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From an aesthetic standpoint, I understand it’s less pleasing with the hard, stretched, thicker skin where the burns healed, and the jagged reminder that they basically had to staple what was left of my mangled forehead back onto my cracked skull. It’s not without its downside though. Splitting your head open and breaking sixteen bones leaves some aches behind that no amount of Advil will soothe.
I’ll suffer. I won’t medicate with anything that would dull my senses. I need them all to make things right.
Out of the fire comes the phoenix, as they say, and somewhere in the hospital, in those months where my memories were a black hole, I rose.
When I came out of the coma, the hospital staff gave me the two things found on my person when they brought me in barely alive. The first was a ruby ring I had in a box in my pocket when they found me in the wreckage. It was my mother’s, the one she gave me when she died, and I take it everywhere I go. And the other was a folded scrap of paper with a note, from who I wasn’t sure.
I owe you, man. Whatever you need.
Then a phone number.
It took months for my rehab to have me walking again and able to hold my fucking spoon myself. But, that ring kept me going. There was something about it that told me it was the key to everything.
Then, one morning when I was strong enough, one of the staff walked with me down to the beach. I stood there, the ocean breeze lashing around my robe as I fingered the ring in my pocket. As I withdrew it, the sun caught in the center of the stone, flashing a streak of red across my vision, and I said her name.
Hannah.
From there, a deluge of memories overwhelmed me. There are still some gray fuzzy areas where details are lost and times and places don’t make sense, but my focus was clear. I dialed the phone number on the note, but it wasn’t Hannah. It was someone else, someone I didn’t expect, but someone who it turns out owes me. Just like the note said.
I don’t like favors. Giving or receiving. But I’ll bend all my rules for Hannah. I needed a plane. Even in Grand Cayman, chartering a plane without ID proved beyond the resources I had at my disposal.
“Mr. Georgio,” the captain’s voice comes through the intercom in the bedroom. “Please retake your seat at your earliest convenience. We’ll be landing in Las Vegas in thirty minutes.”
It feels strange to be called by a different name, now that I remember my real one. Dietrich Bellotti. Or, I guess that never was my real name either. It was an alias, a fucking amazing deep fake alias, but still. Not the name on my birth certificate. The identity I left behind decades ago.
The new one I created is part of them both. My mother’s last name and my old first name. Seemed fitting.
I’m headed back to reclaim my life. Or, the only part of it that matters. I’ve got a new life set up in Cayman with a house and all the money I’ll ever need to provide for her. Only problem, that voice attached to the phone number gave me some bad news. The whole fucking thing fell through.
They can do what they like with me, if they can find me.
But if they harm a single fucking hair on Hannah’s head, hell will be a vacation compared to what I’ll do to them.
* * *
Two hours later, my limo pulls up outside the rundown old house, parking down the street as I watch through my binoculars. It’s more of a shithole now than a year ago, with its cracked concrete driveway, the beat-up old Cadillac and the expanse of tan dirt for a front yard. I hate that she’s been here without me. I hate myself. For what, I’m not sure, but I fucked something up. I feel it in my bones.
I watch her come out of the door, making my heart seize. She’s wearing a too fucking short black skirt, a tight white sleeveless button up shirt with a black bow tie. Her blonde hair swirls around her shoulders and my dick is hard.
Hard.Hard. Hard.
It’s eleven o’clock. Third shift at the casinos.
I’m not ready to show myself so I tell the driver to follow as her Cadillac pulls out of the drive. We hang back as she takes a couple of turns, heading downtown, and I watch as she goes into a shitty old casino three blocks from the old strip.
“Wait here,” I tell the driver.
He won’t go anywhere. My benefactor told him to look after me.
Inside the casino, I see her in the bar, and I want to kiss her and tell her everything is going to be all right. I want her to ride my face and flood me with her liquid cunt candy until she remembers who her Daddy is.
But she looks through me like I’m not even there, standing behind the bar pouring cheap whiskey.
“What can I get you?” she says as though I’m the king of this shithole but the music of her voice nearly crumples me to the floor.
It’s rehearsed. She’s acting and I don’t think she even really sees me. She doesn’t meet my eyes. I’m just another sad sucker on my way out of town. “Nothing.” I answer but that’s a lie. I just don’t want a fucking drink.
I slip into a dark corner booth where I can stare at her without drawing attention. God, she’s beautiful. If she’d seen my eyes would she know it was me?
