Gluttony

by Lana Pecherczyk

  She laughed nervously. “Oh that? That was nothing.”

  “In front of my girlfriend,” he added.

  And that was when Peta’s real colors leaked through. Darkness shrouded her eyes, and she glared at Tony. “Her? Why her? She’s nothing but a—”

  “A slut?”

  “Exactly, she’s…” She shut up, knowing exactly what she’d done.

  “That’s right, Peta. I know it’s you doing all these sick things. The dolls in my trailer, the scratches on my bike, on Bailey’s car. You need help.”

  Peta stepped toward him, held her hand out. “But we’re meant to be together.”

  “It will never happen between us, Peta.”

  “Why? Because I’m a lowly assistant?”

  “Because I’m with someone.”

  “Since when? Last week? I’ve known you all year. I know how you like your coffee, I know that you hate anchovies in your Caesar salad. I know—”

  He held his palm up, stopping her. “That’s enough. Bailey is the love of my life.” That’s why it hurt so much to be lied to.

  Peta’s jaw clicked shut.

  “If you come near me, or her again, I’m reporting you to the police, and the studio.”

  And then he left.

  Tony searched for Bailey on the street, but she was gone. He arrived back at the restaurant the same time as Liza.

  Dressed in her brown detective jacket, and with her badge on her hip, she’d come straight from work.

  His sister took one look at his face and stopped, just before they opened the door to Heaven.

  “You got that cat-got-your-dick face,” she said. “Girl troubles?”

  He rubbed his brow. He should be used to no privacy by now. With a glance across the road at Nightingale Securities, Tony clenched his jaw and went inside Heaven.

  “Stalker issues,” he said, because Liza wouldn’t stop staring.

  “You want me to make some calls?” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  Coming back to the private dining room, Tony held the door open and let Liza in first. The boardroom sized table inside had been expanded as their family had. Once, it only had a place for the nine of them, now it fit up to twenty. His parents were there, at the head. Parker and Griffin were there, as was Evan. Sloan chatted with Wyatt about something to do with her folded origami napkin in her hands. A single empty sitting sat at the other head of the table. Daisy’s place.

  “Good,” Parker said, standing up. “You’re here. Close the door.”

  Tony secured the door and then sat down. The quicker he got this over with, the better.

  Parker pointed a remote at the wall. A projected image came up.

  “This is Wayne Bosch’s wife. Notice anything?”

  She was pretty. Tall. Dark eyes, wavy hair and brown skin. Plum pouty lips. Good makeup. What else was Tony meant to be looking for here? Apparently he was the only one in the room missing the point.

  He lifted his shoulders.

  Parker clicked the remote, and another image popped up next to the woman. Bailey.

  “They could be sisters,” he said. “I don’t understand. Why show me this?”

  Parker folded his arms. “Did you say the creature went for Bailey first, both times? Up the top and below in the sewer?”

  Warmth drained from his body. “You think it was a case of mistaken identity?”

  “Daisy said this creature absorbed the man, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess, or she actually said that?” Parker demanded. “Be certain.”

  “Yeah. She did.” Jeez. “You think it means this creature is influenced by Bosch’s memories?”

  Tony flicked his gaze back to the pictures. The two women had the same chins. Nah, they weren’t that similar.

  Sloan asked for the remote and changed the screen to stream something on her laptop. A map came up first.

  “This is Bosch’s house. I sent a drone. It’s empty. His wife is not there, and he’s not been there for months. We don’t know where she is.” She pulled up screen shots of someone’s Netflix browsing history. “But she’s a fan.”

  Tony cocked his eyebrow at her. “Your point is?”

  Parker leaned on the table and peered across at him. “We have the woman’s email. Get her tickets to your premiere and we can flush her out. Then we can have a little chat about the activities her husband got up to. We may even be able to get some inside information about the entire operation.”

  “What if she doesn’t know anything?”

  “Well then she leaves with an experience she’ll never forget.”

  He exhaled. “Fine.”

  Parker pulled out his cell phone and handed it to Tony. “Make the call.”

  Moving out in the hall near the bathrooms, Tony did. Two minutes later, he had the name of Wayne Bosch’s wife on the door list to the city’s premiere event of the year and a message sent to the woman as an invitation. While he was at it, he put the names of the rest of his family on but didn’t tell them. They’d either turn up, or they wouldn’t. He wasn’t going to beg for their attention. Returning to the dining room, he handed Parker his phone back.

  “Anything else?”

  “Not now,” Parker replied.

  “Good.”

  Tony was thirsty. Without a backward glance, he left. The sounds of the restaurant battered his senses. Their gluttony strangled him. He wasn’t sure where he was going, only that he needed to get away. When he found his feet taking him across the way to Hell, he stopped. The photographer disguised as a bum was gone. And why not? He’d got what he came for. A shot that will sell a million magazines tomorrow.

  Tony’s gaze lifted to the big red wooden door of the club.

  Locked.

  But there was a back door.

  And walls of booze inside.

  “Stop,” Liza said behind him.

  For fuck’s sake.

  “Can’t you women leave me alone?”

  Wrong thing to say. Liza grabbed him by the collar and shoved him inside the Lazarus lobby. She hit the button on the elevator and dragged him inside. When the doors shut, she let him go.

  “Touch me again, and you’ll regret it,” he warned.

  “Get over yourself, Tony.” She glared at the door. “Your girl has it bad for you, and you kiss another woman in front of her, and then take the other woman away.”

  How did she know already?

  Liza raised a brow at him, as if hearing his silent question. “It’s already hit the news network. Lilo called and paid the guy off before it got published.”

  He swallowed, heat rising up his neck. He’d fucked up.

  Liza hit the stop button on the elevator and mumbled, “I don’t know why I’m taking you up, when you should be going down.”

  “Why?”

  “This is the moment you chase after the girl. Don’t let her get away because of your idiocy.”

  “She’s been lying to me, Liza.”

  “So what? We lied to her for months. Give her a chance to explain.”

  Goddammit. She was right. “Fuck.”

  “Exactly.”

  Thirty

  It took days to recover from what its liberator had done to it.

  It had thought she was its savior. It was wrong.

  So it stayed hidden, out of sight. It fed when it could and drank the drips of water leaking from the last downpour. It stayed down in the darkness for days, feeding sporadically on the rats and insects that crossed its path. It remembered there was another savior once. She was its world. Its wife. It wanted her. All it could think of was her. It missed her. It needed her.

  All of her.

  Thirty-One

  Bailey hadn’t stayed long at Nightingale. The moment she’d walked in and seen the faces of her crew, she’d collected a jacket from her locker, and then turned around, taking the file of information with her.

  Ignoring the questions from Max, she pushed out the glass door and w
alked into the cool fall air. She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t know which way was up, and which way was down. All she knew was that Tony had looked her right in the eye after kissing another woman—not just any woman, the stalker—and then turned the other way. Like she didn’t exist.

  It was almost the same thing she’d seen months ago, when she’d first met him. Then, he’d been on the arm of a stunning supermodel. He’d been blind drunk and hopeless. This time, it was a different woman, same scene. This time, instead of coming her way, he went the other. Bailey had overheard some of the conversation. It was clear to her that the woman was the one responsible for all the petty nonsense with the keyed cars and dolls, and she was certain Tony was smart enough to have figured it out. Except, she’d hardly had a moment of normalcy to actually have a conversation with him. She couldn’t remember if she’d told him what the woman had done to her car.

  God, she was messed up for him. Just like one of his groupies. Just like she’d promised she’d never be.

  This was it.

  Proof that she couldn’t make sane decisions about her life. It wasn’t the booze. It was her. Sanity said don’t get involved with celebrity. Sure, maybe it seemed like his heart was in the right place, but clearly she’d had it all backwards. He didn’t have a heart. It was either that, or her parents were right. They’d never seen her either, no matter what she did or how she’d tried to please them. She was the problem. There was something wrong with her.

  Barging into the first drinking establishment she could find—a run down hole-in-the-wall bar. It was two in the afternoon, but fuck it. She was a big girl. And she was spiraling.

  The place was narrow and long, with only the bar on one side, and small booths on the other. A series of industrial lamps swung overhead, and napkins were pinned to the wall with various signatures scribbled on from famous visiting patrons. Her thighs stuck to the sticky stool. Five people were there, including the barman with the handlebar mustache.

  “Cosmopolitan,” she said to him.

  He gave a short laugh and indicated to the sign behind him. It had a silhouette of a Martini glass with a red line through it.

  She picked the only place in the city that didn’t sell cocktails?

  He took one look at her face and then poured her a glass of straight bourbon. “You need something harder than a cocktail, lady.”

  Nodding her gratitude, she took the glass in her hand and stared at the liquid. It smelled sweet, sour, heady.

  She glanced to her right where she’d put the dossier file on the bar. It was filled with dummy information about the Lazarus family. Just noise. She’d made it up herself and knew it wouldn’t keep the CIA off her tail for long, but it would give them a clear understanding that she wasn’t giving up any information. She wouldn’t be turned.

  Iman had said they suspected the family of having ties with international terrorists, but he never said who. He’d also never accused them of being the Deadly Seven, so they’d either not known, or were keeping it to themselves.

  Bailey stayed at the bar for hours, staring into her untouched drink, wondering what to do. Go home, give up, or go back to Tony’s... again, and be the unseen person he came home to at night time to get his fix. She’d had it all wrong. She wasn’t the one in danger of the drink. She was the drink. And she was being used.

  Another glance at the folder and doubts crept in. In the reflection of the mirror between the wall of stacked bottles, she saw her face and grimaced. What was she doing here? This wasn’t her. She was better than this.

  She was trained to think through any situation with a level head.

  So start with what you know, Bailey.

  She knew she was Tony’s mate. She knew this meant he was connected to her like no other. She knew Tony had a pained look in his eyes that had haunted him since that first night he’d come home from patrol and was surprised that she stayed. It was the night she’d met Iman. The night her car had been keyed. Let’s say, for shits and giggles, that Tony knew about all the above, what would that mean?

  It would mean that maybe he’d thought Bailey had cheated on him, or lied about seeing her ex-colleague. Maybe he’d been hurt enough to retaliate and make her jealous?

  Her brows pinched in the middle.

  “I see people like you all the time,” the bartender said, wiping a glass with a towel.

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  He nodded at her drink. “You got a problem. You come in here to test your resolve. You look down at the glass and see your life flash before your eyes, and you wonder if it’s all worth it.”

  “And what do you say to them?”

  The grooves beside his mouth deepened. “I say you didn’t come this far, only to come this far.”

  Of course he was right. She’d used her fancy education to put herself into the CIA, and travel around the world, far from home. She’d taken the hardest route to prove to herself that she could save lives instead of take them. That she made good decisions.

  This wasn’t her.

  She paid for the drink, scooped up the file and went home.

  It had taken Bailey only a moment to decide home was her condo—at least for tonight. Parking her newly buffed and shined car in her garage spot, she collected the dossier file and got out. Her place was the bottom unit in the three-level building. There was a tiny fenced in courtyard at front, and now that she looked at it, she could see how Tony had broken in so easily. She should have bought a top floor unit.

  Letting herself in, she immediately dumped the file in the trash then went to make something to eat. A box on her kitchen bench stopped her. It was big and white with a ribbon around it. There was a note attached to it. On one side, there was a crossword clue. On the other, two simple lines of crossword boxes. Finding a pen, she read the clue.

  What your stupid boyfriend says when he realizes he fucked up.

  She smirked and wrote, I’m sorry. It fit perfectly.

  Opening the box, she found another note stuck on top of the white tissue paper. The note said:

  Forgive me, Angel, I’ve been stupid.

  Be my date to the premiere tomorrow night and I’ll explain. Tony, xx

  She peeled the white tissue paper aside. Turquoise stretch fabric with a tropical leaf pattern taunted her. Holding her breath, she picked it up. The fabric unfolded to a long, sleek one-shouldered dress that would hug her form. Stunning. Something else caught her eye in the box, and when she shifted more tissue paper, her heart leaped into her throat.

  La Perla lingerie. Smooth, pale and sexy.

  In her size.

  He’d gone shopping for her.

  She sighed and put it down, running her finger over the items. She was still staring, lost in thought when her cell phone rang. Half expecting it to be Tony, and she wasn’t ready to speak to him yet, she almost didn’t pick it up. But when she checked the caller ID, she noticed it was from Hudson House.

  She hoped everything was okay.

  “Hello?” she said into the receiver.

  “Oh, good,” Agnes replied. “I hope I haven’t called at a bad time.”

  Bailey put the cover on the box. “No. This is a good time. Is everything okay?”

  Agnes paused. “Look. I just wanted to get your opinion on something, and I couldn’t wait until next week until I saw you.”

  “What is it?” Tension twisted Bailey’s stomach into knots.

  “It’s... um. Okay, there’s no easy way to say this, but I’m not sure if Mr. Lazarus’s donation is a bit too much.”

  Bailey blinked. “Do you mean from Tony?”

  “Yes, well, I know he’s been coming in and playing games with the kids, which is great. You know, they can always do with a new gaming console, there’s so many of them. But the music studio?”

  Bailey didn’t know what to say. “Tony’s been in this week?”

  “Oh, I thought you knew. He’s been dropping in to spend time with a few of the children. But he promised t
hem a music studio, and I almost didn’t believe it, but the contractor has already been in touch with us.”

  She forgot to breathe. “When was that?”

  “Yesterday. Do you think it’s too much? I mean, we need some other essential items more than a music studio, if you know what I mean?”

  Bailey hummed in agreement, but her mind was still stuck on Tony’s generosity. He hadn’t told her he’d been going, and he’d given no sign that he wanted to donate a music studio. This was obviously something he wanted to do on his own. She smiled when she remembered Tony trying to direct the press conference toward the sobriety house.

  This was becoming as important to him, as it was to her.

  “I think a music studio is perfect for them. They all love music. It will give them an opportunity to come to the house, and it will keep them occupied. We can just make sure to let him know not to go overboard with it.”

  “I don’t want the place to be a target for criminals. With expensive equipment, it could be, you know?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll make sure to tell him to go for the cheaper equipment when I see him next.”

  “Great. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. Thank you for talking to me.”

  “No problem.”

  After she cut the call, Bailey opened the box again. A warm feeling spread throughout her body. She touched the lingerie and imagined a future with him. It involved a happier time, traveling the world together, maybe coming home to have a family. Tomorrow, she thought. Tonight she would sleep on it, and tomorrow she would make her decision.

  Thirty-Two

  Christ, Tony was nervous.

  Dressed in a tuxedo and standing at the start of the red carpet, he tried not to flinch every time a paparazzo shot went off, capturing his awkwardness. A tug on his bow tie, and a check of his communicator watch every few minutes didn’t help.

  The red carpet extended from the sidewalk, deep into the entrance of the zoo. Over the din of the crowd—made up of media, fans and giveaway winners—watching from behind red ropes, he heard the occasional monkey whoop and elephant trumpet. It would be interesting to see how much of the noise would be covered when the movie started.