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CHAPTER 27
Tate
SHORTLY AFTER Kiki left Dazzlers, I was pacing the near empty floor of the casino, desperate to figure out some kind of solution.
Mac definitely didn’t have innocent intentions in hiring Kiki. But how could I stop her from taking the job before it was too late?
I thought on it, but came up empty. If she was insistent on handling herself, there was no way I could interfere without once again looking like the guy who didn’t have faith in Kiki’s independence. Anything I might do would anger her.
With no other ideas, I sat down at a slot machine and had the one floor worker bring me over a huge container of pennies. Might as well kill the time between now and death, right?
I slipped the pennies in, and slipped out of reality, floating somewhere between the present and another realm, where everything was easier and answers appeared without difficulty.
Hours passed in this way — penny in, pull lever, wait for the columns to spin. Sometimes I’d win a few dollars, but mostly I lost.
I’d pulled the lever for maybe the five-hundredth time when my phone rang. I picked it up in a haze.
“Yeah?”
“This is Mac.”
That got my attention. I pushed back my chair and stood up from the machine.
“What do you want?”
“I’ll cut to the chase. I have Kiki in my possession, and if you don’t get here stat, I’ll take her virginity. Ish. What’s left of it, anyways.”
My body receded into the background as my mind fell through what felt like a black hole in the universe. Was I still here? Was Tate, whoever he was, still present? Had the Earth spun out into the great beyond, somewhere between here and out there, and could it ever be reeled back in and forced onto its axis? The stars were so bright.
Kiki is in danger.
The thought snapped me back to reality. There was no time to panic.
“Our debts have been settled,” I growled at Mac. “Kiki doesn’t owe you anything. At the very least, let her go and we’ll handle it between us, like men. She has no skin in this.”
“She quite literally does have skin in this,” Mac laughed.
I wondered, not for the first time, what my hands would look like wrapped around his throat.
He was clearly still determined to get what would’ve been his secret take from Kiki’s virginity sale. She had no other outstanding debts with him, and he wouldn’t have called me if it weren’t relevant to the sale. Hell, he probably wouldn’t have even captured her for the money if I hadn’t been the one who purchased her. Four hundred thousand was a pittance for a man like Mac. RES made that in a single evening. This whole thing was personal. He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and now, Kiki was going to pay for it.
“Let her go. The money is nothing to you. Stop this farce, and we’ll talk it out.”
“Oh, Tate,” he sighed, sounding for all the world entirely unfazed by the hostage situation he’d initiated. “It’s not really about the cash, is it?”
“Of course not.” Finally, something we could agree upon.
“It’s about your incessant holier-than-thou attitude, your ‘I’m too good for this town and this business’ way. Somebody needs to put you in your place, and I guess that someone gets to be me.”
“So you’ve been after me for some time.”
I should’ve guessed as much. I knew I was never that welcome in those gatherings, and that my disdain was pretty raw, but who’d known that it would go this far?
“Naturally,” he agreed. “You needed a good talking to for a while now. But up until recently, there was nothing you cared about. You had plenty of money and no family, no close friends. You were untouchable, pal. And then Kiki happened.”
In a moment of folly, I tried to play off my relationship with her.
“She’s just a girl I bought for a night, Mac. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
“Oh really? Because you sounded pretty concerned when I called you. And, more to the point, my spies at Dazzlers tell me that you’ve been hanging on her every word for quite some time, meeting her at her shifts, waiting for her like some love-stricken Romeo. Lie all you want, Tate, but you care for her.”
Fuck. Fuck. I didn’t even know what to worry about first. Mac had spies at Dazzlers?! Wait, no, that shouldn’t be my biggest concern — I needed to focus on the fact that he’d said quite some time, plural. That meant his guys had been watching me talk to Kiki, it meant that…
Had Mac selected her for the sale just to fuck with me?
No way.
I was losing my mind. I’d gotten in too deep. Stay in the present, I told myself. Whatever machinations Mac had prior to this point didn’t matter. What mattered was Kiki, and she was in grave peril.
