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“Fine,” Marco said as he walked further into the bedroom. “Do what you want. I’m sure that your wife will be fine with the fact that you are hanging out with a stripper late at night.”
Alex didn’t flinch, but I did. I didn’t like the way that Marco said the word stripper. He spit the word out as if it left a bad taste in his mouth, and it made me livid.
“Can someone tell me what the hell is going on?” I finally snapped. It wasn’t that I had a death wish; I was just so exhausted by everything that my mouth was working faster than my brain.
Marco raised an eyebrow. “Feisty, little dancer.” He leaned against the doorframe of the room, and I appreciated that he didn’t come any closer. I really might have lost it if he tried.
I raised a brow, trying to show more bravado than I had. “I thought you were going to kill me?” It was a stupid thing to remind him about, but I was curious as to why I was still alive. Grateful but curious.
“Did you want me to kill you? We can always arrange it.”
I stiffened as his words reminded me of what it felt like to not have enough air to breath, and I felt my false strength start to evaporate.
Marco rolled his eyes. “If I really wanted you dead, you would be,” he told me. His words were smug, and they made me hate him even more.
“Why am I here?” I asked again. I was cold, hungry, and exhausted. If Marco wasn’t going to kill me, then I wanted to go back to the club, get my things, and head home. Because I was Mikey’s caregiver, I needed to be home in the morning to watch him while my mother went to the diner. And the money! It was still back at the club.
Marco pulled a manila folder from his back, opened it, and began flipping through it nonchalantly. I glanced at Alex quickly and noticed that he was just as confused by Marco’s behavior as I was.
“You should have stayed inside that night,” Marco muttered, shaking his head, as he read whatever was in the file.
I gulped. Everything that he said felt like a threat. “Trust me,” I told him. “I wish I had.” I cursed Nikki silently for giving me that joint. I hadn’t even been able to smoke it.
“We’ve got a bit of a problem here, Ivy.” Marco snapped the folder shut as my jaw dropped open.
“How do you know my name?” I was sure I hadn’t shared it. The only people at the club who knew my real name were Nikki and Tommy, and Tommy only knew it for check writing purposes.
Marco shrugged. “Wasn’t hard to dig up information on you. Was it, Alex?”
Alex looked sheepish, and I wanted to punch him in the face. He’d played good cop, and I’d allowed myself to fall for it, briefly, but still. I’d allowed myself to hope that he wouldn’t let anything bad happen with Marco, but he was just as bad as the rest of them.
“I don’t think it took him more than thirty minutes to dig up your entire life. Tough break about your brother.”
“Don’t talk about my brother,” I snapped. “He has nothing to do with this.”
Marco looked at me sympathetically, but I knew that it was false. His dark eyes were just as dead and cold as they’d been when he’d tried to strangle the life out of me. “He’s why you work at the club, right? Money for his cancer?”
Alex looked at me with sympathy in his gaze, and I immediately felt myself stiffen. “I work at the club because it’s good money,” I told him.
He made a sound in the back of his throat as if he didn’t believe me. I knew that he just didn’t care. I didn’t matter to him. “I already told you that I wouldn’t say anything.” I wouldn’t. I wasn’t stupid. Even if the cops did arrest him, guys like him were never facing the consequences of their actions. He would be back on the streets in no time, looking to kill me.
“That’s come and gone,” he muttered. For the first time, he looked genuinely upset by something. I wondered what it was. What could make someone as stone cold freaked out. “Your idiot boss gave the security cameras to the police. So now, they know that I was the last person with Adrian, and that you were in the alley.”
I stiffened and my mind raced. I needed to find a way out of this, and I needed to do it fast because I didn’t like wherever this was leading. “They don’t know that I was in the alleyway. I’ll tell them I took a walk and came around the front.” It was the lamest excuse, but it was also the only one that I could come up with.
“You’d go to prison for me?” Marco asked. He pressed a hand to his chest. “I’m flattered.”
“Prison?” I asked. “No one is going to prison.”
“That’s generally where people go when they are caught lying to the cops.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming. No matter what I did, it seemed that Marco was hellbent on explaining why it was going to lead to his downfall.
“Are you just determined to kill me?” I asked. The words left a sour taste in my mouth. “Is that it? You just get off on hurting women?”
Marco tensed, and I knew I hit a nerve of some sort. “I don’t,” he told me. “But there are people who Adrian was aligned with who would love nothing more than to pull you limb from limb until you tell them what you saw. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll get your little brother and put him out of his misery.”
“Stop it,” I snapped.
