Private Dancer (Club Volare Book 12)

by Chloe Cox

  Cole had wanted Mascolo and Turnbull to see Holt following them because he knew that those two were rational. They were dirty, but they weren’t stupid. They didn’t take unnecessary risks, and they didn’t panic. They’d see someone following them and they’d get more cautious, slow down. They’d hesitate before doing something drastic like hurting Bette if they thought there was even a small chance they might not get away with it.

  But Duvall?

  Duvall was a weird character. Smart, and cunning, and ruthless—but impulsive, too. Emotional. And the rumor was he was dipping into his own supply. First he got high on the power he had accumulated, on getting away with it. Then he’d just skipped the middleman and started getting high with the cocaine he was helping to smuggle and launder. Now he was rumored to be a flat-out cokehead.

  A man like that might panic if he saw Cole at his front gate. A man like that might very well do something stupid.

  Cole took two long strides toward the wall, under the blind spot, and launched himself up, kicking off the wall and pulling himself up with enough speed to land his foot quietly on the top of the wall. He swung the other leg around and dropped to the ground silently, crouching low and moving to the side for Holt.

  Easy peasy.

  Holt landed next to him, just as quiet. They were behind a row of some kind of palm, partially obscured, and the only other person in sight was Turnbull.

  He was out on the patio behind the house, smoking a cigarette. Looking nervous. Looking like he was waiting for something.

  Turnbull probably didn’t expect anyone to jump the damn wall. Probably thought Cole would post up at the front gate with his badge up, like a normal agent, playing by the rules. Cole was tired of playing by the rules. They weren’t working.

  Cole moved along the side of the wall, until he was to Turnbull’s back. Then he just walked out from behind the palms and pulled his weapon.

  “Jesus,” he heard Holt mutter behind him.

  Turnbull turned, and the cigarette fell out of his mouth. Cole flicked the safety on his weapon to the off position.

  “Keep quiet,” he said to Turnbull. “And keep your hands up.”

  There was a second where Turnbull hesitated. He contemplated possible futures for himself, and the way they played out flickered across his face. Then he slowly raised his hands.

  “You’re so fucked, Cole,” Turnbull said.

  Cole gestured to Holt, who moved quickly to disarm Turnbull. Turnbull put up no resistance, but he kept his eyes on Cole with a sort of wide-eyed wonder.

  “You have no warrant,” he said. “No one has your back on this.”

  “Don’t care,” Cole said through his teeth. “How many in the house?”

  “Just Mascolo and Duvall,” Turnbull said. “He’s wired in, Cole. You know that right? And you’re so far out on a limb Duvall could drop you and your lady here and now and no one would care. They’d help him cover it up.”

  “Where?” Cole growled.

  Turnbull looked at him, and swallowed. For the first time he seemed afraid.

  “Mascolo took her upstairs to see Duvall,” he said. “You really are fucked, Cole. And you don’t even know it.”

  Cole scowled, let the anger roil through him, let it return to calm. Then he looked up at the house.

  “I don’t know if you pray, Turnbull,” Cole said. “But you better start.”

  The walk into Mark’s house and up the stairs was the longest of Bette’s life.

  She still had trouble believing this was all real. Even with Mascolo’s hairy hand on her arm, making sure she didn’t run for it or do anything else disruptive, she still looked around with disbelief. She had lived in this very house for almost six months, and yet it felt totally alien to her. There were enough little changes, enough plants that had died, enough furniture removed, a rug here, a piece of art there, that it didn’t feel quite like the house she remembered. But then it had never really been her house. Not even the decoration. Everything had been about the image Mark was trying to project—rich, powerful, respectable.

  He seemed to have given up on the respectability thing. Or maybe it was just because he didn’t have a woman around to make sure he didn’t live like an animal. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good look.

  They passed a mirror. Bette saw her glazed expression, and it clicked.

  Ok, yeah, you’re in shock. And you gotta snap out of it.

  She focused on her breathing as they mounted the stairs, awkwardly, together. Mascolo wore some sort of cologne that didn’t suit him. It was a weird reminder of his humanity, but it grounded her, and suddenly it all hit her.

  This was really happening. Her ex-husband, in addition to being an abusive creep, was some kind of monstrous crime lord, and he had essentially kidnapped her because she’d gotten evidence that could hurt him, and this was actually her life. Or what remained of it.

  As they reached the top of the stairs, the door of the master bedroom in sight at the end of the hall, Bette’s chest constricted. She made a fist with her free hand, digging the fingernails into her palms.

  How could she have been so stupid?

  How could she have married this person?

  How could she ever trust herself again?

  Mascolo grunted, and she realized she’d frozen. Bette forced herself to keep moving, to appear calm. All of those were valid questions that she was sure would torture her for the rest of whatever remained of her life, but right now she had to think about survival. She had to think about Lizzie.

  That was the one thing that scared her more than anything else in the world. Not dying, exactly. But dying and leaving Lizzie all alone.

  That is not going to happen.

  They’d reached the door to the bedroom Bette used to share with Mark, and Mascolo knocked on it, surprisingly softly. Bette tried to fight a wave of nausea.

  “Bring her in!” Mark’s voice shouted through the closed door. He sounded tense, agitated. Not a great start.

  Mascolo opened the door, and Bette held her breath.

  Oh yeah, this was not good. Not good at all. The bedroom they’d once briefly shared looked like the den of some paranoid drug addict. Which apparently it was. There was a pile of garbage in one corner—like actual garbage, like the kind of garbage you’d see in a hoarder’s house—and a messy pile of what was probably cocaine on the vanity. The bed was unmade, and the sheets looked like they’d hadn’t been changed in a month. All of the plants were dead.

  And there was Mark, pacing in the middle of the room. He looked like a mess in an expensive suit. He hadn’t shaved, and the skin under his nose was raw. He twitched as he paced, like his nerves and muscles all had minds of their own, and they didn’t all agree with each other.

  But it was the way he watched her that freaked her out. Bloodshot eyes with pinpoint pupils, not blinking, just staring.

  Crazy eyes.

  “Hi Bette,” he said. “I heard you did something bad.”

  Bette didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing at all. That appeared to be the right move. Mark stared at her for another second, almost daring her to defy him, and then looked to his hired muscle.

  “Here’s the phone, boss,” Mascolo said, and stepped forward to hand Mark her phone. He stepped back just as quickly. “You need me for anything else?”

  “Not for a little while,” Mark said. “Go relax downstairs.”

  Mascolo nodded and left.

  And then they were alone.

  Slowly, Bette’s brain started to come down off intense panic mode, and she realized this could almost be a good thing. Mark wouldn’t have anything to prove if they were alone. She could maybe appeal to his sympathies. Maybe…

  “You called Spencer Cole?” he said suddenly, his voice bouncing off the marble floors as he looked up from her phone. “Why the fuck did you call Spencer Cole this morning?”

  Bette blinked. Think. Think.

  He doesn’t know about you and Cole, not really. Maybe you ca
n convince him you’re on board for all of this.

  “Well hi to you too, Mark,” she said as though this was just the ex-husband she hadn’t seen in almost a year, not a terrifying specter of paranoia and ruthlessness. “That’s the guy Bob Faulkner wanted me to, uh, work on, I guess. I wanted to see if I could get anything before I saw him this morning. But I’m starting to think I don’t really understand what’s going on.”

  “No shit you don’t understand,” Mark said sharply. “You’re fucking him, aren’t you?”

  Bette didn’t say anything. Faulkner had asked the same freaking question. Somehow this grossed her out more.

  “I bet you are,” Mark went on. “I bet you have him fooled, don’t you? Does he know you’re just a stripper?”

  Then he laughed. He cracked himself up.

  “A stripper with a kid,” he said. “Christ, you’re a real prize, Bette. You know I thought you knew? I thought you had to know.”

  Ok, he wants to talk, for some reason. Keep him talking, and maybe you find a way out of this.

  Bette kept her voice calm, inoffensive. “Knew what?” she asked.

  Mark sneered. “‘Knew what?’” he said, pitched high and mocking. “Come on, Bette. I thought you knew the deal. I mean, why would a guy like me marry a woman in your position? Of course this was an arrangement. You had a purpose. A role to play. Anyone with a brain would have seen that. And then you had to fuck it up by going and taking everything seriously. By actually believing all the bullshit. Jesus.”

  As he talked, Mark was getting angrier and angrier, the vein in his neck starting to stick out while his face got red underneath the year-round tan. That observation kept Bette in the present, rather than spiraling inside her head in panic about how Mark was probably right. It was almost…like he was hurt? Like he was upset, and hurt?

  Like she’d hurt him by leaving him?

  The idea seemed totally bizarre to Bette, but there was no denying that Mark was definitely getting emotional. That emotion was full-on unhinged anger, but still. He wasn’t just being a cold, terrifying psychopath. His pride was injured, and he wanted something from her.

  In a flash, Bette knew what it was.

  He wanted her to admit she’d been wrong. He wanted her to beg him to take her back, even after all this. He wanted that power.

  And Bette could stay alive by denying it to him.

  “Why did you record Faulkner?” he snarled at her, suddenly.

  “Because the guy is an obvious creep,” she said. “And I didn’t believe him, and I wanted insurance that he wasn’t going to screw me out of custody of my little sister.”

  Mark snorted, and went back to pacing, his eyes still on Bette. His hand gripped her phone so tightly that his knuckles were white. She vaguely wondered if he was going to crack it.

  Hell, if that kept him from deleting the recording, she would take it.

  As they stared at each other, Bette could feel the fear in her heart begin to recede. In its place was…confidence? Somehow? She could do this. She could bluff her way out and--

  “I did that brat a favor,” Mark said suddenly.

  It was like being slapped across the face.

  “You hear me?” he said again. “A favor. She’s better off in foster care than she is with you.”

  Mark watched her expression, a smile spreading across his face while he watched Bette’s heart tear in two.

  Mark always had been good at sniffing out someone’s worst fears, their deepest wounds, and finding a way to make them hurt more. He’d even done it when they were together, though he’d been subtler, more skillful. Undermining her confidence. Making her think she needed him, especially because of Lizzie. That Bette would have been positively negligent if she passed up the opportunity to provide Lizzie with the kind of advantages Mark could pay for. That, in the end, she just wasn’t good enough on her own.

  And then she remembered Cole.

  That girl is lucky to have you.

  It had hit her like a ton of bricks when Cole had said that. When he’d said it and so clearly meant it. Bette hadn’t ever really stopped questioning whether she deserved everything Cole offered her; she’d still felt like an interloper at Club Volare, even when they tried to make her feel like family. Like she was intruding.

  But that? That moment? She’d believed that. For the first time in her life, she’d believed she was good and worthy and competent. Bette knew all of that, intellectually, but the thing was, she’d spent so much time around people who believed she was essentially worthless that their voices had gotten inside her head and set up camp. Her parents, Mark. Other boyfriends she didn’t even care to remember.

  All until Cole.

  Bette might not be perfect, but she stood up for people. And she showed up for her sister. And one day she would believe her own voice telling her that she was a good parent, and that she deserved a family and love and all that jazz, but right now she had Cole’s voice in her head, too.

  And she believed him.

  “Fuck you, Mark,” she said.

  Mark stared at her. Then he laughed, a high-pitched, fake laugh.

  “Oooh, did you get tough?” he said. “Look at you, standing tall. I can’t believe you think you’re gonna raise that kid. I’m going to make sure she stays in foster care, you know that? I’m going to—”

  This time, Bette laughed. She actually laughed.

  Maybe she was losing her mind.

  “Oh, just shut up, Mark,” she heard herself say, in a voice that was stronger than she’d ever felt. “That doesn’t work on me anymore. Lizzie deserves to be loved, and so do I. And guess what? We are. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  And that was when things went really crazy.

  33

  Cole was near the top of the stairs when he heard a toilet flush.

  A door in the hall on the second floor opened, and Mascolo emerged, drying his hands on his shirt. He looked up, and his mouth opened in an “o” of surprise. Then he reached for the weapon in his side holster.

  Cole charged.

  He slammed his shoulder into the other man with his full strength, feeling Mascolo’s ribs crack as his breath whooshed out of his lungs. Mascolo kept falling, clumsily, sloppily, and his head hit the marble floor with a sickening crunch. He tried to roll to his side, revealing a red smear on the white floor, then lay back down, dazed.

  He would need an ambulance. But right now, Cole needed answers.

  “Where?” he growled in Mascolo’s face.

  The other man blinked, said nothing. But he looked at the door at the end of the hall.

  Cole took his weapon, cuffed him, and left him there.

  His hand was on the doorknob when he heard the sound.

  The meaty slap of a hard punch. A woman, his woman, crying out. Someone falling.

  Cole kicked the door in, weapon up, body on fire. If he had hurt her, he was dead. No more training, no more discipline. Cole wasn’t an agent anymore, wasn’t anything but one thing. The man who loved Bette Liffey.

  Time slowed down as the door flew outwards, revealing the scene. Cole had enough time to take it all in.

  Bette, on the ground, a bruise already beginning to form on her cheek, eyes shining and mad as hell.

  Mark Duvall, standing over her, a gun in the back of his waist band, a phone in his hand, a metric ton of coke in his blood.

  Split-second decision: Cole could take Duvall out right there, one clean shot, before Duvall had a chance to finish drawing his weapon. End it all. Already Cole could see him reaching for it. Thinking about it.

  But it would traumatize Bette. Seeing her ex shot in front of her, blood everywhere.

  No.

  Her life was going to get easier from now on. Not harder. Cole was going to make damn sure of that.

  “Don’t even fucking think about it,” Cole said, his voice shattering the air between them.

  Duvall’s hand froze in the air.

  “Put the weapon on
the ground, slowly, and kick it over to me,” Cole said. “And while you’re thinking about whether or not to do what I just told you to do, know one thing. The only reason you’re not already dead is because of her. So if I think there’s even a chance you’re going to put her in any more danger, Duvall, you will be dead less than a second later.”

  Duvall stared at him, anger flattening his lips into a thin, mean line, coke twitching at a muscle under his left eye. Finally he sniffed, shrugged a little, like he was playing to an audience, and dropped his thousand-dollar gun on the marble floor with metallic clatter.

  Cole held himself still, waiting to see if it fired. It didn’t.

  Duvall laughed, throwing up his hands, playing to some invisible audience again. It had been a deliberate provocation. This son of a bitch was out of his mind.

  “You ok, Bette?” Cole said.

  “I’ll live,” she said.

  Christ, just her voice was a balm.

  He wanted to go to her, pick her up, make sure she was ok with his own hands, hold her in his own arms. But he kept his eyes on Duvall.

  “Why so hostile, Mr. Cole?” Duvall said, spreading his hands as if he were hosting a party or something. “Surely we can come to some sort of agreement, like gentlemen. If—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Cole said. “And step away from Bette. Now.”

  Duvall pressed his lips together again, and a vein in his forehead began to stand out against his reddened skin. Then he snorted, and took a step back.

  “I don’t want her anymore anyway,” he said.

  Cole filed that away for later. There were a lot of things he was filing away for later. If everything he’d confirmed in the last twenty-four hours was as bad as it looked, Bette had reasons to be a lot more screwed up than she was. It was a small miracle that she could bring herself to trust anyone, at all. And it was a big miracle that she could bring herself to love.

  Later.

  For now he circled around toward her while he kept Duvall in his sights. In a few strides he was standing next to where she still sat on the ground, Duvall only a few paces away, watching them with undisguised rage.