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Chapter four
Silas
Ileanedbackin the boardroom chair and stared at the ceiling, only half listening to the meeting going on around me. Nothing vital was being discussed anyway. There was nothing interesting or exciting in my life these days. Every moment, every interaction, conversation, and exchange that took place in my life were all washed in shades of gray.
It had been that way for a while now, and I knew that there was little I could do to and change it.
Believe me, I had tried.
I tried exercise, but I was about a jacked as I had ever been, and hours of sweating in the gym had no effect on my morose thoughts.
I tried booze, but Stone put a stop to that after a few weeks. I guess rolling into work half cut and smelling like a distillery was not quite the type of behavior he wanted his head of security to embody here at The Alamo.
I even tried a woman or two, but that experiment was over before we even got out of our clothes. The look of surprise on their faces when I showed them the door before I showed them a good time would have been laughable, if there was a single part of me that wanted to laugh anymore.
But there wasn’t, and it was all my fault.
All my life, I had prided myself on being the bigger man, the better man. When my father would smack me around, I always took the high road, never sinking to his level and hurling insults as well as my fists. When I finally got big enough to defend myself, that was exactly what I did: defend myself. I never took a swing at him, not a real one. Regardless of how shitty he was at it, the man was still my father, and that had to mean something.
I never disrespected my superiors in the Army, always falling in line like the good little soldier that I was, regardless of the orders and regardless of the nightmares they left me with. My job was to listen, and that’s what I did.
So it should have come as no surprise when my best friend, the one person in my life who I wanted to be my family even though he wasn’t, asked me to do something, I did it. Even if it was the one order I didn’t want to follow.
Even if it was the thing that finally broke me.
“Silas, where are we with this week’s VIPs?” Stone’s voice cut into my brooding thoughts. Talk about a turn of events; Stone used to be the moody bastard, growling and scowling at everyone and everything, but these days that title very clearly belonged to me.
“I have everything under control,” I said, not looking at him. I didn’t like to make eye contact with him if I could help it. I usually only saw one of two things there: his sickening happiness with his wife and their life with a baby on the way, or pity and regret because he knew how unhappy I was and that he had something to do with that.
I hated both looks for different reasons.
I didn’t want to be jealous of my friend’s life, but I was. In a way, I always had been. Stone had complained growing up that his parents weren’t together, but his dad tried everything under the sun to make Stone love him.
My father was a violent drunk.
Stone’s mother was a kind and gentle woman who welcomed everyone into her life and her heart, myself included.
My mother was a tramp who had climbed in some guy’s rig at a truck stop when I was four and never looked back.
Growing up, I had never let the things that Stone had and I didn’t come between us. I always tried to rise above and be content with what I had and to have even a part of what Stone did by being his friend.
But lately, watching him get everything I had ever wanted was starting to sting.
A whole fuck of a lot.
“I have three rotating teams covering The Gun Show and the arena all weekend, as well as an additional team in plain clothes for the meet and greet they’re doing before the Saturday performance,” I droned, repeating the same information we had discussed at an identical meeting only a week before. “Ava Carlisle has Mr. Yamamoto arriving Wednesday from Tokyo, and he will be staying in the Jesse James suite. He also brings his own security team, and I’ve worked with them before, so there will be no surprises there.”
There were no surprises anywhere anymore.
Sometimes I wished I had never left the Army. The work was dangerous, but at least I felt alive. There was something to be said for following orders, for doing what you were told, when you were told, and never really having to think for yourself. Sure, we weren’t robots, but even as an officer where you were expected to be better and think faster than everyone else, still left you in the same overall position as every other member of the military; a follower.
I guessed it wasn’t really the military I was missing, as much as the ability to just turn my brain to autopilot and function. I wanted to wake up, get dressed, do my job, go home, and go to bed without having to think.
Without having to feel.
Holy shit, was I tired of feeling.
I finally registered the fact that no one was speaking and dropped my gaze back to the table. Stone sat at the head, dressed in a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no tie. He tried to avoid a tie whenever possible, and I couldn’t really blame him. Life tended to choke the hell out of me on a daily basis as it was; why add a noose?
Across from me sat Gideon Langford, dressed as always in an impeccable suit, the jacket such a dark gray it was nearly black, and his crisp white shirt pressed and starched until it barely moved when he walked. I asked him once who his dry cleaner was and he looked at me, one eye brow raised, and flatly stated that he always pressed his own shirts. The image came to my mind unbidden, Gideon standing in his house, ironing every night until each shirt was perfect. Honestly, he could probably just glare at the shirts and they’d unwrinkle themselves; the man was that intimidating. He never failed to pierce me with his stare, his deep brown eyes seeming to look into my very soul. Gideon missed nothing.
Except lately, it seemed like he was missing a lot. Like right now, he was staring at his phone, the scowl on his face one to rival Stone’s best work, and was completely oblivious to the fact that Stone had stopped the meeting and was glancing back and forth between Gideon and me, a look of bafflement on his face.
Gideon continued to stare at the screen in his left hand while the fingers of his right hand danced in a repetitive motion as he rolled a shiny silver dollar across his knuckles. I watched, mesmerized, as the coin danced, traveling swiftly along the backs of his fingers, flipping end over end in a move so smooth there was no question he’d been practicing it all his life. When the silver dollar reached his pinky finger, Gideon dipped his wrist in a quick looping motion, and faster than I could register, the coin appeared back at his thumb and index finger, ready to start the journey again.
“What the hell has gotten into you two lately?” Stone snapped, causing Gideon to drop his phone into his lap, and the silver dollar to clatter nosily to the table. His eyes snapped up, scooping the coin up and slipping it into the inside pocket of his jacket. If I wasn’t mistaken, he looked a little guilty.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with his usual unflappable calm, even as I watched him swallow heavily. “There is nothing going on.”
“Like hell there isn’t,” Stone barked, standing from his chair and pacing. Pacing was Stone’s favorite corporate stress reliever. Unless he could go for a ride. Horseback was preferable to just about anything as far as Stone was concerned. “Between Silas moping around for what feels like a decade, and you suddenly seeming like you are anything but present, it’s like my best guys are constantly out to frickin’ lunch!” He spun, hands on his hips as he huffed as though he’d just run up three flights of stairs. “Am I going to have to intervene with either of you?”
“I assure you, Stone,” Gideon replied, cool and calm, his deep voice resonating in the almost empty room. If he hadn’t had such a vibrant career with the FBI and then subsequently here at the hotel as the Director of Casino Operations, I would have thought he could have been a blues singer. “There is absolutely no reason for you to be concerned. I have simply been following a…situation on the casino floor.”
“Is this situation the type that we would need to involve the police, or the type where we would need to break some knee caps?” Stone was kidding. Mostly.
Las Vegas wasn’t run that way anymore, at least not as far as we were concerned. The Alamo hotel was a completely clean establishment, with no outside influences from organized crime, and Stone and our team worked hard to keep it that way.
However, that didn’t mean that some old school techniques weren’t applied when necessary. As the man who oversaw all casino operations, Gideon was also the guy who would drag someone into a back room and remind them, in some not-so-subtle ways, why trying to steal from us was a bad idea.
I knew I wouldn’t want to go head-to-head with him. I mean, we were probably evenly matched physically because the guy was a beast, but there was something about the way Gideon looked at you that would make sure that you told the truth when he asked a question. Psychologically, he was unbeatable, and we all knew it.
“Neither, Stone. I have it covered. You can meet your wife in New York tomorrow and rest easy that everything will be just fine while you are away.”
Stone visibly relaxed at Gideon’s words, but my tension increased.
