Dark Secrets

by Jessica Gadziala

  The scary thing was, she seemed entirely capable of that.

  Not that she seemed like a gold digger. Far from. But the murder part, he didn't doubt that for a minute.

  She was just too cool and collected, too unflappable to threats, even threats with a gun.

  Whatever arrangement she had with Vin obviously didn't hold true with Vin's youngest son, Anthony. Though even if it did, chances were Anthony was too much of a dickhead to abide by it. All accounts of him were that he was arrogant, uncontrollable, rude, violent, and a heavy drinker. He had at least a dozen drunk and disorderly and harassment complaint filed against him and he had spent more time in police stations getting questioned than the rest of the organization put together.

  But she didn't seem bothered by him.

  She obviously had some kind of instruction to keep him out from behind the bar, a task she didn't take lightly, even in the face of a gun.

  If she and the woman at the bar, Eleanor, were being honest and she taught Krav Maga, then it at least explained why she didn't freak about the gun, knowing she could disarm him the exact same way he had. But it didn't explain why she didn't flinch.

  Even hardened criminals flinched at guns.

  But she was either just truly fearless or, more likely, used to having guns pulled on her.

  That was a hard reality to reconcile with her hardass personality.

  Why would someone as strong, as sure of herself as she was, allow people to pull guns on her all the time? Why would she even work in a place that made that a possibility?

  Faith was an anomaly.

  Danny hated those.

  They made him uncomfortable.

  They made him second-guess not only them, but himself.

  He sighed as he walked down the hallway toward his apartment. It wasn't a great place, but it wasn't a shithole either. The yellow paint on the walls was faded, but the floors were clean and the windows weren't broken and there wasn't dust or garbage anywhere. His apartment was the last in the hall and directly across from the staircase that no-one used since there was a working elevator.

  He unlocked the lock that came with the door and the three he added before going inside and flicking on the light and re-locking them all.

  The apartment was sparsely decorated, as all of his apartments for almost ten years had been. He actually didn't know what it meant to have a place that felt like 'home'. That wasn't how he was programmed, not anymore.

  So the walls were the same stark white they had been when he moved in. There were no carpets or throw pillows or pictures or art. There was a simple, somewhat uncomfortable deep blue wingback chair with a side table next to it where he sat in the morning to read the paper and drink coffee. That was it for the small living room that melted into the L-shaped kitchen with lightwood cabinets, a stove, apartment-sized fridge, sink, and a coffee machine. The cabinets were bare save for two cups, two plates, two bowls, a box of instant oatmeal, a tub of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. The fridge itself was bursting with veg, fruit, meat, and various packaged foods he got at the pre-made section at the food store.

  The hall went off the kitchen and had three doors. One led to the full bath with a stall shower, old white tile on the floors and half the walls, and an old medicine cabinet mirror. The smaller second bedroom was on the same side of the hall, the door closed, used by Danny as an office, the door locked.

  The master bedroom was the only place he put any real care into. The bed was a king and too big for the small space so he forewent one of the nightstands, only having one on the left side of the bed with a light on top. The mattress was thick and firm and the sheets and bespread were the most expensive things in the whole place.

  He put a pot of coffee on and made his way toward the bathroom, stripping out of his clothes and tossing them into the hamper with a wrinkled nose, not sure he would ever get used to the smell of literally every type of booze, fruit juice, and mixer covering him. Even the areas that clothes had covered felt sticky. He turned on the water and climbed in without waiting for the it to heat up, knowing from experience that it wouldn't do so for a good fifteen minutes even on off-hours.

  He scrubbed in the cold water, washing off not only the booze, but the persona.

  He was alright with Danny, The Bartender.

  He was somewhat likable. Actually, he was probably the closest to Daniel's actual personality. Danny was calm, laid-back, confident, and capable. Daniel was as well. But Danny, The Bartender only existed because Daniel himself had spent a full month doing twelve-hour shifts learning how to bartend. First, in a bartending school that was set up like a bar, learning how to free pour, learning the ingredients in most common drinks. Then he took a job at the busiest bar in a hipster neighborhood and put all that schooling to the test in a real-life scenario until he was sure he could fool even a seasoned bartender into thinking that he was one of them.

  Faith seemed to buy it. And she was absolutely seasoned, seeming to handle even the busiest moments of the night with absolute ease.

  She didn't stress. She didn't get frazzled.

  It was impressive.

  But he couldn't let her know that because if she knew that, she might see that he was an amateur playing the part of a vet. And that could not happen.

  He needed the job.

  Not because there was nowhere else for him to go. There was always somewhere for him to go. That was a true, stark, telling testament to awful human nature.

  But it wasn't that he was afraid to start again.

  It was that he desperately needed a win.

  The past couple of years had been loss after loss. Sometimes things worked out despite him. Other times, things just went to hell.

  And, as it often went with him, when it went to hell, that meant there was blood and death and screaming and fucking awfulness.

  Despite his dedication long ago to not let it get to him, it was getting to him. He was feeling weighted by it, both emotionally and physically. It was in his footsteps, heavier than they used to be. It was also in his shoulders that felt lower because of it.

  He toweled off and moved in front of the mirror, looking at himself until his reflection almost became unrecognizable. He never looked different. It didn't matter what job he was working. Disguises looked ingenuine about ninety percent of the time. The most he would do was bulk up or thin out or grow out his hair.

  So he looked like himself.

  Healed-over gunshot wound to the shoulder included. That one still pulled when he stretched out his arm.

  It wasn't the only scar on him. In fact, his body was a criss-crossed map of old wounds that were healed or still hurt him in the mornings, cold, or wet weather. Each one was evidence of the places he had been, people he had met, the things he had done.

  A part of him was wondering what the people at Lam would leave him with, if anything at all.

  Off in the office, his second cell started ringing.

  Daniel sighed as he walked out of the bathroom, found the key stuck to a magnet under the fridge, and went to unlock the door, missing the first call, but catching the second.

  "Yeah," he said, walking back into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee.

  "'Yeah'?" the male voice said, more gruff than Daniel's, sounding a lot like the owner of it gargled both glass and jagged rocks for the hell of it. "So you're just going to say fuck it to all the rules now, huh?"

  "Max, I just did a fucking ten hour shift and I got another hour or two before I can get to sleep. Not in the mood for goddamn code words."

  "Alright," Max said and Daniel could hear the click of a lighter. "So, how'd it go?"

  "Not much to tell," he said honestly. "Apparently the rules changed though. Vin doesn't have final say about me being there."

  "No shit? Who does?"

  "Faith. The female bartender."

  There was shuffling on the other end for a while before Max let out a whistle. "Well, I wouldn't mind being reprimanded by her fine ass."

&
nbsp; "Max..."

  "Oh, fuck off," Max laughed. "You thought about it, admit it. Cleaning up after you closed up, bending her over that bar..."

  "Good thing this job was mine. At least I can keep my head in the game and not..."

  "Up her skirt," Max suggested. When Daniel snorted, Max could be heard chuckling slightly, the sound low and rumbling. "Look, can't blame me. This job tends to be lacking in the pussy department. What can I say? I'm fucking famished, man."

  "Find yourself a woman. You need to keep your head in the game, being distracted by a hard-on isn't going to do you any good."

  "Speaking of, find anything interesting?"

  "There's a register behind the bar to make change and the tip jar is kept in a locked cabinet but the key is easily accessible. Nothing hiding in there. The office is out of bounds to anyone but Vin, Faith, and the kitchen manager. The door is left open and the safe is even on display, but there's no way for me to get in there without being seen."

  "How long are you in training?"

  "I was told a month, but I think they were expecting someone who didn't know what they were doing. So hopefully shorter. Faith is too observant for her own good. She could be a problem."

  "What's her deal? Is she family? Just paid well?"

  "Honestly, fuck if I know. Vin seems to show her respect, giving her the right to hire and fire as she saw fit. She's not family. I don't know what she makes, but bartenders make salary unlike waitresses and the tip jar was insane and it was only a Wednesday." She had wanted to give him half of the tips, as was customary, but he refused and only took a third. That still gave him one-fifty. If she went home with three-hundred on a Wednesday, he didn't want to know what she would get on a Friday or Saturday night. It gave her a salary of around seventy-K for the year. No chump change, but she wasn't rich either, it was certainly not enough money to warrant her staying in a place where she had guns pulled on her regularly.

  "Best guess is maybe Vin has something on her. If it was a normal bar, I'd say she was just a creature of habit, that she liked it there. But Anthony pulled a gun on her tonight and she didn't flinch. And we both know there have been fights and even two shootouts at that place in the past five years. Doubt she'd stay unless there was a reason."

  "Anything else important about her?"

  Daniel went into his room and sat down on the bed, scrubbing his face with his free hand. "She teaches Krav Maga and there seems to be some genuine bad blood between her and Anthony D'Onofrio. The kind where he'd pull a gun on her like it meant nothing."

  "Alright. Well, that's something. Keep on it and check in."

  "Will do. Hey Max..."

  "Yeah?"

  "Get yourself laid," he said, hanging up the call and moving back into the office to put it on the charger, look over some papers, then lock the door and finally head to bed.

  He had a feeling he would need to be rested to be able to get the better of Faith.

  If such a thing was even possible.

  FOUR

  Faith

  Alright, so he really didn't need training.

  She found herself almost annoyed by the fact as she watched him pull two bottles off the shelf and proceed to do some goddamn flairtending- juggling them around like some cheesy marketing scheme new bar owners use to try to bring in clients. If he tried to pull some bullshit like flaming shots, she was canning his ass.

  He knew what he was doing.

  But he still pissed her off.

  Really, there was no reason she should have been training him at all. He could have gone right into taking her two empty shifts and gotten out of her hair.

  Hell, the last guy Vin hired didn't even know that no one save for freaking fictional James Bond wanted their gin martinis shaken. It bruised the juniper and made your drink taste like a fucking Christmas tree.

  So she should have been happy that Danny knew what he was doing.

  She wasn't.

  Maybe a part of it was that she felt threatened.

  She had been the big man on campus for a long time. She was who kept the place from going to complete hell. And fact of the matter was, Danny was every bit as good as she was. If you were factoring in personality, he had her beat.

  Granted, that wasn't much of a feat. She knew her work personality left a bit to be desired. She couldn't help it, she was on-edge at work. It was not only because of Vin and Anthony and all the other colorful and dangerous characters she ran into at Lam on a daily basis. It was just how she was. She was watchful and distrusting and had little, if any, tolerance for bullshit and shallow relationships.

  So she didn't do the small talk thing, not even for tips.

  If you wanted to talk, she thought the only way to do it was to talk deep. Why bother wasting your time on bullshit like favorite TV shows and the weather and which sports team were really gonna do it this season.

  What was the point in that?

  It didn't tell you anything about a person except they had shitty taste and naive optimism for a team that sucked year in and year out.

  She didn't want to waste her breath on silly things like that. If she was going to talk to someone, she wanted to know their scars, their traumas, their highs and lows, what made them who and how they were.

  Anything short of that, she'd pass.

  So bar talk wasn't her forte, even after ten years on the job.

  There were some regulars she had been talking to for years, who she knew because they talked when the nights were slow or everyone else at the bar was an asshole. She knew Eddie's wife had stage three cancer and wasn't long for this world and that their son was drowning that grief in heroin needles. She knew that Mandy was taking care of an elderly mother who used to beat the ever loving shit out of her and struggled daily over tasks to nurture the woman who left her unable to trust anyone who was supposed to love her.

  But the guy at the end of the bar who wanted to talk to her about what a 'pretty girl like her was doing in a place like this'... yeah, she'd pass. And when she passed, she likely did it with a snippy, sarcastic jab in the process.

  That was her M.O.

  And she had no plans on changing it.

  Even if freaking Danny was Mr. Congeniality all night- flirting with the women, bullshitting with the men, offering his opinions on everything from the menu items he had not even tried yet to what the hopes were for the upcoming football season.

  "Alright, why do you hate me so much?" he asked when things started to quiet down, most people going home to find their beds so they could power through one last day in the workweek.

  "I don't hate you," she said honestly. It wasn't that deep. She wasn't one of those people who said lame ass shit like 'I don't hate anyone'. Everyone hated someone, no matter how much they wanted to deny it. Everyone was as capable of hate as they were of love. And it was Faith's personal opinion that the more capable you were to hate, the more capable you were to love. So she shamelessly wore her hatred of a vast array of people because she knew she loved every bit as passionately the people who deserved it.

  It would be easier if she hated Danny.

  But the fact of the matter was, she had a begrudging respect for the bastard.

  "You sure seem like you do," he said, dumping out the remaining alcohol from the glasses on the bar and loading the glasses into the flats that the guys from the dishwashing station just brought out.

  "Well, I don't."

  "Not much of a talker, huh?"

  "In a month, you're going to be working Mondays and Tuesdays and maybe a busy Friday or Saturday here and there. We won't even see each other. Why do we need to become buddy-buddy?"

  "Why can't we?" he shot back, making her stop from pulling the spill mat off the bar to empty it to look at him.

  "I don't think you want to be buddy-buddy. And I don't think you are any more of a social butterfly than I am. What I think you are, Danny, is a bullshit artist."

  "A bullshit artist?" he asked, straightening, one dark brow raising. "H
ow so?"

  "Tonight you called the lobster ravioli the best in the City."

  "And?"

  "And you've never had it. You also told that hipster jackass that the crappy IPA from Jersey went perfectly with the calamari."

  "Pretty much any beer can go with fried food like calamari. Last I checked, upselling was a part of the job. You know... why give someone a well drink when you can talk them into mid or top shelf?"

  "Why bother?"

  "Because it looks good?" he asked, brows drawing together. "Because it makes the bar money."

  "Trust me, the bar makes plenty of money," she said, shaking her head. The bar didn't even need to make plenty of money seeing as it was more of a way to launder Vin's dirty money than something he relied on for an income. "And if you think Vin is going to pat you on the back for it, he won't. I do the books and the ordering. He just signs off on your paycheck, Danny. You don't need to put on the good guy show."

  "Who says it's a show?" he asked, moving over toward her until the tips of his feet almost touched hers, making her have to tilt her head up to keep eye-contact. "Who says I'm not a good guy?"

  "You're not a good guy," she said, lifting her chin a little. If she wasn't sure of that fact before, she was damn certain right then. Good guys, bonafide help-you-move-to-your-new-apartment, rubs-your-feet-after-a-long-day good guys, yeah, they didn't do the alpha move he was doing right then- getting in her space with challenge in his eyes.

  "Aw, sweetheart, that hurts," he said, lips twitching as his eyes dipped slightly, looking over her lower lip.

  So, yeah, she was human. She was a red-blooded, hormone-filled woman just like any other. His appeal was not lost on her. Especially in close proximity. It was a real test to her willpower to keep things casual that she had managing to keep her libido in check all night. Because Danny, the bullshit artist, the people-person, the model employee, yeah, he was also a touchy-feely guy. Meaning, anytime she was standing in front of the well when he needed some of the booze there, he wouldn't tell her to scoot or hip check her. Oh, no. He would move in beside or behind her and reach around her for it. His hand had found its way to her hip at least a dozen times over the course of their shift. That wasn't even counting the times it found her shoulder, lower back, and, once, her hair.