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“Mr. Souza—”
“Lex, I’ve memorized exactly how your sopping wet cunt looks, feels, and tastes. We’re fucking done with the last-name shit.”
Bringing my hands out from under the desk, I grab both the flowers and the book, then deposit them into the trash can.
My thinned eyes on his hardened ones, I repeat, “Mr. Souza. I regret to inform you that your employment here is no long—”
“What happened when you were sixteen?”
“Excuse me?”
“Something happened when you were sixteen and I want to know what it was. That’s when you started working at The Playground, isn’t it?” He doesn’t wait for a reply before asking, “Why?”
I lift a hand flippantly. “I had to survive.” He said it himself. We’re both survivors forced to do things others haven’t. Or wouldn’t.
Or couldn’t.
“All of a sudden at sixteen? What made Cyrus let—”
“Cyrus is the one that wanted me to work there.”
“His own daughter?”
I fight an involuntary grimace to remain apathetic.
“At sixteen years old?”
“Why do you keep repeating my age?”
“I don’t understand—”
“I killed someone.” I give him a moment to process that before continuing, “When I was sixteen years old, I killed a man. Cyrus helped cover it up. As you’re well aware, Cyrus doesn’t do anything out of the kindness of his own heart, not even for…me, so I became indebted to him. I dropped out of high school and started working at The Playground, where almost two years later, I met my philandering husband and decided I’d rather be Kordin’s whore than Cyrus’s. The job was safer, the pay was better, and the living conditions were much, much grander. Do you understand now?”
“Was it Tommy?”
How the hell does he know about Tommy?
It doesn’t matter. None of this does. It’s all just…pointless.
As indifferent as I can, I inform him, “Tommy was later. When I was eighteen.”
“For giving you that scar?”
He points at my forehead, and I hesitate briefly before nodding. Somebody at The Playground’s been telling my business.
But not all of it. I didn’t kill Tommy for putting his hands on me. I killed him for threatening to use them on my mother.
“Then who’d you off when you were sixteen?”
“Someone that deserved far worse.”
“What’d he do to you?”
“To me? Nothing.” I shrug. “Iwantedto kill him.”
Reece is quiet for a moment, then quietly, he says, “My heart wasn’t broken by a cheater. It was a liar. My father.” He tells the story of how his dad was secretly gambling at Cyrus’s establishment, and after losing a particularly large bet, he chose to take his own life.
“Cyrus—”
