by Cassy Roop
“Did you hear me, Nic?” Victoria asked as she approached me and looked out into the club. I nodded, not sure if she actually did say anything to me before my mind wandered off.
“It’s sad to see her shut down isn’t it? Toby told me they shut down Reno, New Orleans, and Tampa too.”
“Yeah,” I said exasperatedly. Everything seemed to be slowly unraveling more and more as each day passed. My assets were frozen, and all I had available to me were my personal accounts. I still had more than enough to live on comfortably, but to know that all my hard work was frozen somewhere really pissed me off.
“Vic, I cannot thank you enough for all that you have done for me. You and Knox have been there for me through a lot of shit. And now, we have this. Don’t worry; we will get out of this. I promise.”
“I know we will Nic. We will have The Knot back up and running better than ever. People will be flocking to this place, dying to get a membership after that bitch goes down.”
“Vic,” I said in a small warning. Even though my feelings and thoughts were conflicted about Ashley, I still loved her. I still genuinely fucking loved her. Maybe that was why I was having such a hard time dealing with all of this.
Victoria wrapped her arms around my waist and leaned into me. I hugged her back, thankful for her support and friendship.
“It’s true, Nic. I’m sorry. I know how you feel about her, but she doesn’t deserve you. You are a good, honest person. Anyone who knows you knows that. You saved my life. You gave me a job, and you gave me your friendship. I will forever be grateful for what you have done for me.”
She lifted her head from my chest and raised onto her toes to plant a small kiss with her deeply painted red lips upon my cheek. Victoria was gorgeous. Fucking knock-dead hot. I helped her become a dominatrix when she escaped her ex. She swore she never wanted to be out of control again, so I showed her how to keep it. She had nearly blossomed overnight. If it weren’t for the phenomenal friendship we had developed along the way, we could have possibly let it develop into something sexual. I never would have gotten romantically involved with her because I didn’t do that, until Ashley, but I definitely would have fucked the hell out of her.
I don’t know if it was because of the wave of fucking emotions that ran through me, or the torment that I felt from Ashley’s betrayal, but my don’t care attitude began to kick in, and when Vic traced her mouth from my cheek to over close to my lips, I nearly gave into the moment and kissed her. Toby and Knox’s loud arrival had me pulling back just in time before I did something that could have ruined our friendship.
“Nic! We are here. Have the assholes arrived yet?” Knox said as he barreled his way into my office. I couldn’t help but sigh in relief that he and Toby interrupted us, but Victoria looked annoyed and it had me a little on edge. All the years that we have been friends, we have never come close to even remotely anything sexual, kissing or otherwise.
Kelly peeked her head in the door after Knox and Toby made themselves comfortable in my office. She looked shy, almost timid around me. When I first met her, she was spunky, a real fucking spitfire. Nowadays she looked worn and almost fragile. In my mind, I thought it was because she was torn between her best friend and my best friend.
“Hey, Kell,” I said as I walked up to her and slung an arm around her shoulder giving her a side hug. I wanted to try to give her some sort of comfort so that she didn’t think that she had to walk on eggshells around me because it was her friend who had nearly destroyed me.
“Hey, Nic,” she replied with a tone that held exasperation. Victoria brushed past both of us and left the room, and it made my brows furrow. What the hell was going on with her?
“Nic, the investigators will be here in about fifteen minutes. Are you positive there is nothing in here that could even remotely incriminate you?”
“Toby, fuck man. It’s us. You know us and know that we would never do anything like that. We have done everything by the book,” Knox interrupted before I even had time to answer.
“I know that, Knox. I was asking as your lawyer. I just wanted to be sure so that I know how to proceed.”
“We understand, Toby. Kelly, go calm your boy down before he pops a blood vessel in that bald head of his,” I said jokingly trying to liven up the damp spirit in the room. In all honesty, I was truly using the cheap, joking shots to try and mask my own nervousness and edginess. Kelly’s giggle was welcome and I thought Toby’s coffee was going to come out of his nose.
“I’ll show you boy in a minute,” Knox said as he gripped his crotch and shook it at me. We all broke out in laughter, needing the release of tension. After a few moments, Victoria came back into the office, followed by Officer Russell, his trusty mute sidekick who hardly said a word to anyone, and a few other officers.
“Michaels, Tanner,” Russell said addressing us in a nonchalant tone. The guy knew how to get on your nerves. The only thing that kept me from beating the shit out of the smug bastard was the badge he wore.
“If you don’t mind, we would like to get started. You can wait downstairs,” Russell said with a wave of his dismissive hand. I clenched my own in response, fighting tooth and nail against every instinct to knock him flat on his ass. Toby placed a hand on my shoulder when he noticed my aggravation and tilted his head to suggest we leave.
“We’ll be downstairs,” I said as deadpan as I could before following Knox, Vic, Kelly and Toby out of the office. We gathered at a table near the bar as we waited for the search to go on upstairs. The thought of anyone going through my personal stuff, financial or otherwise, pissed me off. Knowing that fucking asshole Russell was the one upstairs doing it, infuriated me to no end.
Toby, Knox, and Victoria went to make a few drinks behind the bar while Kelly and I sat silently at the table. She seemed nervous as she picked at her fingernails distractedly.
“You ok, Kell?” I asked out of genuine concern. I had grown to like Kelly. She was the only one who seemed to be able to keep Knox in line and didn’t take his shit when he dished it out. They complimented each other and I was very glad that my best friend had found someone so perfect for him.
“I’m really worried about Ashley. She is acting so strange, Nic. I don’t know who this person is she has turned into. She ran off late last night when Knox and I got to the apartment. She-she never came home last night,” She said with worry.
She didn’t go home last night?
The thought made me feel shameful, yet extremely distraught. Could I have been the reason why she didn’t go home? What I did to her last night, pushing her to beyond her limit, wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t thought out either. I thought for sure she would tell me why she was in my club, but instead she safe-worded on me. I have never had anyone use their safe word on me before and the fact that Ashley was the first one to do so, wrecked me beyond all repair.
I wanted to be honest with Kelly, but I feared the repercussions of what everyone would think about the way that I treated Ashley. Yes, she ripped my heart out, yes, she caused a cataclysmic ripple effect to my life falling apart, but it didn’t mean that I could destroy her in return. That would make me no better than her.
“I have known Ashley for over seven years. I was the first friend she made when she and Jared moved to Chicago. I watched that man ignore her, I watched as she sacrificed herself for anyone and everything else. You were the first thing that I have ever saw her go after that she wanted. I don’t understand why everything has changed now,” she said as her eyes welled up with tears. The change in Ashley was certainly taking effect on Kelly hard because she loved her so much. I understood where she was coming from.
“I saw her last night,” I admitted as I hung my head, not wanting to look directly at her.
“What?” she perked up. “What was she doing? Where did you see her?”
I tapped my index finger against the table indicating to Kelly where I had seen her.
“Here?” she asked unbelieving, her eyes grew wide in cu
riosity and interest. I nodded my head in agreement, not wanting to say anything about what actually happened last night.
“She was here, in the club?” she asked again still not believing what I told her.
“Yes.”
“What was she doing here? How did she get in? The place was locked wasn’t it?” she said as she glanced around the club like Ashley would materialize out of the walls.
“Yes it was locked, and I don’t know how she got in. I got an alert from the security company saying that the backdoor had been opened. I thought it was suspicious, so I came here to find out why.”
Knox, Vic, and Toby all approached the table and took seats next to Kelly and me. I didn’t want to involve them in the conversation. The last thing I needed was three more opinions about how much of an asshole I was.
“So you were both here? At the same time? What did she say? What was she doing?”
Shit.
Toby, Vic and Knox all turned to look at me at the same time. I now had eight sets of eyeballs staring me down, wanting to know what happened.
“What’s going on?” Knox asked after taking a long pull from his beer. I rested my forehead in my hands and tried to grasp ahold of some nerves to tell my friends about the events that happened last night.
“Dominic and Ashley were both here last night,” Kelly said before I had a chance to respond. It earned a couple of unbelievable “what” from Toby and Knox as Victoria sucked in a rapid intake of air.
“Ashley was the intruder last night?” Knox asked, with his beer bottle paused halfway to his mouth. Toby, Victoria and Kelly had yet to take a drink from any of theirs as all eyes were trained on me waiting for me to respond.
“Yes. She was the one that was here last night,” I said looking at my best friend.
“What was she doing here?” Toby asked in genuine interest.
“I-I don’t know,” I sighed in exasperation. The same question still played over and over on repeat in my mind. The question that I never got the answer to.
“Well did you ask her?” Victoria chimed in after being silent for a majority of the conversation, irritation laced in her voice.
“I did, but I never got an answer.”
Everyone was silent for a few moments, as if trying to process the new information. My leg bounced nervously on the leg of the barstool that we sat on at the high top table.
“Tell me everything that happened, Nic. I need to know, as your lawyer, what went on during your confrontation,” Toby said, turning on his barstool so that he could face me better.
After pulling in a shaky breath, I proceeded to tell him everything that happened when I first got to The Knot last night. I told them about how upon entry, I didn’t see anyone in the Common Room or even in the Rapture Room which was locked when I came in. I told them about how I saw Ashley sitting on the stage when I left the Rapture Room and came back into the Common Room.
I paused, not wanting to continue the story, knowing what kind of reaction I was going to get out of my friends when they heard the rest of the story. Knox lifted his hands and held his palms out in a questioning gesture.
“What happened next?”
Here goes.
“I approached her and asked her what she was doing here. She wouldn’t answer me and I was angry. I threatened to call the cops and have her arrested.”
“Why didn’t you?” Victoria asked almost bitterly. I was starting to get a strange vibe that Victoria didn’t care for Ashley. Of course she wasn’t a popular favorite among us at the current time, under the circumstances that she had put us all in.
“I sort of made a deal with her.”
“What? What kind of deal, Nic. God you have to stop doing shit like this. How am I supposed to defend you if you are keeping crap like this away from me? You aren’t making this case any easier on yourself or me,” Toby preached. He was about to find out just how much harder I possibly made this case against us.
“I did a scene with her.”
Shock, was too tame of a word to describe the looks on everyone’s face after my admission. Seconds, minutes seemed to go by as no one said anything, just looked at me dumbfounded.
“You what?” Knox asked in a near whisper. He stood up so fast that the barstool tipped over from the force of it. The table separating us shook like the rolling sound of thunder when Knox slammed the palms of his hands down upon it.
“That’s not all…” I said when I looked away from everyone to glance at the stage remembering the haunting moment that crept into my brain nearly every other minute since it happened.
“What? Just fucking spit it out already,” Knox growled. Toby had his head down on the table and Kelly and Victoria just stared at me with their mouths half hanging open.
“She...safe worded.”
The table was shoved into my chest causing a bruising pain to radiate briefly through me from the force of Knox pushing against it as he turned and walked away. Victoria jumped up off of her barstool and excused herself and walked out of the Common Room. Kelly and Toby said nothing as Knox paced the floor. No one said anything. Not a fucking word as the thoughts that I thought they were thinking formed in my head threatening to make me explode from the anxiety of it.
“She safe worded? She fucking safe worded? Goddammit Dominic! There is no telling what you have done to that girl. You realize what the consequences of that could be right?”
Yeah, I knew. I knew that not only could I have compromised her trust in me, or other men in general, but also that she could possible use that against me in court and that could have dire consequences.
“Someone had to have let her in right? I mean the security system has to have that key card swipe thingy and a regular key to gain access, right? Oh, God! I have to find her. There is no telling what she is feeling right now.”
Kelly grabbed her purse and took off out of the backdoor of the club. Something she said grabbed my attention. She was correct when she said that someone had to use their keycard as well as a regular key to gain access into the club. Even though Ashley was an employee of the club, I never gave her a keycard. Since I wasn’t here to let her in and Knox was with Kelly at her apartment that meant that only four other people could have given her access. Only four other people possessed keycards other than Knox and myself.
The security team.
Knox approached me cautiously. I could tell he was holding back his anger and to keep from giving me a piece of his mind. How could I not have thought about that before?
“Knox,” I said as the epiphany suddenly came to me.
“What?” he bit out.
“Kelly is right. Someone had to have let her in. There are only six of us who hold key cards.”
Toby looked up from having his head down on the table. He used his index fingers to rub at his temples indicating his frustration.
“What does that mean?” he asked as he continued his clockwise motions.
“That means all we have to do is find out from the security company whose card was swiped last night to let Ashley into the club.”
“Yeah, but she could have stolen it from someone,” Toby suggested.
“True, but it’s a start.”
I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and brought the touchscreen to life. Just as I was about to hit send, Officer Russell and the other officers entered the Common Room.
“Well, did you find or not find everything you were looking for?” Knox asked sarcastically having the same disdain that I shared for Russell.
Russell’s sardonic chuckle had me pulling the phone from my ear. I clenched it in my hands with enough force that I felt like the plastic covering could shatter apart in my hands at any moment.
Control your anger, Nic.
“Oh, yes,” he said as he approached us. “These should come in handy for the prosecution,” he said as he tapped a manila folder against the palm of his hands. “You actually should have done a better job about hiding the financial records for all the money
you two were making selling your whores.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said as my body vibrated with anger. Russell approached and held out a stack of papers he pulled from the folder. My eyes scanned over them, not believing what I was seeing. Line after line of records indicating sales of girls, how much they made, and how much money it appeared that Knox and I made from those sales.
“This is all bullshit!” I yelled at Russell. The papers were yanked from my hands as Knox and Toby both rushed to my side.
“Well, we will let the judge be the judge of that,” Russell said as he and the other officers turned and walked out of the club.
I was so angry I couldn’t move. My body vibrated with rage.
All thoughts of calling the security company and everything else faded into the back of my mind.
“Ashley, do you think you are pregnant?” Rownan asked me, only he seemed far off, like there was a great physical distance between us. I was having an out of body experience as it felt like I was floating above where I sat, looking upon my life happening in slow motion.
Pregnant?
It was very possible. Dominic and I had had unprotected sex around the time that I was on antibiotics for a horrible sinus infection. The idea kept swimming around in my head.
Me.
A mother.
Did I want to be a mother? Without a doubt. Jared and I were married for seven years. I begged him nearly every day for us to be able to start working on a family. He always gave me the same excuse that he wanted to finish school and start his career first.