your thoughts for a while now, little blossom.”
I look over my shoulder at Griffin.
“I met Edgar Castillo once,” I say. “He’s my age. Quiet. At the time, he was my height, although we were sixteen, so I don’t know how true that is now. He shook my hand and said, ‘We don’t have to be enemies.’” I laugh. “I saw him for the second time in my life two weeks ago. I made eye contact with him. He sat in the backseat of an armored car and watched me walk into my house, where his father and uncle were waiting.”
Griffin hasn’t moved from where he leans against the wall. A lot of space separates him from me, and it makes me feel an ounce better.
“What did your stepmom have to do with it?”
I toe the painted line. It’s a little symbolic of this fucking cage I find myself in time after time. “Do you think she loved my dad?”
“I never met her,” he murmurs. “But maybe this is a question better posed to Jackson.” He tips his head in the direction of the door, and I follow my eyes to Jackson. He blinks at me.
I take a deep breath. They’re demanding answers. I’m ready for some of my secrets to spill out onto the floor. “Margaret Elizabeth Applewood was introduced to me on my tenth birthday. One minute it was just my father and me, and the next, there was a woman sleeping in his bed. She called him husband. She kissed my cheek before bed each night as I choked on her perfume. I can still smell it. In my nightmares, she comes into my room and covers my mouth with her hand. She tells me that my father would love her more if I was gone.”
I open my eyes and breathe deeply. The men are silent. They’ve multiplied. Mason, Zach, and Dalton stand behind Jackson.
“Do you think she loved my dad, Mason? You’ve done your research, surely.”
“I think there’s a reason you’re asking,” he answers.
I sink to my knees. “Yeah, there’s a reason.”
Jackson comes forward. He stops at the paint, lowering himself to his knees, too. We’re feet apart, separated by hundreds of miles.
“Edgar and I weren’t supposed to be enemies. James Elvira wasn’t supposed to betray my family. But I think, deep down, Margaret was always meant to be the one to put the knife in my father’s heart.”
They look at each other.
“We deal in secrets, you and I,” I tell Griffin, meeting his eyes over Jackson’s shoulder. “One man’s sin is another man’s blackmail. You’re no different than my family. I tell you this, you own me.” I look back to Jackson. “I can’t be owned.”
“What do you want?” he whispers. “I don’t want your secrets. I just want you.”
“Jorge Castillo was supposed to walk in there and kill my uncles, then me, and then my father.” But not my stepmother. Not Margaret.
They’re coming closer. I reel them in with my words, eyes on Jackson. He’s pained. His eyebrows have drawn together, his hands are clenched into fists. Griffin is the first to kneel next to Jackson. Dalton lands on his other side.
Mason and Zach hover behind them.
“You disrupted the plan,” Griffin says.
“I saw Edgar. He looked sad.”
“What did you do?”
“I did what anyone in my position would’ve done,” I say. And all at once, the weight of my family crashes down on me. Things that I have no right to tell outsiders—things my father would’ve beat me for even thinking around strangers—just came out of my mouth.
Family is everything, he used to say, and we guard it with our lives.
“She’s done,” Griffin mutters. “It’s okay, Delia.”
“Family is everything,” I murmur.
“You’re not being interrogated,” Jackson says in a low voice. My eyes go from Griffin to Jackson. He stretches out his hand, breaking through that barrier we had created. He takes my hand and pulls me to my feet. We all rise together.
I look down at our hands and frown. “I have to fix it.”
16
JACKSON
Zach’s need for answers has abated—for now.
I keep my grip on Delia’s fingers, but she’s still in the ring. To me, it’s symbolic of the fight that she’s not willing to give up. And the fact that I can’t make myself step over the line, to be in it with her? Well, let’s not overthink this.
“Delia,” I say.
“Jackson,” she repeats. By now it’s out of habit, but it makes me smile. We have a thing.
“Come with me.”
She looks down at her shoes, then back up at me.
“I’m dark,” she says. “You’re not trying to be, but what if I rub off on you?”
It’s a good question, but it wakes up fear that she’s going to run off and do something crazy. Up until now, she’s been smart about her actions.
I force myself to smile. “What if I rub off on you?”
Delia steps over the line, brushes her bangs away from her eyes, and lets out a breath. “I don’t think you can,” she says, so softly that I barely hear her.
She leads the way to the stairwell, but when she starts to go up, I tug her down.
She stalls a few steps above me, biting her lip. We’re eye to eye, so I lean forward and kiss her. I tell her, “It’s safe.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugs. “I don’t. But it’s either you come with me or we all go upstairs and hang out. You know. Small talk.”
She smiles. “When you put it that way… Where are we going?”
I clear my throat. “I thought you might want to, uh.” Hell. When’s the last time I asked a girl out? Centuries ago. “Get dinner? You don’t want to eat Mason’s rubbish, anyway.”
“A date,” she clarifies. “I can’t remember the last time I went on a date.”
I rub the back of my neck. “We don’t have to.”
“I just need… two minutes.” She runs up the stairs.
Mason snorts from the shadows. “Smooth, Skye.”
I roll my eyes. “I feel like a bumbling idiot around her.”
“You look like it, too.”
I groan. “What am I supposed to do here? Let her go back to the sharks?” Hopelessness is a bleak feeling that I’m unaccustomed to. I look down the stairwell, toward the garage.
“You’re joking.” Mason squints at me. “She’s the queen shark, dumbass. She may not look like it now, but I’m telling you—”
“No,” I say. “She’s a good person.”
We just are, she said to me. Maybe she was talking about both of us. She’s breathing. She’s existing. But whether she’s wicked or good—irrelevant. She just is.
After the military, which had drilled into me that the world was black and white, I lived that lie. Scorpion Industries kept it going: we’re right, they’re wrong. Good versus evil. Terrorists and heroes.
She’s swiped her hand across those lines. Everything is crumbling beneath my feet.
“After the fight, bring her back to Vegas,” I tell Mason. It’s better if we leave off on a good note. I don’t want to see her turn into the villain of her own story.
He just looks at me, and he even goes so far as to open his mouth to speak. Footsteps silence him, and around the corner comes Delia.
My mouth drops open. Black jeans. One of the t-shirts I bought her. But her hair has messy curls in it. Red lipstick. Dark makeup around her eyes that makes them look bigger.
Mason chuckles. “I’ll leave you kids alone,” he mutters.
She gets down to me and I lick my lips. “I suddenly feel underdressed,” I murmur. “Have I told you how beautiful you are?”
She shrugs one shoulder, smiling at me. “I feel like a giddy teenager. You’re not underdressed.” She reaches out and tugs on my shirt sleeve. “You’re asking me on a date, Jackson?”
“Are you okay with that, Delia?”
She winks. “I guess we’ll find out at the end of the date.” Then she sobers. “The last boyfriend I had, my dad slit his throat.”
I don’t say my immediate first thought: he’s not alive to cut my throat. That thought is closely followed by, what did her boyfriend do to deserve that?
I shake my head and lace my fingers with hers, pulling her toward Mason’s truck. Just in case. Paranoia has no reasoning. My suspicions always do—and one says that Elvira might have my name. A name leads to a rental car, which leads to the GPS tracker in the car. We’re safe in the parking garage, which is a dead zone for trackers thanks to Mason. The minute it leaves, well, hypothetically, he could know exactly where we are.
“Who are you fighting?” she asks once we’re in the truck. Our sides are pressed against each other from our shoulders down to our knees. Warmth flows from her, even as the desert night gets cooler.
“Mason finds people. There’s a network spread all over the West Coast that he taps into. It has a good following. This time tomorrow, that warehouse will be packed.”
She nods. “How does he get the word out?”
I grin. “How does anyone get word out? Social media.”
“But—”
“Well, it’s more like dark web social media,” I admit. “I’m not sure how it works. Mason’s in the tech industry, and he can’t explain anything simply. All I know is that the ticket sales go to the fight winners. There are three matches tomorrow—six of us—and it’s up to chance who we fight. The announcer will draw names the day of the match.”
“Are you scared?”
“No,” I say. Memories of fighting at a military base in Syria flash before my eyes. “No, I—” I shake my head. “Deployment, the contracting job, it brought out something that I usually keep under wraps. You’re going to see it tomorrow, but I don’t want you to be afraid.”
“The same could be said of me,” she murmurs.
For all the bad that I think I was—really, it’s nothing compared to the history of violence a family like hers has. To rise to power, especially in Las Vegas, her father’s hands wouldn’t be clean. My hands shake on the steering wheel. I flex my grip, desperate to get ahold of myself. She just admitted that her father killed her last boyfriend—that easy sort of admission, her knowing Griffin—what else is on their ledger?
I pull into an Italian restaurant and watch her face as she reads the sign. A sad smile overtakes her. “It looks wonderful,” she says. “I haven’t had real Italian since—”
“When?”
She tilts her head. “Our last big family dinner,” she says in a low voice. “That was a month ago.”
We climb out of the truck and I pick up her hand as we walk into the restaurant. Even though it’s a Friday night, we’re seated at a corner table toward the back of the room almost immediately. Delia winks at me as the host stammers in front of us.
“That was weird,” I mutter at the host’s retreating back.
She just shrugs.
I don’t want to talk about distressing things, but I come up blank as I search for words. We’ve been go-go-go for almost two days straight. I’ve only known her for two days. Forty-eight hours. We’re strangers, I realize.
Delia giggles. “You look lost,” she says.
“I feel lost,” I admit. “I want to talk about something happy, but I’m coming up blank.”
She rolls her eyes at me. “Jackson.”
“Delia.”
“I have an idea. Let’s tell each other happy stories from our childhood. Surely you can muster one or two of those?”
“No bloodshed?” I tease. “No murder or death or torture?”
“Not this time,” she promises. “I’ll even go first.” She hums, tapping her index finger against her chin. “I have a lot of cousins,” she says. “I talked about Elton, but he was just one of seven kids from Uncle Angelo. Uncle Ricco has three kids—two of which already have children of their own. Anyway. Growing up, my best friends were my cousins Lauren and Alexa. Things were more dangerous back then, so we were often chased by a bodyguard or two.” She smiles. “I had a crush on one of them. Mickey. Lauren convinced Alexa and me that we should trick him into kissing me.”
“Oh no,” I laugh. “How old were you?”
She pauses. “Thirteen.”
I tip my head back and try to contain my amusement.
“We went to the pool and I jumped in. I’d been practicing holding my breath, but Mickey was still pretty new and I don’t think he knew how long I could stay under. I watched him from under the water as he waved someone else over, stripped off his shirt, and dove in to get me.” She blushes. “He didn’t end up kissing me. I started laughing as soon as we broke the surface of the water instead of playing unconscious. He was horrified.”
“Damn,” I say, taking in her small smile. “So what was your first kiss?”
She shakes her head. “You first.”
I lean back in my seat. “Third grade. I was particularly ballsy for a kid, so I went for it on the bus after school. Her name was Joy.”
“And did you and Joy live happily ever after?”
“Nah, she came out in college and is happily
married. She and her wife live in Massachusetts.”
She blinks at me. “I’m surprised you know that.”
“Facebook is a beautiful thing,” I answer with a smirk.
A woman walks up to our table, a man close behind her. Delia catches a glance at her face and pales. I turn toward the stranger, unsure what I would do—pull the gun I have in my ankle holster? Tackle her? She wears a deep red dress and matching lipstick. The cut of her dress floats just above the floor.
“Stiamo con voi,” she says, her voice rolling along the syllables.
The only foreign language I know is bits of Spanish—unhelpful for what I guess is Italian. I glance at Delia, who has straightened in her seat. She gives a sharp shake of her head, then slides out of the chair and taps the table. “I’ll be right back,” she says to me.
I nod, mute.
The woman stares at me for a second and then follows after Delia. Her long dark hair falls to her waist and swings as she walks. The man behind her—definitely Italian, judging by his dark hair and olive-colored skin—scowls at me.
I purposely ignore him and watch Delia push through the door into the ladies’ restroom. The woman’s partner turns and watches, too. My muscles get more and more tense as I sit here.
I hate waiting. Patience has always come in waves: it ebbs away from me now, etching away pieces of resistance. As it frays, I contemplate my moves: would the man resist? Possibly. A blow to the temple, if hard enough, would knock him out. At the very least, I could stun him and get across the restaurant.
He looks over at me and I growl under my breath. His eyes narrow.
The restroom door swings open. The woman exits first, meeting the man’s eyes and tilting her head toward the door. Delia slips out and comes back to me.
Guilt punches me square in the face.
I stifle it as she sits and smiles at me. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“I should ask you that,” I answer, still feeling like she’s knocked me off balance. “Who was that?”
She shakes her head. “What’s life without a few surprises?” She reaches out and takes my hand. “After your fight, we’re going to Vegas, right?”