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“What’s wrong?” I probed.
She shook her head while she swirled her straw in her glass. “Do you ever think maybe you can get addicted to someone? Even though you know that they’re not good for you?”
Uh oh. Trouble in paradise already? “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. It’s just….” She sighed. “I’ve been talking to this guy, and he’s a total tool and an arrogant douchebag. And I know I can do so much better, but for some reason, I can’t resist him. I just want to keep going back for more of the torture, and it sucks.”
I nodded. “Sometimes, we become addicted to the trauma.”
She smirked. “Yeah. You would know.”
Was that a dig?I decided not to ask because I didn’t want to get too deep into the topic of her and my ex-boyfriend.
“Just be careful, okay?” I said, and she glanced at me. “Don’t lose yourself too much trying to please him.”
She stared at me for a long moment, then nodded.
I opened my mouth to say something else but then stopped. Because at that moment, Brick walked in. He searched around the room and stopped when his eyes landed on me. Anger filled his face, and he stormed toward me like he wanted to kill me.
TWENTY
EZRA
I finally got Lance on the phone. It wasn’t easy. It took weeks, and I was pretty sure he’d been avoiding my calls, but I was persistent.
And I wasn’t accepting the piss poor resignation email he sent to me. That was pure bullshit. If the bastard wanted to resign, he would have to do it to my face.
I called him around noon, expecting it to go straight to voicemail once again. If it did, it would be a sign that I needed to take this up a notch. I was already close to booking a flight back home to go kick his ass in person, and if he kept avoiding me, that was exactly what I was going to do.
And he must have intrinsically sensed that because this time, when I called, it finally went through.
“Hullo,” he mumbled. His voice was rough and groggy, and it was like he was just waking up, which was strange in itself. Like most of my men, Lance had always been an early riser, and the fact that he was still in bed in the middle of the day made me worry.
“What the fuck is going on with you?” I asked, getting to the point. I was tired of dicking around at this point and needed to know what his problem was.
He was quiet for a few seconds before he said, “Boss?”
“Yeah. Who else would be calling your sorry ass today?”
“I didn’t think you would call…I….” He hiccuped, and it triggered a coughing fit before he finished with, “I sent in my resignation.”
“I saw. And I rejected it.” I listened for more cues, the clanking of bottles, a shuffle that suggested he was sitting up on the floor or some other hard surface. “Are you drunk, motherfucker?”
He hiccuped again before he said, “No.” His lie was as blatant as ever. Lance had always been a horrible liar. I noted the clinking of more bottles as he was probably struggling to get up. The fuck? He was drinking? Lance had never been much of a drinker, and it didn’t make sense, but my instinct told me that he was drunk off his ass in the middle of the afternoon.
Anger raged through me. Disappointment too. Fucking shit, Lance had been one of the good ones. All my men dealt with some kind of trauma—I did too—but I thought Lance was doing good. He’d seen the psychologists without any trouble and regularly went to his sessions. He always performed his job perfectly. So what the fuck was going on now?
“What the fuck is going on with you?” I demanded, trying not to let my anger show in my voice. He didn’t need that right now. And I needed him to get comfortable enough to get to the root of the problem.
I didn’t think all this started after one bad day.
And he likely didn’t yet get that this was starting a dangerous cycle. Maybe he got a nightmare or something that spooked him, and he drank to forget the memories. And then that drinking led to even more drinking, and before he knew it, he was an alcoholic with a failing liver. I’d seen men lost to alcohol and drugs before…you name it. Most of them became dependent on their position and were unable to cope with life without it. A few of my men, I watched closely for risk of dependency, but Lance had never been one of them. Shit, I would have even pegged Kuzo and his famous temper before I suspected Lance. It was one of the reasons I paired the two together. Because the even-tempered Lance was good at keeping Kuzo stable.
But now Lance was the one going off the bender.
“Nothing is going on with me,” Lance replied in a quiet tone. “I’m just sick of it.”
“Sick of what?”
