by Staci Hart
Zeke’s face darkened, but his smile didn’t budge. “Don’t make it worse than it already is. Come with me, and I’ll make sure you get home to your girlfriend.”
Dex’s face twisted. “Fucking queer. If you think I’m letting you suck my dick—”
Zeke’s fist flew out like a fucking python, connecting with Dex’s nose with a crunch and a spurt.
“Jesus, what the fuck!” Dex screamed, clutching his nose.
Zeke looked murderous, though he was still smiling, shaking out his right hand. “Now, are you ready to be a good boy and come with me?”
Dex growled but turned for the door, and Zeke followed, hands in his pockets and velvet tongue serving insults all the way.
But I’d already turned for Levi, hurling myself into his arms.
“All right, all right,” Ash said with his trademark smile. “Who needs a drink?”
A host of hands rose with a wave of laughter, and just like that, things were back on track.
For everyone but Levi and me.
He pulled back from the hug to look me over. “What did he say? Did he hurt you?” He grabbed my arm and extended it, drawing an audible, furious breath when he saw Dex’s finger marks. “I’ll fucking kill him,” he snarled.
“He’s not worth doing time for,” I joked, but Levi was too far gone to be amused.
He yanked me into him, and when my cheek rested on his chest, I realized he was shaking. “Tell me not to go after him.”
“Don’t go after him. I’m here. I’m safe. I’m yours.”
His head bowed, his shoulders curling and arms enveloping me like armor. “What did he want?”
“I think you can guess.”
An angry sound rumbled in the back of his throat. “Can I admit I’m jealous Zeke got to hit him?”
With a laugh, I shifted so I could look at him. “Can I admit I’m jealous too?”
A smile flickered on his lips. “Tell you what—next time, I’ll hit him first, then I’ll hold him and you can take a turn.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and there won’t be a next time.”
But he darkened like a thunderhead. “I have a feeling he’s not smart enough to avoid it.”
For a moment, I looked up at him, pressing down my fear.
I know who you are.
And Dex did. He knew too much, the man I’d once thought was safe. Even after we parted ways, I never thought he’d expose me, not like this. Of course, I never thought he’d try to get me back, nor did I think I’d refuse.
Guess he didn’t either.
One word from Dex, and I was fucked. Especially if Dex told anyone outside the sacred circle, because Warren would find out.
I had to tell Levi—he was the only one who could possibly help me get ahead of Dex. But telling a reporter carried its own risk regardless of how he felt about me.
What would he do with that information? Because everyone had a price.
Looking into his eyes, I wanted to believe he’d never betray me. But I’d thought that about Dex once too, and before all this, Dex had never threatened me.
Levi had deceived me, and in a much more dangerous context.
“Kiss me,” I whispered, grateful when he complied.
But not even a kiss from Levi could distract me from my secret.
23
A Lie For A Lie
LEVI
Ed Jameson watched me with assessing eyes from across his massive desk, hands folded over his paunch as he processed the string of questions about Warren I’d just posed.
His office door was closed behind me, the buzzing of the precinct behind him as steady as white noise. With every tick of the government clock on the wall, I grew more and more certain that I was about to get tossed out of here on my ass with nothing to show for.
Jameson’s chair squeaked when he leaned back. “You know, I remember when we found you in that crack house, all dirty and hungry, having taken care of yourself for weeks. Never seen Billy look at anything like that before, not the way he looked at you. I’ll tell you, we all put in a word to do what we could to convince the state to award him custody of you. And I’m glad you made something of yourself, son. I’m not surprised, not with Billy’s hand on your shoulder. And I’ll tell you, that is the only reason you’re sitting in my office today.” His expression hardened.
“Thank you, sir.”
The noise he made was more of a huff than a sigh. “We’re off the record, son. Anything I say here, I will deny to my last fucking breath. Because if you think I’m gonna stick my neck out to save some rich kids, you’re mistaken.”
“Understood, sir.”
He watched me through a beat. “It hasn’t gone unnoticed, Warren’s obsession with those kids. It seems personal, like you said, and I think it is. But I don’t think it’s his beef.”
“Then whose?”
“Couldn’t say. But Warren doesn’t give a shit about much besides money and power. If I had to guess, one or both of those is what’s driving him.”
“Which means he’s a stooge.”
A single nod. “I can’t tell you much, son, but you know someone who will.”
“Billy.”
“Go see him. Ask about the Blaze job, ’05. Tug on that string, see what you come up with.”
My mind spun with possibilities, and he watched with his brows drawn.
“Be careful, kid. He’s one of the most powerful men in the city, so be sure saving these party kids is worth what he might do to the lot of you. All right?”
I nodded. “All right. Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he warned, though he wore the slightest of smiles. He stood and extended his hand in dismissal. When I took it, he pulled me a little closer. “If you dig up anything substantial, bring it straight to me. I never wanted Warren where he is but …” A sigh. “Like I said, he’s got his finger in every pot, and I’d love nothing more than to cut off every digit.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“I don’t doubt you will.”
With an exchange of niceties, I left his office, heading for the elevator with my heart hammering.
Jameson had confirmed my suspicion that something bigger was at play—the longer it went on, the less sense a personal vendetta made. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d given me a lead.
A lead that I had unadulterated access to.
I’d promised Stella I’d come back by, so I hopped on my bike, started the engine, and sped toward her, my mind running at the same horsepower as my motor. And a few minutes later, I was heading into her building and then her apartment.
She stood behind the island with her hands full of raw chicken and a smile on her face. “Hey! How’d it go?”
She extended her cheek for a kiss that I granted, leaving my lips smiling for more than one reason.
“I’ve got a lead.”
Her eyes widened. “Well, go on. Tell me.”
“Jameson doesn’t think it’s personal … he thinks someone’s paying Warren. He told me to talk to Billy. Gave me a topic of discussion—a job they’d worked in ’05.”
She flipped a chicken breast and sliced into its side, separating it to make a pocket for whatever stuffing was in the bowl next to her. “A lead,” she said, her smile widening. “Well, what are you doing here? Get your ass to Billy’s.”
I chuckled. “I told you I’d come back. Plus, I needed a second to think.” I watched her work for a moment. “Look at you, all domestic. What’s this?”
“Dinner for you and me tonight. Everyone’s going out, so we’ll have the house to ourselves.”
A beeping floated toward us from the direction of her bedroom.
“Shit. That’s my alarm.”
I frowned. “It’s two in the afternoon.”
“It’s the no-babies alarm. For my birth control.” She held up her salmonella hands and eyed them.
“Well, let’s not fuck around with that. I’ll get them. Where are they?”
<
br /> She giggled as I pushed off the counter. “My phone’s plugged in next to my bed, birth control’s in the drawer.”
“On it.”
I headed for her room, spotting her phone on her side of the bed. I killed the aggressive alarm and opened her nightstand, easily finding the pink plastic case that housed her birth control. But when I closed the drawer, I caught sight of a book on the bottom shelf of her nightstand, one I might not have noted if it wasn’t for the heavy gold leaf papers sticking out of it.
Curiosity piqued faster than any warning. I knelt to pick up the pink-and-gold book and flipped it open to the page marked by the gilded papers—invitations, I saw on inspection.
You are cordially invited
to dine with the Bright Young Things …
But it wasn’t the invitation’s presence that sent a tingling down my spine. It was the date.
Because this invitation was for a party two months from now.
Numb, I flipped back through the pages, stopping when I found her notes from when she’d planned the circus party. She had planned the party. All the parties.
Because Stella was Cecelia Beaton.
Abandoning everything but the planner in my hand, I walked on leaden feet back to her.
She smiled up at me, drying her hands over the sink. But everything slowed and sank when she saw what was in my hand.
“What are you doing with that?” she asked like the answer was a bomb. She wasn’t wrong.
“What are you doing with it?”
“You went through my things.” The color rose on her neck, in her cheeks. Her eyes were locked on the book.
I tossed it on the counter, and it slid a few inches in her direction. “It’s you. This whole time, it’s been you.”
“You went through my things,” she repeated, her eyes finally breaking from the book to pin me down. “You’re still spying on me.”
“Spying?” A defensive wind blew through me, kicking up dust in whorls. “Hang on one fucking minute, Stella—”
“So you can explain it away like you did last time? I might be gullible, but I’m not a fucking idiot. That book was not out. It was not open. It wasn’t accidentally picked up—you made a choice to pick it up and open it. What the fuck?” Her cheeks blazed, her eyes on fire, sparkling with furious tears. “What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?”
“And how about you?” I shot back. “You’re Cecelia fucking Beaton. You’ve been lying to me from the start.”
“Because I had to! Jesus, Levi—this is nothing like your lie. Don’t you think I wanted to tell you? But too many people already know, and I’m supposed to add a reporter to the list? Especially a reporter who fucking lied about spying on me for weeks. How the fuck am I supposed to believe a word you say right now? Why the fuck should I say anything but get out of my apartment?”
“Because you respect me, for starters.”
“Like you respect me?” She gestured to the book. “Like you respected me when you lied to me about who you were?”
My mind emptied of arguments.
“The other night at Ash’s, Dex threatened to expose me, and I decided telling you was a when, not an if. But I didn’t know if I could trust you. Seems I was right to question it.” She trembled from head to voice to hands. “Did you ever stop digging? Or has all of this, you and me, just been more lies? Am I just collateral damage, a sacrifice for the sake of your story?”
“You can’t be serious. You can’t honestly think I would play you like that.”
“I don’t really know what to think, Levi. Now you know who I am—and not because I told you, but because you fucking snooped around in my things. You had no right—no right—to open that book. So what are you going to do with the information you stole? You went to all this trouble to mine it out. How much do you think Warren will pay you for it? Enough to set Billy up for life?”
“You think I’d sell you out?”
“You’ve done it for less.”
A long inhale stoked the embers in my chest to fire, and an exhale let it out. “You talk a big game about my lies when you’re no better, Cecelia. And if you think I’d fucking betray you, you don’t know me at all.”
Angry tears filled her eyes. “Did I ever? You lied to me from the minute you met me, so why stop now? How could I expect someone like you to keep my secret? You lied to me because of what you could get for it. I lied to you to protect myself. Because if Warren finds out, I could go to jail. So think about that before you tell your fucking editor.”
“I’m not going to tell—”
She held up a hand and closed her eyes, forcing a tear down her flushed cheek. “Don’t make me a promise you don’t know you can keep.”
“What if I know I can?”
“Everybody has a price, Levi. Who I am is a commodity—just look at Dex. The second he wanted something from me, he exercised that power. And I want to think you’d never do that, but I never thought Dex would blackmail me, and here we are. I can’t trust myself any more than I can trust you.” She looked down, shaking her head. “Please go.”
The command struck me still, bolted my feet to the ground. “Stella, please. Let’s talk about this.”
“I don’t want to fucking talk!” she shouted, the words breaking with a hitch of her chest. Angry eyes begged me to listen. “You took something that wasn’t yours, and I want you to go. Right now. Because I cannot be reasonable. And no matter how badly I want to believe you wouldn’t use this against me, I don’t know if I do.”
I watched her for a moment, my throat clamped around a knot that wouldn’t budge. I wanted to beg her, to convince her, to hold her and kiss her and explain. I wanted to yell, wanted to argue and fight and burn it all down.
But I wasn’t able to be reasonable any better than she was.
So all I could do was leave.
“For the record,” I started, my voice rough and raw, “I’d never betray you. I wasn’t digging. I know I lied to you once, but I promised you no more secrets, and I seem to recall you promising me the same. So before you stone me, take a fucking look in the mirror.”
She covered her mouth with her palm, her face wrenched and shoulders sloped, and the pain written on her was etched on my heart, a vision that would haunt me.
Because it was the last I had of her before I walked away.
24
Love Burrito
STELLA
The pipe running across my room had thirty-two bolts, six joints, and a patch of rust shaped like a penis right over my bed.
This data had been gathered in the long hours of the night while I lay here not sleeping. Exhaustion—or lack thereof—wasn’t a factor, and the bottle of wine I drank before stumbling to bed didn’t put me out like I’d intended. Instead, I stared at the pipe as it spun slowly, my body listless and half out of the covers, alternating between the sweats and a chill.
Never should have had merlot.
My spectacular backfire was indicative of so much more than my beverage of choice. And I hadn’t been able to distract myself from that mistake, not with booze or Jane Austen movies—they actually made it worse—or even K-dramas. The empty apartment didn’t help, but I couldn’t bring myself to text anyone. The last thing I wanted was to ruin their good time with my sad panda moping.
Okay, that was a lie. The last thing I wanted to do was talk about it.
So my phone remained painfully silent, the screen black and depthless. I hadn’t texted anyone. And no one had texted me.
Didn’t matter where it was—flipped upside down on the coffee table, stuffed in the couch cushions, plugged in the kitchen—I kept on checking. But the text I was looking for never came. Which I shouldn’t have been so disappointed about, since I’d told Levi to get out, telling him without saying so that I needed space. And I did.
But I wished he’d fought for me all the same.
I wanted to be wrong so fucking bad, I felt sick. It festered in my stomach like poison, and though it could
be the hangover, I was almost positive that wasn’t my problem.
My door squeaked as it opened, and my eyes shifted from the penis pipe to the sound, where they found Betty’s bodiless head in the sliver of space.
“Oh good. You’re up!” she cheered. “Can I cuddle?”
I nodded, my eyes filling up with tears. So I trained my eyes on the blurry penis pipe and started doing math until I reabsorbed the teardrops.
The bed dipped and bounced until she was under the covers with me, lying on her side. I practically felt her worried frown when she figured out something was wrong.
“Babe, are you okay?” she asked gently.
That fatal question was it—there was no holding it back, and I rolled into her arms. What was it about that question that kicked over whatever walls you’d thought you had standing and sturdy? One person asking one harmless question, and that wall was gone with the tide.
I cried for a little while there in Betty’s arms, and when I’d finally caught my breath, she grabbed a box of tissues on my nightstand before pulling the comforter over our heads. I took one when she offered and dabbed my nose.
“Okay, now tell me what happened.”
“You start—tell me what happened last night. Did you guys have fun?”
She gave me the thickest, most are you kidding me look I had ever seen. “I swear to God, Stella.”
I groaned. “It’s bad. It’s so bad that I don’t even know if I can say it out loud.”
The look melted into genuine fear and concern. “Well, now you really don’t have a choice.”
“Did I ever?”
“No, not really. What fucking happened? Where’s Levi? His bike wasn’t outside when we came home, and I wondered if you guys left or what. Do I need to kill him? Did he cheat on you?” Her brain caught on fire at the thought. “Oh my God, if he cheated on you, I swear I will burn his whole building down.”
“No, no. He didn’t cheat on me—put away your matches.”
She visibly relaxed.