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I took the beer from Tristan with a thanks, but still I couldn’t stop looking at the singer for the warm-up act. Tristan noticed my interest as we made it to the edge of the dancefloor and gave me a nudge.
“Blue knows him, the singer. He told me.”
“Yeah? He’s got quite a voice.”
“Quite a body, too.” He paused. “His name is Stephen. He’s from the UK. London.”
I could imagine his accent, and it gave me shivers and chills. That’s when it hit me – just where the fixation was coming from.
It was coming from Lucian Morelli. He reminded me of Lucian Morelli.
His darkness. His strength. His fierce eyes.
The rawness of Stephen’s voice reminded me of the malice in Lucian’s, just enough to make my tummy flutter, and the thought of his British accent was enough to make me tremble.
Yeah. This was about Lucian Morelli.
Tristan nudged me again. “You could talk to hot-guy-Stephen after the gig, maybe? I mean, you can’t touch him, but you can have a good time imagining it.”
I flashed him a scowl. “Yeah, don’t need to keep rubbing it in. I can’t touch him. Fuck life, and fuck my fucking family.”
He looked around us, and I saw the fear in his eyes. “Just as well there’s none of your crowd in here to hear you say that shit.”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I wouldn’t care if they were. I could give them the middle finger before they made me pay for my sins.”
Hot-guy-Stephen started up another track, and I felt a wave of tears pricking. I choked them down, because I hated them. I hated ever having to cry.
If only people knew . . . if only people knew just how much I was suffering like a bad girl, just by trying to be good.
But nobody knew that. Nobody but my mother. My mother and the Power brothers, who were chasing me down for my black-market debts – most of them not even mine.
Luckily, coke and alcohol were friends enough to blank the whole sorry mess from my mind. Speaking of. “I’m going to the bathroom,” I told Tristan and gestured towards the signs overhead.
He rolled his eyes, and there was disapproval in them again as I handed him my beer. He knew damn well I wasn’t headed there for a pee.
I was already in my clutch before I reached the women’s, fingers sifting through my cosmetics to the bottom. There it was. Just what I needed, buried deep inside the satin lining.
My head was already spinning before I could snort back a fresh line. Hell, I needed it. The Power brothers were nasty, and they were coming for me. Anytime now, they were coming for me. My debts were getting too damn big for them to accept my smiles and promises.
It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if they were coming after my own debts, but they weren’t. They were coming for everyone else’s along with them. A whole sea of gambling and addict debts owned by people I’d met along my own desperate road.
I couldn’t let them die for it. I couldn’t let the Power brothers destroy people I’d come to care about along the way, even if just in passing. Again, just as well I didn’t really care about my own sorry fate. Not about how much I owed and not about how much I’d suffer for it. The Power brothers could take what they liked; I’d be almost glad to say my final goodbyes.
There was another line to wait in before I got into the bathroom stall. The place was filling up, bustling with laughter and chatter and people having a good time. Good for them.
I was desperate for release as I dropped myself down at the side of the toilet, pulling out my bank card and bills along with my stash of white powder.
Thank holy fuck for cocaine.7Lucian“Terence Kingsley,” I said to the girl on the entrance desk.
“ID, please.”
I handed over Terence Kingsley’s passport and pushed my fake glasses up on my nose. My hair was styled in his usual swept-back wave, and I felt like a total imbecile in jeans and boots with a button-up shirt. She gestured me through with a smile, and I forced one back, determined to make this disguise work as well as possible. Terence Kingsley would definitely smile at her. He’d even smiled at me when I arrived at his doorstep last fall. More the fool him.
Cyrus Bar was quite lively for a shitty little downtown dive. People stepped aside to let me climb the main stairwell, and I was up and amongst it, into the main bar area. The music was garish and loud, hardly my usual taste. The singer on stage looked like a dull brute with a roar of a voice, and his band members had brightly-colored hair, glowing like trash under the spotlights.
