by Vivian Wood
I don’t trust men who look dashing.
Amusement flashes across dark eyes, as if he knows. “Where are your manners?”
“They’re reserved for people I actually like.”
“Like Brennan Chase?”
I struggle to remember if I said Brennan’s full name. I dub thee Sir Brennan. Go forth into battle. My heart squeezes, imagining Damon keeping tabs on me. “How do you know his last name?”
“It’s my business to know people’s names. Their likes and dislikes. Their addictions. Do you have any addictions, baby genius?”
“Do you?”
“Many. Some worse than others.”
An answer that admits nothing. “What are you doing here?”
“I may not deserve a warm welcome, but I didn’t expect hostility. You invited me inside once.”
“That was before you were your father’s puppet.” I still feel guilty for that, but it doesn’t change the fact that he can’t be trusted. He didn’t only survive his father. He became him.
“Ah.”
“That’s all you have to say for yourself?”
“Would you like me to deny it? Fine. That’s not true, darling. I was most definitely my father’s puppet before we ever met.”
The seductive tone almost draws me in, even as his words confirm my worst fears. “You did what you had to do when you were a child. You’re a grown man now.”
“Thank you for noticing. Though I don’t work with my father.”
“Everyone says you do.”
“They say that?”
“They say you deal in money and drugs and women.”
He pauses meaningfully. “Not with my father, I don’t.”
It’s an admission.
He does every horrible thing he’s accused of doing. Every single thing I raged against in my mind. How could the sweet boy I once met be so horrible? How could someone who once risked his life for me be responsible for hurting other girls?
All the street lamps have blown out here, maybe on purpose. The only light is the moon, and when it shines over his dark eyes, the reflection makes them look silver.
He may not work with his father, but he’s become him.
“And that’s supposed to make it better?” I manage to ask. “That you do them for your own gain instead of working for your father?”
“Better? No, but it’s definitely more lucrative this way.”
It’s upsetting that he looks so clean and crisp and beautiful standing beside a run-down tenement. Upsetting that he looks so good when he’s clearly a bad man. That his movie star smile hides a terrible broken soul. “You’re not the boy I knew.”
“No,” he agrees. “Are you the girl I knew?”
“You’ll never find out.”
He tilts his head to the side, as if demurring. Too much of a gentleman to tell me I’m wrong. Except he’s no gentleman. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to speak to your father.”
My heart thuds. “Why?”
“He owes me money.”
Oh God. Daddy, what have you done? “He doesn’t.”
I’m only delaying the inevitable, but I can’t think right now. Can’t deal with the fact that we have rent due in two days and barely enough money to cover it. How will we pay back hundreds of dollars?
Damon looks to the side a little. As if he’s embarrassed by my horror. Or maybe bored. He straightens the cuffs of his fine white shirt, perfectly tailored to his broad chest and narrow waist. He might be waiting in the eaves for an opera to begin, so casually refined.
“How dare you?” I whisper, waiting for him to meet my eyes, daring him.
He glances back at me, one dark eyebrow raised. “Pardon?”
“You know he doesn’t have a way to pay you back. How dare you loan him money? Charging insane interest rates he’ll never be able to afford. How dare you?”
A small laugh. “Would you have preferred I told him no? He would have gone straight to my father, who would have charged him higher interest than I did.”
“I hate you,” I say, tears stinging my eyes. “I hate you both.”
“And it’s not quite true that he doesn’t have a way to pay the money back.”
The silence spins out in brutal possibility. “How?”
“He has you.”
Part II
The King
Chapter Seven
When I first came to live with Daddy he worked in a prison-release program at Goodwill. He would pick things out of the donation piles to bring home. A Barbie with her hair cut jagged. A half-empty box of tinker toys. It was when he brought home the Rubik’s Cube that we hit the jackpot.
Some of the stickers had been torn or smudged away, but the colors were still visible. Only one sticker was gone completely, but a quick count of the sides told me it was yellow.
I sat down in front of the armchair, still worn and lumpy then. My legs crisscrossed, my heart pumping. And in twenty minutes solved the cube for the first time.
Daddy watched with a strange look in his eyes.
When I was done he turned the columns this way and that, trying his best to make sure no two colors were side by side. This time I already had practice. It took fifteen minutes.
So many evenings we sat like that, him messing up the cube, me putting it right.
That was before he lost the job at Goodwill, before he turned heavy to gambling. Before I met Damon Scott and began to hide what I could do.
Though I guess we’re still in old patterns. Daddy messing things up.
Me putting it right.
I can tell Daddy’s home before I put my key in the lock. Something about the air feels heavy with despair, with guilt—though maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I want him to be sorry for what he’s done. But the only thing I feel when I feed my addiction, when I breathe in the sharp tang of numbers is relief.
He sits in his lumpy armchair, the secondhand metal cane leaning against the side.
My feet seem to slow down as I approach him. As much as I need to have this confrontation, as many questions and accusations are swirling inside me, I wish I were anywhere but here.
I don’t bother to sit on the lumpy couch or the wooden coffee table with a crack down the side. Instead I sit down at his feet, crossing my legs. In the same place I sat so many times. The same way I did when I was a little girl.
That’s how I feel right now. Small and helpless.
In Daddy’s eyes I find terrible confirmation.
“I’m sorry,” he says gruffly.
“I don’t understand. Why would you borrow from Damon Scott?” When his lips press together, my heart stops. “Oh God. You owe someone else.”
He shakes his head, as if struggling to understand it himself. “I thought if I could pay off the debt with Damon Scott I’d have more time. So I borrowed from someone else. Pretty soon I owed almost everyone in the city money.”
“Almost?” I say, my voice tight.
Where I felt a surge of emotion with Damon Scott, there’s only emptiness. A blissful numbness that spreads from my heart to my fingers. It’s a relief, however temporary.
His eyes sharpen. “I didn’t borrow from Jonathan Scott.”
“You wanted to.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway, whether I borrowed from him or not. There’s no way I can survive this. Not with the amount of money on the line.”
“Damon Scott talked to me.”
Daddy surges up in a surprising show of strength, before making a cry of pain and falling back into the chair. “That bastard. Did he touch you?”
That small amount of protectiveness makes my heart squeeze. This is what I wanted. Someone to care about me, someone for me to care about. Without having to worry about kneecaps breaking.
How is it that some people get huge trees of family, aunts and uncles and cousins? A flick of a DNA strand, a twist of fate. And here I am, almost alone. Except for one person.
I can’t quite meet that person’s eyes. “D
amon might be willing to help.”
“He’s no better than his father,” Daddy snarls. “Leaning on family like that. He’s not supposed to do that. He’s never done it before. And with you still a child.”
A child? Not really. There are enough men in the diner who stare at me to know they see me as a woman. And Jessica’s barely older than me, her body just as slender despite having given birth only eight months ago. We grow up early in the west side.
The Rubik’s Cube is long gone, lost to the vagaries of childhood. Maybe left behind in the trailer outside of town. But my fingers clench together all the same, longing for something to solve.
A puzzle that’s guaranteed to have an answer.
“What will we do?” I ask softly.
“I have a plan,” he says, gruff, almost glad.
“But how—”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“There’s this big game.”
Dread slithers down my spine, thick and cold. “No way.”
“The pot is huge, Penny. It could pay off all the debts and still have more.”
“You have to win.”
“With your help I would. If you were there—”
“You don’t think anyone would notice?” Counting cards isn’t allowed, which has never made sense to me. As if I could stop counting them. But any sort of signals I made would definitely be caught.
“The game isn’t for six months,” he says. “We have plenty of time to practice them.”
“And what would I be doing at a high-stakes game?” Even in the twisted sex world of Tanglewood, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a player would not be allowed into the private room. There are rules, which is why I couldn’t help him in the big games.
He’s silent in that way that’s filled with words. With guilty admissions. “You’d be in the room if you were my buy-in.”
My gasp sounds loud and ridiculously innocent in the broken little apartment. Who knew I still had naivete to shatter? “You want to bet me?”
“It costs fifty thousand dollars just to enter.”
Oh my God. I thought we had hit the bottom with the debts, but this is worse. There are rocks down there, sharp and slick. And no one to pull me from the water.
Suddenly I remember Damon Scott, his eyes black, fierce.
What made him able to hold his breath underwater so long?
My throat tightens. The memory of a tall man in black sweeps over me, his grey eyes like mist in a dream. “Who’s running the game, Daddy?”
“Jonathan Scott.”
“Don’t do this,” I whisper, knowing I’m too late.
“We’ll win, Penny.” He’s pleading now, asking forgiveness for something already decided. We’re not so far away from medieval times. A man can sell his daughter. A man can gamble her.
I don’t have to ask what happens if he loses, my body forfeit.
Horror is a black hole, threatening to drag me under. Only denial keeps me floating in endless space, denial that my own daddy would do this. “There has to be another way.”
He stares at his hands, knotted together. I know he has arthritis, that his joints swell up in the warm muggy nights, that he struggles to hold the cards.
Oh God, I hate that I care about him.
“The debts are coming due,” he says, and in his voice I hear the grains of sand falling, the amount of time I’m the owner of my body slipping away. The water level rising.
Chapter Eight
The diner still pays me off the books, the way they did before I was old enough to legally work. That means I get to keep one hundred percent of my measly tips, the handful of coins tired factory workers leave beside their empty coffee cups.
Supposedly I’m saving for college, but both Daddy and I know that the few hundred dollars in my account will never cover actual tuition. Stochastic calculus is just a pipe dream, stored on a shelf alongside leaving west Tanglewood and finding out I’m secretly a lost princess.
Six hundred dollars seems to be the tipping point. That’s how much I can save before Daddy gambles again and needs help paying the debt. A fifty-dollar note from the bar owner. A few hundred dollars deep. Not thousands of dollars.
I guess I should be flattered that I’m worth that much.
There’s a cold, hard stone where that flattery would be. Polished smooth from years of being objectified and diminished, shined with every day working in this diner.
I wipe the cracked countertops with extra fervor.
“What do you recommend?” comes a voice out of my nightmares.
A muffled shriek escapes me before I catch myself.
Damon Scott sits on one of the stools, looking at ease despite the fact that his suit costs as much as a car. He sounds so much like his father that I’m surprised to see him there. And relieved. And secretly so very glad.
A lock of dark hair falls onto his forehead, effortlessly perfect. He studies me with a bland expression, the only sign of life the amusement dancing in his ebony eyes.
I glare at him. “What are you doing here?”
“I haven’t eaten dinner.”
“So go somewhere else. Somewhere with caviar and steak on gold plates.”
He sighs, woebegone. “Those places can’t fill a man up.”
“Get out.”
“I’m a great tipper.”
“How about you tip the amount my father owes you?”
“I don’t know.” He sounds thoughtful. “That’s a lot of money. And so far you haven’t really given me great service.”
“I’m not servicing you at all. Leave.”
“We didn’t finish our conversation.”
“That’s because I don’t want to talk. Or see you, ever again.”
“How disappointing for you.”
His smug dismissal sends a jolt of electricity through my body, not entirely unpleasant. I whirl away from him and push into the kitchen. I hate how aware I am of Damon’s voice, the low and sensual timbre. I hate how I can see his cocky smile even when he’s not there.
The scowl on my face must be fierce because the stoic cook, Jackson, raises an eyebrow.
“What?” I demand.
He doesn’t answer, just flips a greasy burger on a grill caked with black.
Ruth Mae has no such qualms. She heads out of the office like a bull seeing red, as if she can sense an unsatisfied customer from far away. If anyone on the floor gave her attitude she would throw him out in a heartbeat. That’s why she doesn’t usually talk to customers. Bad for business.
“What the hell are you doing?” she growls.
“Checking on an order.” That’s a lie but luckily Jackson slides the burger onto a bun, and I grab the plate. It takes some time to do the rounds to all my tables, to refill coffee and jot down orders.
And then there’s nothing left to do but face him.
I slump behind the counter, closing my eyes. “Why are you still here?”
“Still in conversation,” he says, taking a sip from his mug.
“Where did you even get that? I didn’t give you coffee.”
“I went behind the counter. You seem busy.”
I’m replacing Jessica, but Delaney called in sick. That probably means she’s high with her lame boyfriend-of-the-week. So I’m working the tables by myself. Busy is an understatement. “You have thirty seconds to finish the conversation.”
One eyebrow rises up. If anything his voice becomes lower, a faint Southern drawl inflecting his dark velvet voice. “You were polite to the asshole who wanted five refills.”
“They’re unlimited.”
“He only drank that much coffee so he could stare at your rack.”
That’s probably true. “Well, then he’ll suffer plenty when he finds out what five cups of that radioactive sludge does to your stomach lining.”
Damon pushes the mug with his fingertip. “Duly noted.”
“Is that why you’re here? To stare at my rack?”
He manages to look affronted, which is a major feat for a man in his position. For a man who’s put me in this position. “You’re fifteen.”
“Then why did you really come here?”
For once in his life he actually seems uncertain. Almost nervous. Except he has the upper hand in every possible way. He’s handsome. Smart. Rich. And for some reason he’s holding his breath. “Look, Penny. It isn’t exactly safe for you here.”
“Is that a threat? Because the last guy my dad owed money to showed up at our apartment with a baseball bat. I didn’t know subtlety was part of your profession.”
His eyes narrow. “His name.”
“What?”
“The name of the person who showed up with a bat.”
I’m not going to tell him who beat the door in, who smashed my father’s knee. And I’m not going to tell him about the big poker game. This man is nothing to me. I owe him nothing. Least of all the truth.
I brace my hands on the cracked countertop, sure that I’ll need the support. “How much?”
“We should talk about this in private.”
Then he shouldn’t have showed up at the diner. “I could shove you into the freezer?”
“He borrowed five grand. And the interest on that’s… not negligible.”
All the blood drains from my head. I’m dizzy with fury, impotence. Hopelessness. “Is that all?” I manage to choke out.
“No, he came back and borrowed another five.”
Ten thousand dollars. My throat feels thick. I can’t start crying in the middle of the diner. Ruth Mae would definitely dock my already-slim paycheck. I press my nails into my palm, counting slowly until the moment passes.
There’s a look of genuine sympathy on Damon’s stupidly handsome face, which makes everything worse. I want him to look smug and gloating. I want him to be easy to hate. “Penny,” he says, low and grave. “I’m trying to help you.”
I make a sharp motion with my hand. “If you really want to help me, stop loaning money to my dad. No matter what he wants, no matter what he promises. We’ll find a way to pay you back, and then we’re done.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why?”
