by Max Monroe
“You’re going to listen to her?” he asked, alarmed. As much as we had this kind of shit as liability protection, I didn’t make a habit of using it. Apparently, Cal didn’t much like the idea of that changing.
Unfortunately, in this case, whether Cal or I liked it, I had to make an exception.
Keeping Alex close, but in the dark, had been the priority. Watch her. Test her a little. Make sure she hadn’t heard any information her delicate little ears shouldn’t have been privy to—specifically, Wonderland, Inc.’s connection and deal with King.
But mostly, keep her in the motherfucking dark.
Her walking into my apartment was the complete opposite of the plan. Hell, it blew the lid right off the fucking plan. And worse than that, it possibly made her a liability when she wasn’t necessarily one in the first place.
I needed to hear the events that led her to my apartment, and I needed to hear it right the fuck now.
With a slow inhale and an even slower exhale, I did my best to tamp down the rage that was practically choking the air out of my throat. “I’m going to get both sides of the story, and I have a feeling Alex needs some space right now. This is the easiest way.”
I couldn’t blame her for hauling ass out of my apartment without a word. There would’ve been cause for concern had she just hung around and acted like shit was normal. Because in her mind, there never should’ve been a connection between her so-called landlord and me. Hell, she hadn’t even known I lived in the building.
Fucking Moosa. I had a feeling once I listened through the voice surveillance recording of her apartment, he would be getting more than just my boot up his ass.
“Space?” Cal asked, concern and accusation roughening his voice. “What happened in there?”
“Cal,” I reprimanded.
He scowled but knew better than to push it. “I can fuck right off. I got it.”
“I like that you like her,” I praised. Someone needed to be looking out for her. Someone who could fucking think rationally around her. But it didn’t matter how much either of us liked her. Her knowledge made all of us vulnerable—probably her most of all. “But you can’t let that sway you. You know what we have to do here, how we have to be.”
Seemingly appeased, he nodded, his jaw tight, and took out his phone to call IT and Mickey. I shut the door and strode back into the kitchen. I looked around almost manically. Hoping to find something to break, something out of the ordinary, I didn’t know. But she’d been in here; I could smell the heavy sweetness of cherry blossom.
My phone buzzed on the counter, and I scooped it up immediately. The email from the IT department held nothing more than an MP3 file, so I clicked it to download.
The wait couldn’t have been any longer than a minute, but it felt like an eternity.
Dialing up the volume by several clicks, I listened as the file started to play.
It seemed like nothing more than the knock of a hammer with some soft, shitty music playing in the background for the first few minutes, so I moved the file forward in five-minute increments until I heard the sound of her voice.
She was midsentence, so I went back until I found the beginning and started to listen.
A few meows from her cat and a deep sigh from her were the last things I heard before she started a one-sided conversation that could have only been a phone call.
“How’d you know it was me?”
A pause.
“Well…the shower off the master bedroom…I don’t think it’s working right. My temperature options consist of boil my skin off or frostbite. Can you come look at it?”
Only a moment passed.
“Fantastic,” she responded. “So, I’ll see you in about thirty minutes?”
Another run of silence.
“Wednesday?” she questioned, after someone, likely Mickey, fed her some kind of bullshit excuse. “But that’s two days from now!”
A puff of sound filled the air like she’d thrown herself somewhere dramatically.
“Mike, this is ridiculous. How am I supposed to shower over the next two days?”
Definitely Mickey, the prick. Two days to fix her goddamn shower? After I broke his neck, I was going to break his fingers one by one, just for good measure.
“You mean like the kitchen sink?”
“The temperature is great, but the whole dilemma of not being able to fit my ass inside the sink might cause problems!”
I shook my head. Mickey thought this was giving her whatever the fuck she wanted?
“Seriously? You’re the only guy who can come fix it? There’s no one else in this building who can help me? Not even maintenance staff?”
I’d heard enough. Mickey was a lazy fuck who’d sent her up here on a whim because she was fucking annoying him.
I wondered how annoying he might find it to walk without toes.
“Cal!” I called harshly, and the door opened almost immediately.
“Yeah?”
“Tell me Mick’s on his way here.”
He smiled evilly, correctly reading every ounce of my pissed-off aura and relishing it. “He is.”
I jerked my head, and he stepped back outside as I fast-forwarded the file again and stopped it on the slam of her door fifteen or so minutes later.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Oh my God.”
The cat meowed.
“Yeah, tell me about it. What am I supposed to do with this?”
Another two meows.
“I can’t do that!” she yelled.
Was she on the phone again? I listened closer as footsteps tracked toward the mic and away again.
“I mean, he’s my boss, right? He is my boss. I can’t just ride the joystick anytime I want, Deena, okay? So, stop. It doesn’t matter that it’s huge.”
Deena?
I pushed pause, picked up my phone, and jogged over to my home office to grab her file. I opened it right there on my desk and scanned the contents with the tip of my finger.
One cat. Name: Deena.
Her cat. Her fucking cat. She was talking to her cat.
More aptly, she was freaking out about wanting my cock to her cat.
I couldn’t help but smile as I pushed play again, closed the file, and made my way back out to the kitchen.
“What matters is that he lives in the same building as me. I mean, what’s the deal with that?”
The corners of my mouth melted straight into a scowl.
Fucking fuck, I was going to kill Mickey.
“Cal!” I yelled again.
He stepped inside this time and closed the door behind him, his brows drawn offensively. Normally amiable and friendly in my presence, I sometimes forgot he could look like a scary motherfucker when he wanted.
“What?”
“There’s only one rule when Mickey gets here, do you hear me?”
His head jerked in the affirmative.
“Don’t let me kill him. Not today.”
“But—”
“Alex,” I explained with just one word. She was starting to wonder about things, and one missing landlord was going to be more than enough to deal with when it came up.
“But we can make it hurt, right?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
I planned to make it hurt a fucking lot.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS HAD PASSED, AND I still had no idea what to make of yesterday.
Hell, I was starting to question everything that had occurred over the past two weeks—meeting Matt, getting un-evicted and moved in to a kick-ass apartment in downtown LA, being introduced into the world that was everything Wonderland, Inc., and working at swanky, sophisticated parties whose attendees comprised some of Hollywood’s elite. And then, witnessing those very attendees blur the lines of good and bad with charitable functions being used as some sort of cover to delve into a classy kind of dirty where prostitutes were called pleasure girls and drugs and alcohol were passed around like hors d’oeuvres.
It was a mindfuck.
And the icing on the cake?
Mike, my fucking landlord, instructing me to go to the eighteenth floor, into an apartment owned by none other than Matt Hadder. My fucking boss.
And not only that, but like a complete moron, I’d walked around his place until I found him in the shower, naked and stroking his dick.
I hated how much I loved the visuals the mere thought of his oh so very perfect cock spurred. I shouldn’t have been fantasizing about what he tasted like or felt like or, holy hell, what he’d feel like inside of me.
I definitely shouldn’t have been fantasizing about those things.
Shouldn’t being the operative word my mind kept forgetting.
Matt fully dressed was a fantastic sight, one that any woman in the world would drool over. But remove the clothes and add his hard cock into the deal? Mind-blowing. Provocative. So fucking erotic and arousing it should’ve qualified as the eighth deadly sin. I couldn’t remove those images from my brain even if I wanted to.
Christ, I’d be a liar if I said I wanted to remove them. Like a little ravenous scavenger, I’d been stockpiling each and every image into the recesses of my brain so I could obsess over them for the rest of time.
I was a pervert and starting to wonder if I needed therapy. Or sex. Hell, maybe both.
Sex? Cripes. How long has it been?
I knew it had been at least a year. My last sex being my ex-boyfriend Randy. And sadly enough, it wasn’t even good sex. It was just…sex. In and out, in and out until he climaxed and fell asleep.
Which, normally, I wouldn’t think twice about. I’d never really considered myself a sexual person per se. I found men attractive, and I did enjoy the benefits a good orgasm could give, but sex wasn’t something that had ever really been on my daily radar.
Until Matt and his sexy naked body and perfect cock in the shower.
That visual, well, it had fucked up my normal thought processes. Short-circuited my brain’s usual neurotransmitter path and rerouted my mind’s inclinations toward fixating on fantasies and obsessing over tanned, flexing muscles and intense eyes that rotated hues of honey and amber and gold depending on their mood.
It didn’t make sense.
Before Matt, I’d had boyfriends. I’d seen men naked. I’d had sex…not a lot, but enough to know the gist of it. But nothing, not even sex itself, had ever turned me on as much as seeing Matt stroke his perfect cock. It was like that man and his fuck-hot body held the key to my secret garden of horny.
And right on cue, the visuals started rolling in again.
Naked Matt.
Matt’s biceps flexing and his intense eyes on me and his hand wrapped around himself, moving, stroking, up and down, up and down, until my brain felt buzzed.
Sheesh. This is crazy.
I blinked several times to find my equilibrium.
Fuck, I had to get out of this apartment. Take a walk. Get some fresh air. Basically, do anything but sit around in my underwear and fixate.
After a short trip to my walk-in closet, I’d switched out of my sleep shirt into a little black cotton dress and decided that a quick stroll to the market to grab a few things wasn’t a half-bad idea.
Five blocks south and another two toward the right, I stepped into Ralph’s, the nearest grocery store within walking distance, grabbed a basket, and kept my brain busy with the short list I’d jotted down before I left my apartment.
-Coffee
-Milk
-Turkey
-Don’t think about Matt
-Oranges
-Oreos
-Don’t think about Matt!
-Bananas
-Ice cream
-Stop thinking about him!
-Toilet paper
-Eggs
-Stop thinking about him, you pervert!
-Ugh. You’re pathetic.
Forty minutes later, I walked toward my building with both hands full of grocery bags and my mind not thinking about Matt naked or the one million things it probably should have been analyzing.
Such as, how did my landlord know Matt?
And why did he send me up to Matt’s apartment?
There were a lot of things I didn’t know about Matt Hadder, but I definitely knew he wasn’t a fucking maintenance guy.
I’d even attempted to call Mike three different times, but every time, I’d lost my nerve and hung up before the second ring.
I mean, how did someone even broach a conversation like that?
“Oh, hey, Mike. It’s Alex. I’m just wondering why you sent me to Matt’s apartment so I could watch him jerk off in the shower. Also, please ignore the fact that I took it upon myself to just stand there like a pervert and watch him finish…”
See what I mean? It wasn’t an easy situation any way I looked at it.
And the more I thought about the entire clusterfuck of confusing circumstances, I wondered if it really was just by chance that I’d been relocated into the same building as Matt? I mean, what were the fucking odds?
Surely, they weren’t good. I probably would’ve had a better shot at winning the lottery.
Okay, so maybe I was a bit of a liar.
My mind was thinking about Matt. He was all I could focus on. Not only my insane attraction toward him, but all of the strange coincidences and odd situations that had led me to my current confusing set of circumstances.
As I rounded the last block toward my building, I passed by an empty bus stop, and my eyes locked on to a newspaper sitting discarded on a distressed, wooden bench.
Aha! I smiled, but it wasn’t the newspaper that had caught my eye. It was the back of a playing card peeking out between its pages. Without hesitation, I snatched the newspaper off the bench and finished the short walk toward the entrance of my building.
Collecting playing cards found in the street was a bit of a pastime for Aunt Delores and me. We’d been doing it for years, since I was probably around eight or nine, and it was our game, with our rules. We had to find the cards on the streets of San Diego, any neighborhood, and we could only take two cards at a time. Every year, on January 1st, we’d start the yearlong search to collect an entire deck in a year’s time.
I’d loved our game. Still did, actually.
We’d bring our cards home, organize them by numerical order and suit, and eventually, for the years we’d get a whole deck, we’d put them in a scrapbook with little notes about when and where we had found them.
When I was fifteen, Aunt Delores had made a chart that consisted of what each card meant. Considering she’d gotten their descriptions from Ms. Gypsy—a part-time psychic who gave readings inside of her garage—I hadn’t really put much stock into their meanings.
And when I was eighteen, my then-boyfriend Randy and a few of my friends had asked me why I was doing it, collecting discarded playing cards in the streets. I think their question stemmed from annoyance more than anything else. But I hadn’t really known the answer. It had always been just something fun that I’d done with Aunt Delores.
Until right now.
The instant I spotted that card, I’d finally connected the dots.
I walked into my apartment and dropped my grocery bags onto the counter, too excited to look at the playing card to waste time putting the cold items in the fridge. And with a giant smile on my face, I flipped open the newspaper and slid the playing card out from between the pages.
The six of hearts.
According to Ms. Gypsy, it stood for love.
According to me, it stood for rediscovering the pastime that had brought me so much joy in my childhood—and finding it at a time when I really needed it.
See, as humans, we always want an explanation. A reason. A solution. For everything. We do this in every aspect of our lives. Always searching for things that are useful, that make sense. Always needing to know the answer to Why?
But this, finding random playing cards on the street, it didn’t necessarily make sense. It didn’t necessarily hold a specific reason. A
nd it wasn’t exactly useful.
It just is.
This game was Aunt Delores’s and my way of rebelling against the mind-set of society where everything should be useful and make sense. Sometimes, you just needed something mysterious in your life that couldn’t be easily explained. Something that you didn’t feel the need to try to explain.
And right now, with all of these unknowns swirling around inside my head, I needed this six of hearts.
As I reached to grab my phone off the counter, to make a quick call to my aunt, I spotted a familiar name splashed across the opened newspaper. I stopped in my tracks and scanned the article with narrowed eyes.
Boyle Heights’ Police Update: Man found dead in Boyle Heights has been identified as Vinnie Pat
Police say they’ve identified the dead body of a man found earlier this week sitting inside of a stolen vehicle parked in a Boyle Heights’ alleyway. They say the body was that of 45-year-old Vincenzo Patterelli, known to most as Vinnie Pat.
Vinnie Pat had been suspected of having deep ties to the Mexican drug cartel, as well as involvement in a string of robberies that had occurred in the Bel Air area.
After his death, it was also discovered he had several rental properties in the Boyle Heights area that had been purchased under a different alias.
The California Office of the Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death.
Since Patterelli did not have any identification on him, police say he was identified by fingerprints.
A woman, who was taking out trash to a bin in the alley at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, noticed the man sitting in the parked vehicle and called police. The woman thought the man had passed out, but police say he was dead at the scene.
Vinnie Pat was dead? Not to mention I’d been living in an apartment building owned by a landlord who had ties to the Mexican drug cartel?
What in the ever-loving fuck was going on here?
Between Wonderland and my new landlord Mike, and Vinnie Pat dying not even twenty-four hours after I’d told Matt that I was getting evicted, there were too many coincidences and not enough explanations.