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I don’t look, and neither does Georgia, but I can feel both Alfie and Ezra watching us, their hard gazes fixated on us the entire evening, and I already know this is only the beginning with them.
Chapter Nine
When the cocktail party comes to an end, I send a delighted Georgia down to deal with the winnings from earlier—she is my wife now and was sitting there when I won—and I go to the suite, anxious to get started and dive into both Ezra’s and Alfie’s secrets.
The room is nicely appointed in variations of gray with gold and brick red accents and a view of the Bellagio fountains and the Paris hotel across the way. The couch is laughable, designed for beauty instead of comfort—not long enough that I’ll fit on it without pulling it out though, and there is no fucking way I’m pulling out a couch in a Las Vegas suite. I don’t care how nice or clean the room looks.
I grab my computer and sit at the dining table, immediately getting to work.
My father taught me how to write code before I started speaking. I was late to that ballgame, having no interest in it, which naturally worried my mother and had doctors throwing out all sorts of diagnoses at me. But my father—a hacker himself—sat me down and taught me code. A language I instantly took to. A language I enjoyed communicating in.
Just thinking about him now hits me in the worst ways.
I came home from Switzerland, Suzie’s body in a fucking coffin beneath the plane, and the first things my mother and father did were slap me and blame me for her death in that order. When Central Square hit it big, they sent me off with Suzie—a wild child if ever there was one—with one mission: keep her safe and bring her home alive.
I remember my mother saying that to me, almost in jest, but when I returned home with their daughter dead, they were suddenly oh-so-serious about my charge and how I had failed. I failed Suzie. I failed my parents. And our family of four that had been impossibly tight—thick as thieves, as my father called us—was broken.
My father drank and drank and drank until he couldn’t see or think straight, and then he got angry and fought. Fought me, fought my mother, fought anyone who looked twice in his direction.
One night I got called down to his local bar to come and tend to him. He wasn’t yet ready to leave, and the bartender said fine, so I sat and nursed a beer at the bar, watching bullshit on television when a man was dumb enough to make a joke about Suzie. That was it for my father. He smashed a bottle over his head and then plunged the broken remains into the man’s throat. He killed the man before I could act. Before I could reach them. And after, with his eyes right on mine, he told me it was my fault she was dead and that I had done this to us.
Then he stabbed himself the same way he had stabbed that man.
I stood there and watched it happen. In all fairness, I didn’t know he was going to kill himself. He was brandishing the bloody, broken end of the bottle like he was going to come after me next, and I didn’t move because I hadn’t decided if I was going to stop him or not. Plus, the police had already been called and were on their way, and I wasn’t the only one frozen from what had just transpired.
But I didn’t act when he stabbed himself. And I didn’t force him to leave the bar when I knew I should have. I didn’t want the resulting fight it would have caused, and because of it, a man lost his life along with my father.
It became a media cyclone.
My mother was long done by that point, and after my father’s death and with the way the press relentlessly hounded us, she up and left Boston. Left the country. Last I bothered to check, she was living in Australia and teaching English.
Clearing away those thoughts, I’m just about finished when I hear the click and swish of the mechanical lock on our suite door, and in walks my wife followed by a man in a livery uniform carrying bags of what appear to be food and alcohol behind her.
She treats me to a dazzling, happy smile, and my heart thuds painfully against my ribs.
“Where would you like it, ma’am?”
Isn’t that my question for her?
“Right over there by my husband is perfect,” she tells him, indicating the table I’m sitting at with my computer, an amused laugh tickling her lips at the way she calls me her husband.
The man gives me an apologetic look but then sets down three large bags right beside me, the scent of garlic, onions, tomatoes, and something spicy immediately hitting me.
“Thank you so much.” Georgia hands him a large bill, and he gives her a bow like she truly is a queen, then he leaves the suite.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner,” she explains as if it’s obvious. “I was in the mood for Italian. Ten million dollars minus a large chunk that went to the casino and another large chunk that went to taxes is now being sent to my favorite women’s health charity.”
Her cheeky, playful tone has my lips twitching. She’s in a good mood, the brightest I’ve seen her since she showed up at my house in Cambridge last night. I’d marry her every day just to see that smile on her red lips, and it’s thoughts like this that I need to eradicate immediately.
She prances over to me, still in her wedding dress with her hair up and her heels on, and begins unloading dinner from the bags along with a bottle of red wine, a bottle of tequila, and a bottle of expensive bourbon.
I raise an eyebrow and she winks at me. “We’re quasi-celebrating, right? I mean, that’s how I’m trying to spin it in my mind. I didn’t have to marry Ezra, and come Monday, Monroe will be mine. Besides, I didn’t know what you were going to be in the mood for tonight.”
You instantly slingshots through my mind, but I rapidly pull it back and ram it into the locked place in my head, where I seem to be collecting a lot of thoughts about her tonight.
I clear my throat. “I need your phone.”
