by Donya Lynne
There’s a folded sheet of notepaper on the bed, which has been made by housekeeping.
I grab it off the duvet and nearly rip it in half as I unfold it.
Wait, what? I read the name at the bottom twice more before the realization sinks in.
The note isn’t from Nash. It’s from Shaun.
Max,
I told you that you owed me and that I would get that diamond ring from you one way or another. You’ll find your account is missing three million dollars. Two for the ring, and one for what I’ll just call a partnership dissolution fee.
You’d be nothing without me, Max. I gave you everything. I gave you a life and a chance to be somebody, and now you want to walk away. You don’t get to do that without paying the price.
Oh, and I saw your new girlfriend leave this morning. She was all packed up and ready to go. Got into one helluva sweet ride that looked like government issue and took off. But not before I saw her tuck what looked like a microSD card in a small case she stuffed in her bag. Tsk, tsk. Very careless of you, Max, losing your insurance like that. Maybe you’ll have better luck at poker.
Shaun
P.S. I told you she was using you.
I think my heart just stopped. For a long moment, I can’t move. I can’t breathe. My whole world is crashing down around me.
Shaun knew about the SD card. How did he know? I never told him. He must have installed security cameras. He must have been watching me.
That son of a bitch!
As if I’ve been shot from a gun, I rush to my bag. I pull out my laptop and log in to my accounts.
My total balance is three million dollars less than it was yesterday.
Fuck me.
I catch my head in my hands and rake my fingers through my hair.
Fuck, fuck, holy fuck. I can’t believe Shaun would do this to me. I can’t believe he would—
My head jerks up as if I’ve been slapped.
The last part of his note. The part about the SD card and Nash.
It’s only just now registering what he wrote.
God no!
I nearly shred the note as I grab it off the bed and reread it. Right there. Nash, the SD card, she had it. How did she have it?
I take off my necklace, fumble with the locket. My fingers are shaking so violently it takes me three tries to get it open.
Nothing.
The locket is empty.
The card is gone.
My insurance policy.
My get-out-of-jail-free card.
It’s gone!
Maybe Shaun took it and he’s trying to pin it on Nash. He obviously knew I had it, and he certainly seemed intent on throwing Nash under the bus these past couple of days. Maybe this is his way of turning me against her.
But when would he have had the chance to steal the card? It’s been with me the whole time. I had it yesterday. I checked. So when would Shaun have had the opportunity to take it?
And why would Nash leave so suddenly today?
I want to believe Nash is innocent and that Shaun has concocted this lie to drive the knife even deeper into my back, but my gut tells me that’s not true. How Nash was this morning, after my shower . . . she looked nervous, upset, like she was hiding something. And then, outside her room, she wasn’t herself. She’d been on the verge of tears. I know she was.
The nail in the coffin is that she told me good-bye. She knew she would never see me again. In hindsight, the truth becomes crystal clear.
She took it. I know as surely as I’m breathing that she did.
I fall ass-first onto the bed, nothing but an empty vessel. What is this pain in my chest? My heart hurts. Am I having a heart attack? And what the hell? Am I crying? I dab my fingertips on my cheeks and look down at them. They’re wet.
Tears slide to my chin and drip off.
I’ve only ever felt this way twice. The first was when my father died. The second was with the passing of my mother. Now, it’s as if I’ve lost the rest of me.
How can I love someone this deeply when I’ve only just met her? That’s the only explanation for how I feel. It’s not the money. I could give a shit about the money. Let Shaun have it. I have plenty left. It’s not even the fact that the SD card is gone. I have ways of staying under the radar. I didn’t get this far without learning how to stay invisible. I can find another insurance policy. I hacked that one, I can hack another, even if my hacking skills aren’t as developed as Shaun’s.
This pain I’m feeling is caused by the loss of a love I never thought I would find. Maybe it happened fast, and maybe it’s crazy to think two people could form such an intense bond so quickly, but it happened. The way my heart is ripping in two is proof.
I don’t know how long I sit there. Thirty minutes? An hour?
When I check the time, I’m surprised to see ninety minutes have passed.
Ninety agonizing minutes.
By now, I’ve been disqualified from the tournament, but I don’t care. Without Nash to celebrate with, a win would have felt hollow. More like a loss. Why rub salt in a wound that’s still ripping me apart?
Gathering myself, I drag the empty locket back around my neck. After all, it was my mother’s. It still holds value in my heart, and I wore it every day even before I stored the SD card in it.
I shut down my laptop and put it back in my bag. I have one more night in Vegas. Tomorrow I’ll figure out whether I’m going to return to California, stay in Vegas like I planned, or strike out toward someplace new to lay low for a while and regroup before making my next move. Florida sounds promising. So does Chicago, although I’m not a fan of the cold.
It doesn’t matter where I go, though. Nash won’t be with me. So, every destination will feel empty.
With a resolute sigh, I push myself off the bed. There’s nothing I can do tonight. What’s done is done. Might as well go down to iBar one last time and wallow in a bottle of Johnnie Walker until I can’t keep my eyes open.
The lights inside the bar I’ve come to know so well are a little less bright, the colorful décor less lustrous. A dull sheen seems to coat everything as I take a seat at the bar, order a double, and tell the bartender to keep ’em coming.
“Rough night?” he asks, noting my disheveled appearance.
“The worst.” I down my drink in one swallow.
He refills my glass. “Maybe your luck will change.”
Fuck luck.
I shake my head. “Doubt it. Some losses are too great to overcome.” I raise my glass to him, give him a little salute, then dump the contents down my throat. I drop the base of the glass onto the bar. “But I’m sure as hell going to try to forget about them for the night.” I glance suggestively at the bottle in his hand.
He eyes me the same way someone might eye a length of coiled rope in a darkened corner, wondering whether it’s really rope or a snake poised to strike. Then he nods once and leaves the bottle sitting on the bar in front of me.
“Good man.” I unscrew the cap and pour myself another as he offers a grim smile and heads off to wait on another customer.
This must be what karma feels like. I spent almost a decade cheating people, conning them out of millions of dollars in one way or another. Through it all, I was able to avoid getting caught. No prison time for this slippery goose. Nope. But I’m definitely taking my punishment now.
I smirk and down my third shot of whiskey before pouring myself another.
The con man has become the conned.
I’ve been thoroughly played.
Fate gets the last laugh. I’ve bluffed my way through life until the stakes grew high enough to hurt when the cards finally failed to fall my way. Contrary to my aversion to luck, I relied too much on it to get me where I am. And the problem with luck is that it eventually runs out. I’ve sensed for over a year that my own luck was about to end, I just never knew it would end this way.
Staring into my drink, I realize I’m never going to have a normal life, no matter how badly I want it. Fate ha
s other plans for me, and I may as well get used to the idea.
I’m on my fifth shot, feeling sorrier for myself by the minute, when a shadow passes to my left. A moment later, a hand breaks into my field of vision. It’s a feminine hand, and it’s holding something. Something small and flat.
I focus my whiskey-fogged vision and blink once, twice. The third time I frown.
What sits in front of me on the bar is an SD card. The same SD card that was in my locket until this morning.
I sit a little taller, straightening my back as my gaze follows the slender arm in front of me to her elbow, then her shoulder, up her slender neck, until I’m staring into the dark-brown eyes I’ve come to know so well in the past two days.
“Nash?” Am I hallucinating? I haven’t had enough to drink to have reached that level of drunkenness, so she must be real.
She eases onto the seat beside me. “This belongs to you.” She holds the card in front of me.
When I don’t take it, she sets it on the bar, opens my locket as I stare numbly at her, slips the card inside, then snaps the locket closed.
“Why?”
Guilt veils her eyes as she tentatively meets my gaze. “Why did I take it? Or why did I return it?”
My mouth opens, closes, opens again. Nothing comes out and I shrug, shaking my head.
She lets out a heavy exhale, briefly closes her eyes, then flags down the bartender. “I need a stiff drink if I’m going to tell you everything,” she says to me. To the bartender, she says, “Bring me a shot glass, please.”
He sets one in front of her. She promptly fills it from the bottle still sitting on the bar beside my glass.
All I can do is watch. She’s back. My Nash is back.
Then the anger kicks in. She lied to me. Like Shaun said, she used me. She used her feminine cunning to get an in with me and take what was mine.
I glare at her as she swallows her drink and scrunches her face as the whiskey burns her throat.
Then she looks at me, flinching as if she can feel my animosity.
“Max, let me explain.”
I kick back my drink, slam the glass on the bar, then drop a couple of hundreds as I stand. “Leave me alone.” I throw a venomous glance her way then make for the door.
_________
Nash
I knew he’d be angry, but I had hoped he would at least listen to me.
“Max, please . . .” I hurry after him.
“No, Nash. Or should I call you Natasha, since only your friends call you Nash?”
His harsh words hit their mark, and I feel the sting deep inside my heart.
“Max, if you’d just let me explain . . .” I’m practically running after him.
He cuts through the thick, Friday-night crowd. I almost lose him among the beeping, buzzing, and ringing gambling stations, but I somehow manage to catch up.
“Max, I need to tell you why.”
“You lied to me, Nash. Turns out I was the top-secret job you were sent here to do. Well, you’re damn good at your job, honey. I never even suspected I was just a hit. Congratulations on playing me so fucking thoroughly. And here I thought you were different.”
I want to scream at him that I am different. That I’ve jeopardized my very existence by returning the card to him. I’ve walked away from a payday substantial enough that I would never have to worry about money for the rest of my life. I’ve left everything I’ve ever known behind. I’ve become a fugitive. For him!
Karen is going to be furious. I don’t even want to think about how enraged Mr. Salazar will be once he finds out what I’ve done.
“You’re right,” I say, struggling to keep up with him as he makes a break for the elevators. “I used you. I lied. I—”
“Who do you work for?”
“Nobody.”
He scoffs and shoots me a dubious snarl.
“I don’t. Not technically.” I huff. “It’s complicated.”
“Well then, uncomplicate it.” He barges ahead, shoving his way through a crowd of people standing around a blackjack table.
A couple of curses fly, and someone barks at us to watch where we’re going, but Max is oblivious, driven by fury.
“If you would just stop and let me explain, I would uncomplicate it.”
We finally enter the elevator bay, and he slaps the up button. “What’s the point, Nash? It’s not going to change anything.”
This isn’t how I expected our reunion to go. Ideally, he wouldn’t have known I’d taken the card and I could have slipped it back into his locket before any harm was done. Then I saw him sitting at the bar, in the very seat where I first met him, and I knew I had to come clean. I couldn’t just come back, return the card to the locket when he wasn’t looking, and not tell him what I’d done. The guilt would have hung over me for eternity.
Now, I have to overcome his distrust of me in hopes he’ll listen. I need him to listen. To understand. I’m in trouble here, and my life rests in his hands. Without him, I’m as good as dead.
“Max . . .” I try to take his hand, but he yanks it away.
I drop my hand to my side and wait in silence with him. The elevator doors open, and without waiting for me, he marches inside. I follow.
The doors close, and we’re climbing upward. We’re the only two in the elevator, probably because everyone else in the bay could feel the aggression coming off Max and didn’t want to be anywhere near him when he detonated.
“Okay, so talk,” he says, his voice gruff. “Tell me why you did it.”
“I had no choice. I didn’t want to take it, but, I . . . please believe me when I tell you I didn’t have a choice.” Apparently, extreme shame causes you to lose your voice, because mine sounds so small, so weak. Tears balance on the rims of my eyes.
“What, did someone hold a gun to your head or something?”
“In a manner of speaking.” I bite my bottom lip. “I’m in a lot of trouble here.”
This seems to catch his attention, and a new emotion passes over the angles of his face. Concern.
“Just what the hell are you involved in, Nash?”
The doors open on his floor, and this time, he lets me pass through first. His gait is still brusque, his strides long and purposeful, but he doesn’t seem to be trying to escape from me anymore.
He leads me to his room, opens the door, and stands aside for me to enter. Once the door closes, he tosses his key card onto the dresser, leans his shoulder against the wall next to the bathroom, and crosses his arms. He’s a wall of flesh blocking me from getting out of the room if I decide to flee.
“Okay,” he says, “tell me what’s going on. Tell me all of it.”
I start from the beginning, rehashing what I told him last night, but this time, I fill in the blanks. I tell him about Infidelity, the agreement I signed, my relationship with Mr. Salazar, what was expected of me, and what I saw on Mr. Salazar’s computer.
Max doesn’t seem surprised. He probably isn’t. After all, he broke into Mr. Salazar’s computer and downloaded some of those files. I’m sure he saw what was on them.
I confess everything. All of it. How I was told if I didn’t do this job and steal the SD card, Mr. Salazar would manufacture a way to put me behind bars and discredit me. How scared I am that he might just have me killed instead. How I worked out a deal with Karen to cancel my agreement if I saw this job through. I even told him about the million dollars they were going to pay me and the dossier I was given, detailing what Karen and her team had learned about him. I tell him I came to Vegas to seduce him, to get close to him, and steal the card. No detail is spared.
When I finish, we’re both sitting on the couch, and I feel lighter than I have in years.
I have no idea what he’s thinking. He’s been wearing a poker face for the last twenty minutes, studying me in silence, probably searching for nonverbal clues that I’m not telling the truth.
Finally, he blows out a troubled exhale, bends forward, and rubs his palms up
and down his face. He rakes his fingers through his hair, slumped over, elbows on his knees, looking as beaten down as I feel.
“Shaun’s gone.”
The statement catches me off guard, and I have to quickly shift gears. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
He shrugs. “Yes and no.” He turns his face up to look at me. “He stole three million dollars out of my account.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
A thought hits me. Is he accusing me of working with Shaun? I hold my hand in the air like I’m taking an oath, professing my innocence. “I didn’t have anything to do with that, I swear.”
He utters a rueful chuckle and brushes his hands through his hair again as he sits back. “I know you didn’t.” He rests his head on the back of the couch and rolls it so he can look at me. “I just thought . . . I don’t know . . . I thought you should know.” Exhaustion seems to be tugging at him from all sides.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He’s gone. He got what he wanted and split. Clean break.” He lifts his hands and makes a breaking motion, like he’s snapping a twig. Then he tosses his arms to the sides, opening his hands like he’s throwing away the pieces.
We sit in silence for a while, gazing at each other. I’m not sure what to make of the look in his eyes. Has he forgiven me? Is he trying to figure out how to tell me it’s time for me to leave? Is he trying to decide how best to kill me and dispose of my body?
“So,” he says, “what’s going to happen to you now?”
It’s the last thing I expected him to say. “I, uh . . . I don’t know.” I pick at my nails. I’m a jumble of nerves and confusion and fear.
“The people you work for aren’t going to be very happy when you don’t show up with the card.”
“No, I don’t suppose they will.”
He hesitates then sits up, scooting closer. “You’ve sacrificed a lot for me by coming back here, Nash.”
I try to hold myself as proudly as I can, but I can’t meet his eyes. Not after what I did to him. “It was the right thing to do.”
“But now you could get hurt.”
If only I could say he’s making more out of this than there is, but I can’t. I’ve really stuck my foot in the shit this time. I don’t know what Mr. Salazar will do to me, but the list of possibilities is long and scary. The only consolation I have is that it’s me I have to look at in the mirror, not him.