Cards of Love: Justice

by Wilde, Amelia

  Cards of Love: Justice

  Amelia Wilde

  For Justice and Cassian, who wouldn’t let me quit.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Before She Was Mine - Sneak Peek

  Chapter 2

  Draw Your Next Card

  Connect with Amelia

  Also by Amelia Wilde

  1

  Justice

  This is the night I make my escape.

  The silver balloon shoots up from the net like a diver swimming the hell away from an undiscovered deep-sea animal—too fast, way too fast, fast enough to get the bends—and hurls itself against the steel rafters, exploding like a shot.

  At least, I assume it sounds like a gun shot. I can’t hear anything over the deafening roar of the music at this party. It’s so loud that it thrums through my ears and into my jaw, rattling my teeth.

  It’s time to go.

  For one thing, I’m crashing this party.

  For another, the balloon release is the signal.

  The birthday girl, according to the signs in the lobby, was born at exactly 12:05 a.m. Perfect timing.

  I have no idea why she wanted to ring in her freshly minted adulthood at this second-rate club—with a balloon release, no less—but her friends are still screaming their congratulations when I unfold myself from the booth, gather my purse, and begin wending my way to the doors.

  Justice Danes is out.

  Out of this party.

  Out of Manhattan.

  And out of all the awful things I’ve done.

  All the awful things my family has made me do.

  But did they really make me, or—

  Now’s not the time for debate—not if I want to follow through with this plan and flee the city for somewhere better. Somewhere that doesn’t make my skin feel stained from the past.

  My heart picks up the pace the closer I get to the narrow cast-iron stairs leading down to the main floor. The plan itself makes nominal sense, in that I know my personal security guard, Andre, loathes this kind of party. An hour ago, I pouted at him until he agreed to wait in the car.

  I’m never going back to that car.

  The first floor of the club is a sea of people who should be too young to get into a bar, much less be this drunk. I wouldn’t mind a buzz at this point, but I have been fucking steadfast. Not even a sip of a vodka cranberry has graced my lips this evening. I left the entire thing sitting on the table as a kind of sacrifice to the gods of getting the fuck out of here.

  In the hallway leading to the bathrooms—and beyond that, the kitchen—a clutch of drunk high school seniors descends upon me.

  “Oh, my God,” one of them trills. “Chelsea.” My name is not Chelsea. “I fucking love you. You used to be so fucking ugly. Get in the picture.” She flops her arm around my neck and presses her slobbery lips to my cheek. Somewhere in front of us, a camera flashes. There’s a 50-50 chance it captures my blank, horrified expression.

  “I love you, too,” I tell her, digging my fingers into her arm and twisting it off of me.

  “Like, ow,” she says, narrowing her eyes to glower at me. Then her face lights up. “Are you going to get drinks?”

  “Yeah.” I paste on my biggest, brightest smile. “What do you want?”

  She tips her head back like she’s in the throes of a halfway decent orgasm, her hair all ruffled on one side from dancing. “Like…anything with Red Bull.”

  “Got it. I’ll be right back.”

  “Love you, Chels,” she calls after me.

  I will not be right back.

  For appearance sake, I pause outside the bathroom and pretend to look inside my clutch. The posse of drunken teens is gone when I look up, so I don’t have to waste any more time. I head past the bathrooms, take a hard left, and stride with confidence toward the swinging kitchen door.

  It’s a sturdier door than I thought, because when I push it open and step over the threshold, the volume of the music drops. Or maybe it’s just so quiet in here that it sucks up all the sound and folds it into the silence.

  A door creaks open to my left.

  “Hey!”

  “I’m on my way out,” I tell whoever it is.

  “You’re not allowed to be back here.”

  “I don’t want to be back here.” I risk a glance. You can never be too careful when you’re making an escape. It’s a lanky guy with a dark shirt and an apron, and he’s balancing a stack of metal bowls in his arms.

  “They’re always drunk,” he mumbles, and I push open the back door and step out into the alley.

  My first inhale of the night air smells more like a rancid garbage dump than freedom. It’s disgusting back here. Not that I needed another reason to walk out onto the sidewalk.

  It’s the part of the block nobody’s supposed to see. Paper tumbleweeds grown from shredded posters blow up to the foot of the one street light. The bulb is blown out, so I have to navigate my way under the light pollution that hangs over Manhattan.

  Soon, I’ll be…elsewhere.

  Destination so far unknown, but a few of the details are nonnegotiable. Clean air. Sheets of an appropriate thread count. And an address my family knows nothing about. Where my father and brother can never find me again. For all I know, my brother Hector is already in charge, has already stepped up to take my dad’s place. Maybe they celebrated the promotion tonight. Either way, I want to be gone by the time they realize they need me again.

  Maybe I’ll finally have a chance to find my sister.

  But I have to push Patience out of my head along with everyone else. Tonight isn’t about them. It’s about me.

  I have enough money tucked into my purse to make it to where Tripp is waiting, and then some. Once I had a nanny who drilled it into me that I should always carry some cash. In case of what, I didn’t know. Why would I need money when Andre was everywhere I went?

  The fall breeze swirls around the points of my heels, and I hurry faster.

  Three blocks—that’s all it is.

  A car goes by one block behind, and I tuck my head down and walk faster. I look like an idiot out here without a coat, but I couldn’t carry one inside the club without tipping off Andre. I could have stolen one, I guess, but then one of those wasted 18-year-olds would be freezing her ass off out here.

  I might be the black sheep of my family, but I try my best not to be a bitch. Enjoy your coat, drunk girl.

  I wait for the traffic signal—which, why?—and go quickly across the crosswalk.

  That’s when I feel them.

  The eyes.

  Someone’s watching me.

  No. Nobody’s watching me. It’s late, it’s cold, it’s October—nobody cares what’s going on at midnight. Nobody knows I’m here, anyway. Nobody knows what my plan is or where I’m going with Tripp. Nobody knows how done I am with this life, with my father, with all of their bullshit.

  Nobody knows how done I am waiting for the shoe to drop.

  “They don�
��t know,” I repeat to myself out loud, the words swept away from my lips by the wind. “Nobody knows.”

  Nobody knows, except Tripp.

  There’s no realistic reason to think that anybody’s watching or following me. That’s fucking paranoid.

  Those are not footsteps that I hear.

  Other than mine, those are not—

  I stop abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk, and two heavy footfalls echo off the brick buildings to my left.

  My heart rockets up into my throat. It’s two more blocks. Fine—two and a half. I can run if I have to, but I’m not going to run. Running only makes people take chase. But I move faster—as fast as I can without breaking into a jog. My ankles ache from the sheer height of my shoes.

  Two blocks.

  I throw myself out into the street without waiting for the light, and someone behind me breathes audibly.

  It’s one inhale, the sound of someone who maybe doesn’t believe I can walk this fast in heels, and a fresh wave of goose bumps rises at the back of my neck.

  Coincidence.

  Somebody else is out here, looking for a cab. Hurrying home. Probably escaping that party, too. No reason to think—

  They break into a run,.

  I know it from the first scrape of their shoe on the sidewalk, know it from the way I’ve got one and a half blocks to the car.

  Run. Run. Run.

  Half a block to go. The short, sequined dress that was supposed to be so perfect to blend in at the club rides up to the bottom of my ass, letting the cold air sweep between my legs. It freezes me to the core.

  My right heel catches.

  It just…catches in the crack of the sidewalk. I scramble to get upright, scramble to keep my balance, but my ankle twists and I go down hard to the left. Pain scrapes up my left elbow and Jesus, that hurts as much as it did when I was a kid. I shove off and up, breath ragged, and this is it—this is the final sprint, everything I’ve got, half a block, half a fucking block—

  I reach the corner.

  The entire intersection is soaked with the yellow glow of a flickering street lamp.

  The entire intersection is empty.

  There’s no car here, no one is here waiting for me.

  Why. Why?

  I don’t have time to figure out the answer.

  I lurch forward, ready to run across the street, ready to try one more time, and that’s when the hand closes over my mouth—gloved. Andre never wears gloves. It’s not my bodyguard. I take one heaving breath through my nose and I’m met with silence, not Andre’s exasperated scolding.

  That’s when I know I have been caught.

  2

  Cassian

  My shoulder hurts.

  It’s a burn that reminds me of lifting the final set of weights in the gym, but it’s concentrated in my right arm. I’ll have to do something about that imbalance, and it vaguely irritates me that I can’t reproduce it exactly.

  Not that my last contract would have been able to withstand that.

  I can still hear her crying.

  It was a one-week session and she cried every time. I was tired of the tears by Wednesday, but the payers certainly weren’t. They got their money’s worth.

  I key in the code on the door to the rest of my apartment and push the door open with the flat of my palm. She can cry in the stairwell—a private exit and entrance off a secluded alleyway—for another five minutes, if she likes. I don’t need to hear it. I’ll send the security team to remove her if she doesn’t leave.

  They always leave.

  Some take longer than others.

  This one, at least, had someone to collect her other than a driver idling in the alleyway. It’s David’s job to take their trembling bodies from the paddling bench and take them to the person on the landing at the top of the stairs or to the concrete step that marks the last boundary of this house.

  I should do something about my underused left arm, but I’m fucking tired. My job is far more complicated than David’s. Mine is to bend and punish and break the people—mostly women—who are sent to me. My job is to remain impassive. Remaining impassive is the easiest and the hardest part.

  I should go down to the gym. I don’t.

  It’s been a long week, and the burn in my shoulder curves its way around the back of my neck and down my spine. It’s time to shut the door of my suite and lock it behind me—past time. The last session ran long. I was paid a handsome bonus. It’s enough for tonight. More than enough.

  The hallway opens up into the main living room, the one with the elevator into the main lobby. Firelight pours from the fireplace. It bathes the room in enough flickering, orange light for me to know that Lysander isn’t here.

  Thank God.

  I’m not interested in conversation with my brother at this moment.

  I move down the hall, lifting one hand to rub at my shoulder. The double doors leading to the bedroom suites are firmly closed. If I can just make it to those doors, no one will bother me.

  The universe, in all of its infinite power and wisdom, favors me up until the moment I reach for the door handle.

  The door swings open unbidden.

  And there he is on the other side—the very brother I’d hoped to avoid.

  “Good night,” I tell him, crisply, tersely, hoping it’s enough to get him to move out of my way.

  It’s not.

  “Cash.” He puts one hand up on the doorframe as if that could ever stop me from going where I want. “Is the last contract out?”

  “Of course she’s out. I finished with her half an hour ago.”

  “Good. Good.” He rubs his hands together, eyes bright. “Has Lily been in yet?”

  I look at him through narrowed eyes. “It’s been thirty minutes,” I say levelly. This is not entirely true. I don’t care. “It’s after midnight. It can wait until morning.”

  “It can’t.”

  The fatigue gathering behind my eyes crystallizes and disappears. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Lysander, I’m seeing now, looks too proud of himself for this to be mere satisfaction at a job well done. “We have someone coming in. Right now.”

  “No, we don’t. I haven’t signed any new contracts.” I was going to leave the city for a week or two, but I haven’t mentioned that to Lysander yet. I don’t intend to take him with me. It’s enough to be living in the same apartment with him. It’s enough to be in business with him. I’ll admit that he does have some specific skills that balance mine out, but I find his entrepreneurial spirit exhausting.

  I have never needed an entrepreneurial spirit. When I took over this business for my father, I did so with the knowledge that New York City’s elites will never want for drama and intrigue. They’ll forever have their claws at each other's throats. And I’ll be here, waiting to dispense the only kind of justice they can tolerate.

  The kind that happens behind closed doors. In private rooms. For a price high enough to make me the impartial arbiter.

  No—that’s not quite true, either. They negotiate among themselves. They agree on the length of punishments, of severity. The fine details are always left up to me. As they should be. I’m the one who carries them out.

  “I did.”

  “You did what?”

  “I signed a new contract.”

  I make it a point in my life not to entertain emotional reactions, but what the fuck? “When?”

  “While you were in with…her.”

  We usually call those people deposited on the landing, arms crossed tightly in front of their chests, the contracts. It’s not an elegant term. It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be passionless. And it is.

  I shove down my irritation to the far reaches of my mind and resist the urge to ask Lysander why he’s signing contracts if he can’t follow protocol. “While I was with the contract, you sat down with two parties, entertained negotiations, and—”

  “I signed a contract,” Lysander insists. “And she’s com
ing now.”

  “I never agree to contracts on such short notice.”

  “There was a bonus.”

  The way he smiles when he says it tells me that it was substantial. It also sets off a warning bell in the back of my mind—an obnoxious peal that makes the muscles up and down my back tighten. “This isn’t wise.”

  “It’s already done.” Lysander sticks his hands in his pockets. He’s fully dressed, so either he’s planned to go out, or he’s planned to do…something else. “If you’re not up to the task, I’m more than willing to—”

  “No.”

  He frowns. “You know, Cash, you’re not going to be able to control this forever. At some point, you’ll need to let me step in and—”

  “No. The moment you walk into that room is the moment all of this crumbles around us.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Anger flares on his face, red spots splotch his cheeks. “Do you always have to be such an asshole? I brought in enough money to cover—”

  “We’re past that,” I tell him through gritted teeth. “When are you going to wake up? We’re past hustling for other jobs to make ends meet. What did you expect me to do? Pat you on the head and hand over the reins? You’re fucking dreaming, Lys.”

  He blows a short breath out through his nose. “It’s not my fault if I don’t want to follow in our dad’s footsteps.”

  I want to punch him. The bright, sharp feeling scrapes its edge along my shoulder blades. It’s all I can do to hold it at arm’s length, letting it cut into my palms instead. “At least he understood the importance of maintaining our professional distance. That means not taking on contracts like a desperate beggar.”