Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
JULIAN
I didn’t want to leave her, and it isn’t because I’m babysitting her like she says. It’s because whenever I’m more than eight feet away from her, I physically ache. I start to have panic attacks, wondering if the infection is coming back, if she’s feeling better, does she still hate me.
Natasha may be at home with me, but there’s a wall a mile high between us. I’m grateful that she wants to sleep in our bed, but she only cuddles me if I ask her to. She never initiates physical touch, and now she’s flinching again when I reach for her.
We’ve gone all the way back to the beginning, and I want to rage. I want to get on my knees and beg her to forgive me, for things to go back to the way they were before I fucked everything up.
I know she needs time. She’s still healing and coming to terms with everything. She’s still angry, and damn it, I get that.
But when she asked me if she should have dinner waiting for me, she might as well have opened my chest and plucked my heart from my body.
I need my wife back.
Jack pulls into the parking lot of the piece-of-shit pawn shop where my wife sold her million-dollar ring, and when he cuts the engine, we sit in silence for a moment.
“We offing someone in there?” he asks.
“Maybe.” I glance over at him. “Depends on how this goes.”
I push out of the vehicle and walk to the door, and when I stride inside, I see a woman behind the counter staring at her phone.
She’s middle aged, has sallow skin, dull and lifeless, after a long life of poor nutrition and smoking.
And when she looks up at me, her eyes narrow with curiosity and maybe a little fear.
When she stands, her eyes travel down my body, and with what I’m sure she thinks is a flirty smile, she leans on the counter, showing off tits that I’m absolutely not interested in.
“Hey, fellas. How can I help you?”
“My wife came in here a few weeks ago and sold you a ring.”
The smile turns into a sneer.
“Don’t remember. I buy a lot of rings.”
“You’d remember this one. It’s an eight-carat oval solitaire, and you raped my wife with the price you paid for it.”
This bitch sets her jaw and digs her heels in.
This is going to be fun.
“She agreed to the terms.”
“I don’t agree to your fucking terms.”
“You’re not the one who sold it, are you?”
“I assume you still have it because it would be difficult for you to find a buyer for a million-dollar ring when you don’t know where to sell it. I’m going make this offer only once. I’ll reimburse you the twenty-five hundred you paid for it, and you’re going to give it back to me.”
She snorts and shakes her head. “Or what?”
I lean just a little closer to her, like I’m going to tell her a secret. “Or I’ll go find Stephen at his little community college in Van Nuys and disembowel him slowly. You pissed off the wrong man, Britney Ann Lewis, of 688 Huntington Drive, Social Security number . . .”
I rattle off the number, along with every other piece of personal information I could find on this cunt, and watch as what little color she has leeches from her wrinkled face.
“I won’t kill you. I’ll destroy you. I’ll make every fucking day of your miserable life a terror and agony that you can’t even comprehend, and I’ll make sure you live to be a hundred fucking years old.
You fucked with a Mafia queen, you idiot.
A woman walks in here with a ring like that, and you just dick with her? ”
“I didn’t know who she was!” Her voice is shrill now as panic starts to set in.
“Well, now you do. And you know who I am. But the most important piece here is, I know who you are. Now, where is my wife’s ring?”
She licks her lips, and her faded brown eyes flick over to Jack, but my man is stoic as fuck, and he looks scary with his beefy arms crossed over his chest. She won’t find comfort there.
“It’s in the safe,” she finally says.
“Lead the way.”
“Oh, I can just go get it.”
I smirk at her. “I don’t need you slipping out the back door.”
Britney turns and leads me to the cheapest fucking safe I’ve ever seen. It’s not even locked.
How she hasn’t been robbed blind, I’ll never know.
The woman pulls out a sandwich bag full of diamond rings, and plucks Natasha’s out and holds it up, just out of my reach.
I should break her fucking fingers.
“I want fifty grand for it.” She raises her chin defiantly. “If you paid a million, you can afford it.”
“You’re under the impression that we’re negotiating.” I take a step closer, and she swallows thickly, takes a step back. “That’s not what’s happening here.”
My hand snatches the ring from hers faster than she can react, and I slide it into my pocket, then walk away.
“Hey! You owe me money, asshole.”
Jack lifts an eyebrow as I come out of the back. He heard every word, of course.
“She thinks I’m an asshole,” I tell him.
“Well, there are days . . .”
I smirk and then turn back and scowl at Britney as I pull the cash out of my pocket and drop it on the smudged glass of her countertop.
Without another word, I walk out to the car, and Jack and I climb in.
“Home?” he asks.
“No, we need to see Malis. I need a new setting for my wife’s ring. That bitch touched it.”
Jack nods and heads toward my jeweler’s office.