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“Right. You want to pay me hush money. Just to… not tell anyone about this.”
“Yeah, babe, that’s what hush money is for. For you to hush.”
“For how long?” I asked.
Someday, someone was going to have questions about the scars I was sure I was going to have.
“For as long as we are willing to pay you for it,” he said, shrugging it off.
Like it was no big deal.
Like they had an endless supply of cash to just toss at me. Forever.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to… you know…”
“Whack you?” he asked, chuckling.
Whack?
Whackme?
That wasn’t gang terminology.
That was… that was the mafia.
Right?
I mean, those were the only guys I’d ever heard use that term in movies and TV shows.
My gaze lifted, looking at his dark hair flecked with gray, his dark eyes, his somewhat tanned skin, his slacks and dress shirt. And the other guy, Maine, he was dressed up too.
What gang members looked like they were ready to go out to a fancy dinner?
None that I knew of.
These guys were the mob.
For some reason, that fact let my stomach untwist a little bit.
It shouldn’t have. The mafia was notoriously violent. But they also had a code, didn’t they? Was that why they hadn’t just killed me? Because of that code?
“We don’t kill innocent women,” Surgeon said, shrugging off that fact.
“But you’re willing to pay us indefinitely for silence?”
“It’s just money,” he said.
Just money.
It wasjustmoney.
That was only something someone who’d never struggled would say. Because to those of us who cut coupons and bought used and pinched every last penny, money was not “just” anything. It was essential. There were days when it was all there was, all you could think about, all there was to worry about in your world.
I couldn’t fathom a world where I didn’t turn off the lights early or sweated in the summer heat to keep the electric bills low. Or when I refused to buy my favorite soup because they raised the price by twenty cents a can.
Things had been tight for my entire life.
And they’d gotten much, much tighter over the past six months. With no end in sight for several years.
