Lucky for them that I didn’t care when they sabotaged me, because by that point I was usually done with the guy anyway, but Dallas was different. I didn’t want them scaring him off. He deserved better than to be pitted in the middle of their childish games. Plus I wasn’t ready for him to exit my life. I was trying with him, especially because I was trying to forget someone else.
“Sharing a romantic dinner I see.” Cutter observed while picking up an egg roll off of my plate and popping it in his mouth.
I smacked his hand away.
“You boys are being very rude,” I scolded. “As you can see, I’m having dinner with a friend and you weren’t invited.”
“Dallas, right?” Cutter asked rhetorically.
My stomach dropped. I had no idea that anyone knew that I was seeing Dallas, and if they knew his name then they knew other shit too. This wasn’t good.
Camden was standing quietly to the side observing the entire exchange, leaning back against the bar, his thickly corded arms crossed in front of his chest. His eyes were keenly focused on Dallas, but he didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. His icy cold eyes said it all.
Dallas startled me a moment with the grating sound the legs of the table made across the floor when he abruptly pushed himself away from it. “Can I help you?” I could hear a bit more of his southwestern twang angrily reveal itself.
“Well the first thing that you can do, country boy, is sit the fuck back down,” Cutter responded in an amused voice.
“Is this somebody I should actually give a shit about?” Dallas asked me. I was shocked. He wasn’t someone who usually liked to face-off with people. At least I didn’t think he was. I honestly never thought that he was a punk or anything, but I never imagined he would have stood up to Cutter like that. He definitely wasn’t scared of my idiot bosses, or if he was, he did a good job covering it up. Another good reason to keep him around.
I threw my hand up to stop both of them from saying something else before the exchange ventured down a dangerous road. Cutter could be … unpredictable.
“Wait. Stop,” I said to Cutter.
“I didn’t do anything but ask a simple question. Your country fried friend here is a little touchy if you ask me.”
I sigh in exasperation.
“Cutter, this is my friend Dallas. We’ve been seeing each other for a while now, and I’d like to continue doing so. You’re making a bad first impression. He’s going to think that you guys are unfriendly,” I said while giving him the side eye.
Cutter turned and looked towards Camden. “Little bit here says that this guy is her friend. I thought we knew all of her friends.”
“Guess not,” Camden replies with a stoned face.
Cutter points to Dallas’s chair. “Sit.”
“Cutter, please—”
“I said have a seat, country boy. No need to get all huffy.”
Dallas looks at Cutter, then Camden, and then looks at me. Still not sitting.
“Who are they, Jade?”
“Well you wanted to know more about me. I guess you should have been more careful what you wished for. These two baskets of sunshine are my employers.”
I hadn’t talked much about my job with Dallas. It’s hard to explain what I do with regular folks. Sometimes I stretch the truth, and say we’re private investigators if I’m forced to talk about it at all, but Dallas never pushed the topic.
“You need to think about getting a new job,” he said still standing while Cutter worked on my second egg roll.
“We’ve got a comedian, Cam,” Cutter said while licking his fingers.
The temperature of the room dropped ten degrees as soon as I looked at Camden’s face. This was going to be so bad.
“Let’s just go, Dallas.” I decided while pushing my chair back and standing up.
“Sit the fuck back down, Jade,” Camden ordered in a seriously scary voice.
A bent out of shape Dallas slammed his hands on the table. Some of our appetizers went flying in Cutter’s lap, and some of them ended up on the floor. People started to stare.
“Stop talking to her like that,” he said to Camden through gritted teeth.
Cutter looked to Camden as if he was requesting permission to sucker punch Dallas first. I knew that look. I’d seen it many times.
“Wait—” I tried to intercede.
“I’ll talk to her however, wherever and whenever I fucking please,” Camden stepped up closer to the table and said in a deadly tone. “You’d do best to remember that shit.”
I just wanted to get Dallas out of there, because he was very much outnumbered. Not just by those two, but because Solstice was full of kitchen staff who were ex-convicts. Everybody in the kitchen would have no problem coming out to fight if they thought the Kings needed back up. As if the two of them ever needed back up.
“Let’s just go, Dallas,” I pleaded. “I’m serious. Let’s just go.”
“He can get the fuck out of my restaurant, but you are going to sit back down. You’re not leaving with him.”
“You’re being ridiculous, Cam. What’s wrong with you?”
Cutter’s body began shaking with silent, obnoxious laughter.
“What are you laughing at?” I practically screamed. Spit flying out of my mouth.
Camden walked over and stood directly behind me bending his head down by my ear and caging me in completely with his long, thick arms and large body. His palms flat on the table.
“Calm down, you’re causing a scene,” he quietly requested.
I tried escaping his hold, but I couldn’t make him budge. I was pretty sure Dallas was about to punch him in the face when Cutter gave him a warning glare.
“In about ten more seconds this isn’t going to end well for you, country boy. I highly recommend you leave now. It’s not worth it. She’s just entertainment for you, but she belongs to us.”
They had taken their game entirely too far. I mentally started plotting a thousand ways that I was going to get my revenge. I’d make sure every woman in the club wouldn’t come within ten feet of either of their dicks for a long ass time. I just needed to concoct the perfect rumor. Disease? Impotence? Bankruptcy!
“Just leave, Dallas. Let me deal with them, and I’ll call you later. I promise,” I said while still being smothered by one soon to be dead King brother. “They must want their mommy’s attention really badly if they’ve resorted to acting like this.”
Dallas was red as a beet as he watched me squirm under Camden.
“I don’t care who they are to you. I’m not leaving you here with these assholes.”
I tried my best to turn around and knee Camden in his balls, but I still couldn’t move freely inside of his tight grip. The big fucker.
“He’s not who you think he is,” Camden said loud enough for everyone to hear but in a very low, deep and thick timbre that rumbled through my entire body. I imagined it was a voice he used right when he was about to cut a guy’s balls off although it was eerily similar to the one he used when he was just about to come inside of me.
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said angrily. It was pretty clear he’d done some digging into Dallas’s personal life and found something that I didn’t want to hear. I wish he would have just minded his own business for once in his life.
“Let her go,” Dallas warned Camden again.
“Pretty please, Cam?” Cutter interrupted with a facetious request to hit Dallas, but it was pretty obvious that it was Camden’s show to run.
“Afraid of what I may have to share, Dallas?” Camden said his name like it disgusted him.
“Hell, no. Say whatever you have to say.” Dallas prodded him on with confidence. “I want to hear it. Who do you think I am?”
“I told you I don’t want to hear it,” I said again. My ears covered by my hands.
“Sorry, tiny tot.” Camden gently pulled my hands away from my ears. “But you need to hear this. Your new friend here filed a joint tax return this year. He’s
married and has a three-year-old kid.”
I immediately looked up at Dallas for any sign that what I had just heard was wrong, but his face revealed the truth. He had been completely exposed. And in that moment I started to really despise Camden.
Didn’t he understand I would never survive the two of us being fuck buddies? That it wasn’t healthy or normal for either of us really? Now that they had uncovered Dallas’s secret, there was no turning back. I couldn’t fuck a married man, and even if I could, those assholes would never let it happen.
“We’re separating.” Dallas quickly offered up a typical married man’s excuse.
“You’re separating?” I parrot back slowly wanting to believe it but knowing more than likely it was a lie.
“Bullshit,” Camden whispered harshly in my ear.
“I should have told you, but I knew it’d be a deal breaker for you. You’d think it would be too messy, but I swear that I haven’t been with Mikayla for over two years.”
Hearing her actual name said out loud made me cringe. It made it all the more real.
“You filed a joint return,” I countered.
“Because we’re still married, but we’re separated. We live separate lives.”
“Did you fill them out married filing separately or married filing jointly?” I asked grasping at straws.
“Jointly,” Camden eagerly added.
I remember thinking how I couldn’t wait to kick Camden’s ass once this was over.
“I guess you haven’t been over his house?” Cutter chimed in.
I looked at Cutter’s still face. He stopped munching on my dinner, and he wasn’t amused anymore. I was so busy trying to stay in control of everything by making sure he came to my house, that I didn’t even consider the fact that he never even invited me over once.
“No, I haven’t.”
How could I have been so stupid to fall for the oldest game in the book?
“You know why I didn’t ask you over, Jade.”
“Why?” Cutter asks. “We’re dying to know.”
“Jade—” Dallas says.
I know what he’s claiming. That he didn’t ask me over because we agreed that sex was off the table for a while, and that when it happened it would be on my terms and probably at my place. But I damn sure didn’t want Camden knowing that. He needed to think I was fucking other people.
“Do you live with her?” I ask cutting him off, so that my own secret isn’t exposed.
“I don’t. I swear. I have my own apartment, but divorce is long and expensive, it’s just taking us a while to settle everything.”
“Liar,” Camden whispered in my ear.
I already knew Dallas was lying. I could hear the desperation in his voice. I just hated that it was ending this way. Badly. In front of an audience.
“And your kid?” I asked.
“A boy,” Camden added smugly.
“Wait are those tears welling up, country boy?” Cutter chuckled.
“Things with my son are … complicated.”
“I bet,” Camden said in my ear again.
I’d had enough. I needed to end this.
“You should go, Dallas. I do a lot of dumb shit, but I don’t fuck married men. Especially ones with babies.”
“That a girl!” Cutter cheered.
“Shut up, Cutter, and you,” I turned my head, “stop talking in my fucking ear!”
I tried wiggling out of my human Camden cage once again.
“Jade, please—” Dallas tried appealing to me one more time.
“No, Dallas. I can’t do it. Lose my number and have a nice life.”
After a dejected looking Dallas finally walked out of Solstice, Camden finally released me, and I promptly turned around and smacked the hell out of him.
I put my whole body into it and got a good smack in. My palm was burning, and his face was even turning red under that five o’clock shadow of his, yet that asshole didn’t even flinch.
“If you think I’m going to sit idly by while you try to fuck me out of your system, then you’ve sorely misjudged me.”
I was speechless by his words and by the venom in which he spewed them.
Then Cutter raised his arm to get the server’s attention.
“Garlic wings and a round of drinks over here please. We’re celebrating!”
“Celebrating what?” I almost whisper.
“Progress,” he answered.
Sixteen
Camden
My great-grandfather owned a small supermarket in the meat district of Philadelphia. It was always his dream to pass the store down to his son and so on and so on. I’ve heard the story a million times. My grandfather was seventeen years old and working part time in the market when they came knocking. It’s not an urban myth or fiction that organized crime exists. It does. And it certainly did back in those days.
If you wanted to do business back in those days you had to pay. You had to pay the government, you had to pay the city, you had to pay your landlord and you had to pay the mob. My great-grandfather had a difficult time accepting that cold hard truth and eventually paid the price. He tried organizing several of the businesses in the area to stand up against the mob. It only took three days for retaliation.
Benjamin King’s throat was slit right behind the cold cuts counter in front of his son, my grandfather, as a warning to all the other store owners in the area. Not being paid and organizing some sort of rebellion wouldn’t be tolerated. They allowed my grandfather to live to spread the word, and to serve as a living example of their ruthlessness and their mercy.
My grandfather was traumatized by this event needless to say. Back in those days there was no PTSD diagnosis. There wasn’t treatment for it. People just called you batshit crazy. And God bless him, but he was definitely batshit crazy.
I’m not really sure how he talked my grandmother into marriage, but I think it had something to do with her desperately wanting to get out of her parents home. Marriage was the only way back in those days for most women. My grandfather wasn’t much of a provider. He lost the market, and only seemed to be able to hold onto menial jobs, but my grandmother worked as an elementary school teacher for well over thirty years and was a good provider. She was good to my grandfather, tolerated his lunacy, and gave him two children. One of them being my father.
My father, Benjamin King The Third, was a dickhead. Having a good mother didn’t make up for the fact that he was named after and was raised by a father with tons of issues. He resented his own father and lived with a mission to never be like him, which he succeeded in some ways, but failed in others.
At first things were pretty average as far as family dynamics went. Financially he did much better than his own father. He built a small printing business, which afforded us a nice life in a middle class neighborhood with pretty decent schools. But things were changing rapidly in the city where we lived and our father was not prepared for change.
Lots of companies who faithfully used his business were closing. The Internet and growing use of email and digital documents was growing. Due to a decrease in jobs in the city, many families were flocking to the suburbs, and virtually overnight we watched our neighborhood change. Watching his business slowly unravel and become irrelevant grew to be too much for him. He started drinking heavily and running with a group of men who were small time hustlers to make ends meet.
Cutter and I were eleven and twelve years old when he started taking us out on runs. He always wanted us to have the car running and waiting in case he had to leave somewhere quickly. Sometimes he would stop at massage parlors for a payoff pick up and would bring us inside. He’d pay a new girl to give us both hand jobs while he got the full service package in another room.
There was an abandoned field near our neighborhood that was starting to be used as a makeshift firing range. It was fucking dangerous but he took us there anyway and taught us both how to shoot. It’s why we’re both good shots to this day. Our training was inappropriate
and much of it was self-serving, but our father did leave us with a couple of life lessons before he was a victim of a deal gone bad.
It was a run like so many others but karma had come to bite him in the ass. Someone had held a gun to his head and stuck him up months back, and he never went back to deal with him. Probably because he was too drunk to remember who the thief was. That same guy came back to rob him a second time and killed our father. A shot right to the head.
We were both waiting in the car.
Our father’s death served as the foundation upon which me and my brother’s ultra tight relationship was formed. At only a year apart, I was never really his older brother. We were always a team. Working together to take our father’s place as the head of the house. Helping our mother in any way we could. We had to step up and become the men of the house and make money the best way we knew how. With our smarts and our fists. We had each other’s back and we always will. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Cutter, and I know the sentiment is mutual.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I walk into the carriage house that my brother and I share and catch him using one of my laptops. I usually carry my main one everywhere with me in my leather backpack, but I have a couple others that I store at home. I use them almost like burner phones. Work on them a few times then toss them. I make sure to assign a VPN proxy server to all of my machines, so that I can use various anonymous IP addresses. This enables me to track and hack without leaving a trail for the average techie to trace.
“Just checking on something.” He closes all of the browser windows he had open and closes the laptop.
“On one of my burner machines? Why aren’t you on your own computer? This better not be about the glamazon.”
Cutter and I are as close as two brothers can be. We share everything. But sometimes we both can hold back on information when we’re not ready to share it with the other. I’ve known for a while that he’s been sabotaging Elizabeth’s friend Sloan aka the glamazon. She’s the daughter of a famous NBA player and she’s a party girl. From my observation, she’s got lots of beauty but not much substance. Cutter’s watched me long enough to know how to do a basic tap on a phone or a hack into an email server. So he knows how to snoop. At first I thought it was funny. Harmless play. But now I’m wondering.
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