‘Why are you following me?’ Asta demanded. The dragons were vocal in their stalls, chuffing and bellowing. The stable hands must be late with breakfast.
‘Hummer doesn’t trust you,’ Karol growled. ‘Thinks you’re going to blab. So I’m watching you.’
Asta’s stomach sickened, but she couldn’t let Karol smell her fear. ‘Or he’s just tired of you hanging around him all the time. And sending you to stalk me is cheaper than a babysitter.’
Karol scowled. ‘You better do your fucking job, or you’ll be the one needing a babysitter.’
Asta narrowed her eyes. ‘Why would I need a babysitter?’
‘You’ll see,’ Karol answered, reveling in his own vague menace.
It struck Asta that no one of the Bruce clan, on their own, scared her as much as the whole gang of them. Separated from the pack of his cousins, Karol seemed little more than an overgrown boy pretending to be a tough guy. There was something so pathetic about him that it seemed to shrink him down to the size of a tabletop illusion.
A leer crept into his face. ‘How you gonna do it, Ek? You gonna screw Seraphin into submission?’
‘You’re disgusting.’ Asta turned away. Let him follow her. She wasn’t obligated to talk with him.
‘Hey, you’re the one with your legs in the air. Does he know you’re screwing Nat, too?’
Asta spun and punched him hard, right on his fading bruise.
Karol wheeled and bent over, fingers to his brow. ‘Fuck!’
‘Don’t talk to me like that.’
‘Hummer’s going to be so mad when I tell him you hit me.’
‘He’ll give me a goddamned medal, you butt crust.’
Karol winced and touched the new bruise gingerly. ‘Bitch. You want me to turn you in? Fixing the Grand Prix? Going after Seraphin? Your ass wouldn’t be worth shit.’
Asta went cold. ‘You wouldn’t dare. If I go down, Hummer goes down.Yougo down.’
A look of disdain crossed Karol’s face. ‘Sounds like you think you’re one of the family, Ek. Doesn’t work that way. You get caught, we’ll tell ’em we had no part of it. Maybe you went crazy on your fuckboy out of jealousy. Saw him with some other chick and tried to take him out. Not so hard to believe. You done it once already.’
Karol sneered at Asta. ‘Nat can tell ’em.’ Karol mimicked Nat’s voice, making it girlish and whimpering. ‘“The things she said she’d do to him! It scared me!”’
Asta stiffened. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’
‘Her idea,’ Karol replied. He looked happy to be able to say this, to see the hurt in Asta’s face as she tried not to believe it.
But a horrible thought snuck its way in around her defenses.Hadit been Pikki who tipped the reporters off about her history with Felix? Besides Pikki, there were only a few people who knew enough to dish on both her time at PillarandMedley– and Nat was one of them. Asta had chalked up the careless falsehoods in those stories to sensationalism or Pikki’s spitefulness, but upon reflection, it reeked of Nat’s hit-or-miss attention when other people talked about themselves. Had this been the plan all along? Had Nat planted the story to give the Bruces their jealous-lover cover if anything went wrong?
‘So long as Nat wins,’ Karol concluded, ‘nobody gives a flying fart what happens to you. But if she doesn’t, you’ll need more than a babysitter. You’ll need a medic. You got it, smart mouth?’
Karol had found his inner goon after all.
‘Yeah, I get it.’ Hummer would get the money, but Nat would get the glory. This was her deal with the devil. And in that deal, Asta was disposable. To Nat and Hummer both. Asta didn’t want to believe it, but in her gut, she knew it was true. For a moment, perhaps, they had truly meant something to each other, but Nat had always been willing to trade Asta for the win.
Well, Asta would give it to her. Let the Bruces walk away and forget her name forever. If she could pull this off, she would finally be free.
Asta turned to walk back between the buildings toward the avenue. Karol started to follow.
‘You know what, Karol? You keep stalking me from over there. I don’t want anyone to think that I’d actually hang out with you on purpose.’
Back on the street side, shielded from Karol’s view by the housing unit, Asta slumped against the front of the building, the points of the stucco biting into her back. She had to get her plan straight. Everything depended on it.
Simply giving Nat the win wouldn’t be good enough. Hummer would just keep asking for more. She had to make herself useless to him. She had to be too reckless for Hummer Bruce, and that was a tall order.
