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“I least Ihavemoney,” I say and stare him down. “At least my money doesn’t disappear the second I get it. What happened? Tell me they’re not going to kill you.”
“Not yet,” he says, deflating. He takes a slow, steady breath, and lets it out. “The Albanians had this thing going. This racket where they were buying cheap pills from Canada, smuggling them into the States, and selling them for a profit. I borrowed some money from your mother, but it wasn’t enough. So I used some contacts and got another loan from some Greeks—”
“More fucking mobsters?” I say, feeling sick. “How do you even know these people?”
“—And I bought in with all that cash, thinking it was a sure thing. The Albanians had been running it for a couple years, everything was going great, but the laws changed, and I guess the drugs came out of patent—”
I groan and rub my face. “You got fucked. You got duped. They tricked you into buying a bunch of pills they knew weren’t going to be worth shit. They passed the bag off to you.”
“It wasn’t like that,” he says but there’s no force behind his words. He knows it’s true, just like I do. “Anyway, the generic came out and the prices plummeted. I managed to recoup less than half of what I borrowed and that wasn’t enough for the Greeks, they wanted more, and so I had some words for the head of their organization—”
“Oh, fuck. You insulted a mafia Don.”
He waves that away. “The Greeks don’t call them Dons.”
“I don’t give a fuck what they say.” I slam my hand flat on the table. “How bad is it?”
“He’s very unhappy. Very, very unhappy. That’s why I’ve been hiding out in—uh, vacationing in Spain. Waiting for him to cool down. But apparently he’s not the cool-down type.”
“What’s his name?”
“Evander Kazan.”
I work my memory, but it’s not familiar. “All right. Okay. And you owe Kazan two million?”
“And some change,” he says with a shrug. “You can help me, can’t you? I know you don’t have it all, but something?”
I close my eyes and think. I have cash in my accounts and can scrape together a million, maybe more, but that’s everything, all my investments, my entire fucking future. I was saving for a house, for retirement, for anything other than this endless string of shitty jobs, of an ugly half-life pretending I’m something that I’m not, and maybe I could even bring my mother with me. Get her a nicer apartment, buy her some decent things. Treat her the way my father never could. Get her out of that lonely townhouse, the last thing she owns, give her something new for once.
That dream’s dead now.
“I’m working on something,” I say, shame and dread filling my guts like poison. I hate my useless bastard of a father but I can’t let him get murdered by the Greek mafia no matter how much I want to pull the trigger myself. “It’s a good job. A hard one, but the potential payout could solve all our problems and then some.”And if it works, I’ll cover your debts and send you packing.You will never, ever fucking do this to me ever again.
He straightens up, eyes brightening. “What’s the deal? Tell me, maybe—”
“No,” I say sharply and shove a finger in his face. “You stay thefuckaway. You stay as far away as you possibly can.”
He narrows his gaze and turns his beer glass in a slow circle. “I don’t like your tone.”
“And I don’t like the fact that you owe gangsters over two million dollars. I don’t like spending my whole life saving you from shitty situations, over and over again. I don’t like that I had to drop out of school because you lost all our money, and because Mom spent her entire inheritance on bullshit, and I don’t like that I tell the world you two cut me off, when really I’m the one funding your mistakes. So please, spare me the fatherly bullshit and stay the fuck away.”
I’m seething. I’m breathing hard. I feel my edges starting to crumble and crack and break apart. My dad’s staring at me like he can’t decide if he wants to stand and storm off or if he’s going to strangle me. I welcome either outcome, anything to give me an excuse to finally end this toxic relationship for good. He’s the reason I’m trapped in place, him and my mother, because the second I finally cut myself off from them is the second my father ruins my mother for good. Whatever she has left, he’ll suck it all down and make it vanish into his bad luck and stupid decisions.
And as much as I hate him, I can’t let it happen. I won’t let them end up washed out and pathetic, living on nothing, a ghost of their former selves. It’s bad enough my mother’s down to just the townhouse in Austin, the last property my family owns, everything else having been sold off to pay debts years ago. It’s bad enough I’m taking these ugly jobs, conning my way through high society, pretending to be something I’m not and won’t ever be.
Unless I can convince Melody to marry me.
That’s my only chance at making things right. If I can get her family’s money, I’ll be able to cover my father’s debts and make sure my mother’s safe and taken care of. I’ll even throw more cash at Dad to make sure he disappears and never resurfaces again. Let him snort his way through Amsterdam and end up dead in a canal. So long as he doesn’t leave a mess in his wake.
Melody’s my way out. She’s my best chance.
And Idespisemyself for it so deeply it’s like a shard of glass in my heart.
But at this point, I have no other choice.
“All right,” Dad says finally, sounding calmer than I expected. “You have a good thing going. I can respect that and I’ll leave you to it. But listen to me, Warren. Kazan won’t stay quiet forever. He’s going to find me sooner or later, and when he does, it won’t go well for me.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
