Dark Secrets

by Jessica Gadziala

  Contents

  Title

  Rights

  Dedication

  - ONE

  - TWO

  - THREE

  - FOUR

  - FIVE

  - SIX

  - SEVEN

  - EIGHT

  - NINE

  - TEN

  - ELEVEN

  - TWELVE

  - THIRTEEN

  - FOURTEEN

  - FIFTEEN

  - SIXTEEN

  - SEVENTEEN

  - EPILOGUE

  - DON'T FORGET

  - ALSO BY JESSICA GADZIALA

  - ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  - STALK HER!

  Dark Secrets

  Jessica Gadziala

  Copyright © 2016 Jessica Gadziala

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.

  "This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental."

  Cover image credit: Shutterstock.com/vlavetal

  DEDICATION:

  To the badass women out there. And the men who love them.

  ONE

  Faith

  She didn't want to go to work.

  She wasn't one of those people who bitched about work. If you were unhappy with something, her general feeling was that you should stop doing it. It was stupid to waste your life on something you hated. And she damn sure didn't want to sit and listen to your sob stories about it. Which perhaps put her in the wrong field, being a bartender. Men liked to spill their guts to bartenders as much as women liked to spill their guts to hair stylists and manicurists.

  But she wasn't someone who dreaded going into work.

  Things were off there, that was the root of the problem. And given that she worked at Lam which was a cover of a well-known mob front, things being off weren't just unsettling, they were downright worrisome.

  She hated worrying.

  That wasn't how she operated.

  "Get it together," she told herself as she moved into her bathroom to put on some eye liner.

  Her reflection showed her long dark brown hair, her fit body with wide hips and a rack that got her more tips than her personality did, dressed in tight black jeans and a tight tank, combat boots at her feet. She put some liner around her brown eyes, giving them a slightly more exotic look, slipped a pocketknife into her boot, grabbed her wallet, and headed into the hall.

  She'd worked at Lam for years, had seen it when parts of it were still being built, ordering the booze for the back bar amid the sawdust and the somewhat fascinating construction of the panic room that was situated in the wall behind the table where Vin, the owner and also the leader of the D'Onofrio crime family, always sat.

  How she'd gotten the job when she had about all the hospitality charm of a rabies-ridden raccoon, well, that was between her and Vin.

  She walked up to the door, situated beside an all-night diner that she ate at far too often, having no actual cooking skills herself, and let herself into work.

  Lam was a nice, upscale place.

  You would expect nothing less from Vin who she was pretty sure slept in a goddamn three piece suit. The walls were a deep gray, the floors a sleek hardwood that he had finished every year or so due to the heavy foot traffic. All the tables, the bar, and the back bar were black.

  Usually, for reasons she chose not to analyze, Lam always had a calming effect on her. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the owner of it had a lot more respect for her than he did some of his own children or the fact that she wasn't expected to be someone she wasn't. She was known for being rude, if not downright hostile, to the male patrons. She kept a bat under the bar and had been known to use it. And no one ever dared to question her methods.

  Except maybe Vin's son Anthony, the shithead drunk who couldn't keep his mouth shut and his opinions to himself, and was jealous that his father had more respect for some 'nobody bartender' than he did for his own son.

  But as she walked behind the bar and put her wallet into the safe, she didn't feel relaxed. She felt on edge.

  Something was going on.

  That wasn't exactly unusual.

  It was a mob bar. There were always things going on. There were constantly men around with the bulges of guns in their jackets. There were people casing the place, checking out Vin and his sons. There were meetings with the other organized crime syndicates: the Russians, Polish, Irish, the Chinese. Crime, like any business, had little to do with the actual business and a lot to do with keeping the peace with friends and enemies.

  So things were never drama free.

  Faith was used to those feelings, that hair on the back of your neck feeling when an unfriendly came in and might cause a problem. That was as normal as kicking out a kid with a fake ID in her business.

  But this was different.

  This was something she couldn't place, didn't understand, and absolutely didn't trust. It was something that seemed to seep into the paint in the walls, draped the entire building in a sort of weighted trepidation that made her skin feel scratchy and her nerves feel frazzled

  As someone who never was really the type to fret, yeah, it was irritating.

  "Faith," Vin greeted her, warm smile on his face that made the creases next to his eyes look sweet and fatherly. If you saw him, you would think that was just what he was- a friendly Italian father figure. Albeit a very wealthy one in his expensive suits and a four-thousand dollar watch. He was tall and fit with dark hair that was graying in a charming way and dark eyes that were always working.

  It wasn't that he wasn't a nice, Italian father figure. He was. Which was what was so disarming about him. He was friendly, charming, intelligent, worldly, and had a moral compass that often pointed North.

  That being said, he was the head of a mob family.

  He wasn't a good guy.

  She had seen with her own eyes what he was capable of. One of her best friends, Xander Rhodes, had stood by and watched as the man had taken a tire iron to his client's kneecaps.

  He did bad things.

  And she was wondering if that was what she was picking up on, if he was about to stir some shit.

  "Hey Vin," she said, taking the bucket out from under the counter and loading it up with hot water, sanitizer, soap, and bleach- a personal combination she used to clean the bar. "How were things?" she asked, meaning the past two nights, Monday and Tuesday, her nights off.

  "This place falls apart without you, you know that," he said, patting her hand, being one of the very few men she would allow to do such a thing.

  "Oh yeah, it looks like a wreck," she said dryly, gesturing toward the immaculate bar. Immaculate because that was how she demanded it look when she came in.

  "Tony had to be here until five AM to get it this way," he said and she knew that that meant he had to be there until five AM as well, something he could not have been pleased about.

  "So he's fired," she guessed, exhaling hard. Just what she needed.

  "Of course he's fired," Vin said with a hand wave as if it would be absurd if he gave the guy the benefit of the doubt.

  "I can't keep training all these guys, Vin," she said, never being one to sugarcoat anything, not even to her boss. "And, not to m
ention, having to work seven nights a week until they can handle the bar themselves. You've got to fucking stop being so trigger happy with the 'f' word around here. I'm sick of it."

  "Faith..."

  "No. Don't Faith me. For once, I'm not being unreasonable. I've trained five guys over the past six months. This is insane. Hire someone who knows how to keep a bar clean and doesn't drink on the job and doesn't try to slip shit into the drinks because some fuckwad pays him a hundred bucks to do it."

  "That was one guy and you caught him before anything could happen."

  "Yeah, but not before I had to find a girl trying to make her way to the bathroom and falling three times like she was drunk off her ass when I knew she had only been served a goddamn martini. This shit is unacceptable."

  "Look, you don't like my hires, fine. I will give you a final say on the guy I chose. You don't like him, I'll bring in some more candidates."

  "You know, it wouldn't actually hurt you to hire a woman," she said, waving a hand out. Every single one of the people he had hired since she started working there too many years before had been male. "You do realize men come to bars to see women. They like women behind the bar. They tip better and they order more."

  "Most women aren't like you, Faith."

  "Don't be condescending," she snapped. "Just because the women you have known in your life are all shrinking violets doesn't mean we all are. Most female bartenders can handle themselves."

  "It's another element of danger this bar doesn't need. Don't want to have to call the cops in because some guy got handsy."

  "But me taking a baseball bat to the grab-assers, that's totally an element of danger that is acceptable," she said, smirking.

  She didn't fuck around. Vin knew that and had a begrudging respect for it. Hardly a week went by when she wasn't half-pulling a guy across the top of the bar to scream at them or coming out from behind the bar with a bat to chase them out of the building.

  "By now, Faith, most of the men know to steer clear of you. Look," he said, waving both of his hands in a peace gesture, "I don't want to have to babysit a new bartender and I don't want the door guys to have to look away from the door to make sure she isn't getting hurt in some way. It has to be a man and you will just have to accept that."

  Faith shook her shoulders, trying to release some of the tension she felt and hoping that maybe the tension was because of yet another employee shake up and not something worse.

  "Fine, but if I say he can't do it, Vin, he can't fucking do it. It's going to take a month at least to train him. That's thirty days of me not having a night off which is going to make me pissy."

  "Are you ever not pissy?" he asked, but tempered it with a smile. "Your word is law on this, Faith. You don't like him, he's out the door, no questions."

  "Okay. Good. When can I see him?"

  "Well..." Vin said, looking sheepish.

  "Well what?" she asked, nodding her head at Rodrigo from the kitchen who just brought a flat of rocks glasses in from the wash so she could stack them under the bar.

  "Well, I may have told him he started training tonight."

  Faith picked up the heavy tray of glasses with the ease of someone who had been doing it several times a night for the better part of a decade. "You're impossible," she told her boss. "I'll forgive you if you tell me that Anthony is out for the night or something. Ugh," she growled as soon as she said it and Vin's head tipped to the side. "Of course he's going to be here, breathing down my neck."

  "He doesn't get behind the bar," Vin reminded her, as he often did.

  "Can I kick him in the nuts this time when he tries?" Faith asked, smiling at the idea. Fact of the matter was, she had wanted to do worse to him since the goddamn day she had the unfortunate privilege of meeting the sleaze bag he turned into when he was trashed.

  "Play nice, Faith. And try not to scare the new guy off."

  "Listen, Wednesdays are busy. If he can't handle it, or the very least stay out of my way, I am not going to pat him on the head, give him a gold star, and tell him he did a good job. If he sucks, he sucks. You wouldn't keep Marco on if he made a sub-par fettuccine or if Rodrigo left spots on the dishes, so why is the standard for the bar different?"

  "Alright, alright," he said, holding up his hands, palms out. "The bar is your domain. You have the power to make the decisions about it."

  "Including who gets fired and when from here on out," Faith demanded, brow raised, daring him to challenge her.

  There weren't many men or women who could get away with making demands on a man like Vin D'Onofrio, but Faith could. And they both knew why.

  "Yes, fine," Vin said. "Danny will be in at five," he said as he walked away.

  "Danny?" she asked his retreating form. "He better not be some freaking college kid, Vin!"

  She sighed as she stacked rocks, shots, and stem glasses. Then she tried to not be pissed off as she filled the juice mixes and collected the fresh fruit from the walk-in and piled them on the bar.

  "Need some help with that?" a smooth, deep voice asked from in front of her, drawing her attention up for several reasons, not the least of them being that no one, no one was ever able to walk up on her. She never got surprised. She never got caught off-guard. She had more training than that.

  But other than that, the place was still closed. No one should have been able to get in.

  When her head lifted, she got another surprise because the man standing there was way too good looking for a Wednesday afternoon at a bar.

  He was tall and fit with strong shoulders, a chiseled, masculine face, neat brown hair, slightly tan skin, and brown eyes. Those eyes were what stood out to her. Good looking men were a dime a dozen. Great abs and strong biceps and muscular asses said nothing about a person. But she was a firm believer in the eyes having it all. Even not knowing someone, their eyes gave away a lot.

  But this guy's deep brown, pleasing, trustworthy brown eyes, yeah, they had her on edge. Why? She wasn't sure. But that was how she felt about them.

  Which was a shame because she was a sucker for a brown-eyed guy and it had been far too long since she had a man.

  "We're closed," she told him, voice clipped and dismissive. "And your game could use some work," she added for good measure. In her experience, shooting down a guy was best done clearly and brutally. Better they thought she was a cold-blooded bitch than someone who just needed more persuasion.

  But he didn't seem phased by her words or her tone when he shrugged a shoulder and gave her a half-smile. "That wasn't my game, baby. If that was my game, your panties would be a puddle on the floor." She felt her brow raise at that, liking confidence perhaps more than any other trait. Nothing was worse than some lily-livered insecure beta who had to try to convince you he could be even passable in bed.

  You could always tell a man who knew what he was doing in the sack by how he flirted. Compliments, trying too hard, and being too in-your-face were tell tale signs of small dicks or wholly unsatisfying machine-gun fucking- fast and hard and over way too quickly.

  But a guy who was cooly, almost detachedly sure of himself, yeah, they didn't have to compliment you or try too hard or get in your face because they knew what they were capable of and didn't need to do any of that crap.

  This guy, he knew what he was capable of.

  That, paired with the fact that he was good looking, yeah, it had Faith's attention.

  "And I believe this place is only closed to the public. I'm not the public."

  Faith exhaled a breath, brain telling her under-used libido that it would just have to wait a while longer because she didn't fuck people she worked with. "You're Danny."

  "That'd be me," he agreed, eyes moving over her in a way that was somehow simply appraising and also somewhat sexual.

  "You have the name of a five year old boy."

  "And you have the face of someone who isn't a fucking ice queen."

  Despite herself, she felt her lips twitching at that. Alright so maybe she had o
nly known him for a total of two minutes, but she already liked him better than the past five bartenders she had needed to train. At least he wasn't meek and accommodating.

  "Vin hired you with an attitude like that?" she asked, shaking her head. Vin, while he tolerated her, generally liked his employees of the bow and kowtow sort. He ran the place, he signed their checks, and he expected them to behave accordingly.

  "Nah. I brought my 'yes, sir' game to him."

  "What? No 'yes, ma'am' game for me?"

  "First, doubt you want me calling you ma'am. Second, you might have seniority, but we're on the same level here."

  "Were," she corrected. "We were on the same level. Until about two hours ago when Vin told me I have ultimate hiring and firing say."

  "So... what? I should check my ego and pretend your attitude doesn't have all the charm of a fucking honey badger?"

  She smiled at that, wryly, as her usual smile was. Rarely could you ever get a genuine happy smile out of her, being an award winning "resting bitch face" contestant. "Know what the honey badger is in the Guinness Book of World Records for?"

  "Sure you're going to tell me," he said, moving down toward the side of the bar where it opened so the bartenders could walk in and out. But Faith moved there first, blocking his way.

  "World's Most Fearless Creature."

  "So that's a metaphor."

  "It's a warning," she corrected, standing her ground when he moved closer, putting him in way too close proximity, close enough that she could see the specks of gold in his eyes and could smell the slightest hint of aftershave or cologne. "This is my bar. I am the only one who has lasted here more than a year. I'm going on ten now. So things stay where I want them. Drinks are made how I like them. You piss off the customers, I don't care. But if you piss off me, I will happily wipe the floor with your ass all the way to the door."

  He rocked back on his heels for a minute, biting into his lower lip, then looking her in the eye. "I think we understand each other," he said and she figured it was his way of acknowledging that she was, for all intents and purposes, his boss and that he would behave as such.