He angled her chin, forcing her to look at him. “You lie to me, Red. You lie like you lie at the table with your poker face. You went away for the weekend to see a man, didn’t you? And you can’t stop thinking about him.”
She rolled her eyes as if that notion were ludicrous. “I only wish I had done something so interesting. Told you I was seeing friends in New York. That’s all.”
“Your friends have distracted you then,” he said, enunciating each word so crisply that a bead of spit flew out of his lips and landed on her skin. “Do I need to pay them a visit? Enlist them in my employ?”
“No,” she shouted, as he poked at her deepest fears. “But maybe you shouldn’t have called me back then. I barely got off my flight before I had to show up.”
He sneered at her, his fingers drilling her face. “You had three hours in between. That is enough.”
“Well, it wasn’t enough tonight.”
He yanked her closer to him, so close her eyes could no longer focus on his face. She stood her ground though, her high-heeled feet digging into the floor as his brutal fingers jammed her jaw. “I can’t have my ringer bringing me nothing.”
“Sometime you win, sometime you lose, sometimes it rains. That’s the way it goes,” she said in as flat a voice as she could muster.
He dropped his hold on her chin, then stared at her curiously, as if she were a science project. “I do not like baseball. Do not give me baseball analogies. Give me your best poker face and beat my whales. That is all I want from you.”
“That’s what you’ll keep getting.”
“But Red, I did not like your performance tonight. If it happens again, I will be adding on to your totals.”
Her heart plunged and she wanted to shriek No. A loud, echoing cry that would carry through the night. “It’s not even my fault. It’s not even my money,” she said, insistently, as if that might change his mind.
“It is your fault. It is your money. And you are mine until I say you’re not,” he said, rooting around in his pocket. He took out his knife, opened it, and stabbed it into the wood of the table. She cringed, and there was no hiding her emotions this time as the sound of metal parking itself into wood rattled in her ears. He didn’t remove the blade; he left it in the wood like some strange trophy. “Or do you want me to visit your pretty bartender friend?” He asked, making a circle over his stomach, as a reminder that he knew Kim was pregnant.
Her heart twisted. “No.”
“How about your sister? She’s a lovely lady and quite perky on that little fashion blog of hers,” Charlie said in his cool even voice.
It was as if he’d sliced her open with his knife, her bleeding organs on display for all to see. Julia bit her lip hard, trying to stop her insides from quivering. Charlie had never gone near her sister, or her friends. He’d also never mentioned McKenna until now, and her heart raced at the pace of fear. She’d do anything to keep her sister away from him. “Please leave them out of this. This has nothing to do with them.”
“That’s right,” he said with a firm nod, pointing from her to him. “It is our business, and we will continue do business until it is all resolved, or else I might need to collect from them too. Is that clear?”
With his words, the floor felt out from under her. He’d done it. He’d done the thing she feared. Threatened her family. Fear coursed through her body, rooting itself in her belly in a twisted knot, where it planned to set up camp for a long, long time. “Yes,” she choked out.
“Now get out of here, and I will call you when I have a game you won’t mess up.”
She turned on her heels, and left the restaurant, Skunk holding open the door. He lowered his voice to a whisper, as if he didn’t want Charlie to hear him. “Want me to call you a cab?” He asked, and he sounded like a sweet, sympathetic bear. Like he legitimately wanted to do something nice for her after the way Charlie had treated her. He had some kind of soft spot for her. But she wasn’t going to be fooled. She knew where his loyalties lay and it wasn’t with the woman he wanted to help. It was with the man who owned him, just as Charlie owned nearly everyone he worked with.
Except her. She told herself Charlie only rented her and eventually the lease would be up.
“No thank you. I don’t need a cab,” she said, and walked home in the night, the fog crawling into the city, threatening to ensnare the night. She brushed her hand roughly against her cheek, wiping away a tear.
But another one fell, and then another, and that’s how she walked home, wishing there were a way to unravel herself faster from Charlie’s clutches. Wishing she’d never met Dillon, that he’d never made off with $100,000 from the mobster he worked for, that he’d never claimed the money was for her.
When she reached her home and poured herself a glass of whiskey, her fingers itched to pick up the phone and call Clay. To tell him why she ran, that she missed him, that this weekend was the best she’d ever had.
But she could still feel Charlie’s hand on her chin, and she knew, she f**king knew, she shouldn’t be involved with anyone. Because when you get close to people, your debt becomes their debt, and theirs becomes yours, and you are left with nothing but an aching well of shame inside you as you try to claw your way out.
Clay could be just like Dillon – disappear and leaving her holding all his problems.
She put the phone in a kitchen drawer and shut it hard.