Chapter 27
chapter twenty-seven
Mateo
We walked twenty blocks with blind hope that the girls were a handful in the thousands of people swarming the pools and dance floor at a massive exorbitant beach club. Sand vibrated beneath our feet and anxiety beat like a low drum in my chest trying to wrangle the level of overstimulation. I tamped it down forcefully to keep my head on straight as it swiveled searching for my fiancée in the sea of inebriated ravers.
Pike threw his arm around my shoulder and tugged me into him. “They’re here somewhere.”
The only lead I had was the little bit of information my sister-in-law decided to give me in that god-awful, albeit warranted, phone call. Which brought us to the biggest, loudest, crowd control fiasco of my wildest nightmare. A Where’s Waldo? would be easier than this.
“Mia mentioned the MGM Grand,” I said. “They have to be. Let’s just scope it out and move on. We might need to divide and conquer, though. Frankie, we’ll take Angelo out toward the DJ. Wink, Echo, you two float around the pools and the bar.”
“Roger.” Tyler tugged his T-shirt over his head and tucked it into the waistband of his pants, letting it hang. It came as no surprise to anyone that it took Tyler less than five minutes to start stripping off his clothes. You couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks. Especially not one at a busy dog park.
“They’re out for blood with this scavenger list, so keep that in mind and don’t be like my fucking brother.” I glared at Angelo. “I swear to God if someone takes another photo of me with a woman even standing in the background you’re going to find me floating face down in the fountain at Caesars Palace.”
“Didn’t she say they were with a bunch of Marines?” Sam asked. “I think you have bigger problems, Cap.”
The thought of Natalia surrounded by a group of ogling men sent fire through my veins. I didn’t mind the attention she got when it came to the work we did on camera. It wasn’t the fucking same. She was safe with me, behind a screen, in our own home with a set of rules and boundaries, a pre-existing understanding of what’s going on, and a partner who respected her more than anything in this world. I was well aware of how stunning my fiancée was and that given the option, she could have any goddamn man on the planet. Not for a second was I okay with being more than an arm’s length away from her in a barrage of fuckboy bachelors trying to get laid in Las Vegas.
“Navy.” I pushed the word through gritted teeth.
“At least it’s not Marines,” Angelo offered with a faint shrug. “Could have been Marines.”
“I’m calling their bluff on that one. O knows better.” Frankie shielded his eyes with his hand and lifted onto the balls of his feet to look over the crowd. My best friend had his heart broken once upon a time, but Ophelia had picked up all those little shards and hot glue gunned them back together in a way that changed him permanently. “Check your phones,” he said. “Half an hour.”
The Swans broke away, their tall, broad bodies still inches above the people around them after getting swallowed into the shuffle toward the pools. They were easy to pick out, yet effortlessly blended into whatever background they needed to when necessary, and I had trust in them the same way I trusted Pike. Plus, if anyone were to take this scavenger hunt to heart, it would be Sam and Tyler. My conscience breathed out a sigh of metaphoric relief knowing the two most shameless competitors were on my team.
The venue split itself down the middle, and my brother and Frankie led the way through a plume of fog into the pit of people in front of the DJ. I stopped attempting to speak to them beyond hand gestures and facial expressions as a mind-numbing bass gonged in my ears. Through what game of charades we were playing, I understood we were circling the dance floor, making our way to the other edge and avoiding the shower of champagne from the bottle service models standing over the crowd at the edge of the stage. By the time we got there I’d had two drinks inadvertently spilled on me, a high heel speared through the top of my foot, a puff of vape smoke that smelled like cotton candy hotdog burps blown in my face, and the will to live drained like a toddler with a Shirley Temple from my veins. No Natalia to be found.
That wave of anxiety was growing again. The loud music and tight spaces filled me with an untamable dread I could only breathe through until we arrived at the end of our search, still coming up empty.
“Fuck this!” I yelled out. Frankie followed me through the maze of bodies like an anchor until we hit a paved edge leading into a row of cabanas and ridiculous ride-on animals. I tugged in a jagged breath of air only the slightest bit less polluted, and Pike pointed ahead to a dark head of hair wearing a sparkly crown with a veil attached.
My ears popped from the pressure change. “It’s not her.”
“You can’t even see her,” Angelo said. “How do you know it’s not her?”
“I just fucking do. That’s not what the crown of her head looks like. Her hair was curly when she left the house, and that girl is too tall to be Tally. Keep moving. I’ll know my wife when I see her.”
“It’s another bride.” Pike shrugged, pointing at the list. “We have to find another bride.”
I stuck my tongue in my cheek and put both hands on my hips. “Fine.” I let up, reluctantly. The eagerness to win the game was still there despite the hiccups. “Quickly.”
We shouldered through to the circle of women, and somehow unsurprisingly, the first voice and face I landed on wasn’t a stranger at all. It was Mia. Standing there in her sequined mini skirt and familiar indignant scowl that should have been a warning in and of itself, but instead perked me right up.
Natalia was close.
The noise around me dissipated and I beelined toward my future sister-in-law who had already caught the attention of the other bride in that feminine, girl power way Natalia described a drunken bathroom stall visit was like for women. All giggles and handholding, complimenting each other like they’d known one another their entire lives. “Where is she?” I demanded.
Mia popped a hip out and stuck her hand to it as she slowly turned toward me. “Look who decided to finally show up.”
“Well you didn’t make it very easy, now did you?”
“You were busy.” She squinted. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I was taking a photo with this gorgeous, gorgeous girl and winning a scavenger hunt.” She turned back to the brunette in her veil and lifted her phone to take a selfie. A moment later my phone buzzed in my pocket. Said photo, sent to the godforsaken group chat Angelo had started. Mia gave me a deprecating pat on the shoulder. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found, Mateo.”
“Maybe not, but she’ll have to send me away herself if that’s the case. Quit making this harder for me to fix, Mia.” I felt my brother and Pike at my back and strangely enough Mia’s scowl deepened and her glare turned dark looking over my shoulder.
“Don’t kill the messenger,” Angelo chided.
“You greasy little meatball—” She pointed a sharp finger and I caught it right at my ear. You couldn’t have pinned two more fiery, cocksure people against each other if you tried. Mia was a brat and Angelo was a dick. If taking on Tally didn’t put me in an early grave, mediating these two would. They started fighting like siblings the second they got the chance, which should have been endearing, but this was a different kind of loathing I wasn’t touching with a ten-foot pole.
“Little?” Angelo scoffed, taunting her. “Ain’t nothing little here, sweetheart.”
Mia stuck her pinky in the air toward him, and Pike and I turned our laughs in the opposite direction.
“Mia, please,” Frankie cut in. “Point us in the right direction. We promise to be on our best behavior.” He jutted his bottom lip out, and I recalled how charming and freshly kicked puppy my best friend could become if he really wanted to. It was a secret weapon.
She regaled him, crossing her arms and looking around. I followed her line of sight as though it would lead me right to Natalia but the crowd behind us was boundless and ever-changing. I could hardly see three heads away. “Tell you what,” she said, tapping her lips with her finger and then gesturing toward the row of rideable animals only someone who lost a bet or was stupid drunk would be caught dead on. “If Mr. Gabagool can stay on that mechanical bull over there longer than me, I’ll walk you right to her.”
Alas.
I stuck my tongue in my cheek.
“Who’s Mr. Gabagool?” Angelo asked.
“It’s you,” I said.
“Me?”
Mia cackled. “You.”
Angelo scrubbed a hand down his short beard. “You know, that’s kind of racist.”
She was extremely proud of herself. There was no lack of venomous wit when it came to the Russo girls, I’d learned firsthand. Probably something to do with their upbringing; comedy came as a natural salve to the slow burn of childhood trauma.
Angelo pushed past me, knocking my shoulder and squaring right up to Mia and I could have sworn I saw a smile twitch at the corner of her lips. I braced for some sort of impact, because it felt inevitable, but my brother just tilted his head down toward her short frame and said, “You’re on, little nightmare.”
“This is going to be bad.” I chewed the corner of my thumb as Mia stomped up to the mechanical bull attendant with the confidence of a sorority girl walking into a bar without a wallet.
“Entertaining,” Pike supplied instead. “How’s the anxiety?”
“Lethal.” I was being honest. If anything else in my life went wrong I’d likely collapse under the unbearable weight of it all. “I don’t know where my normal thoughts end and my obsessive, intrusive ones begin. Because not everything can be the end of the world, right? I am acutely aware of how much I stress myself out, in comparison to how much stress these things actually put on me, but I’ve yet to find that happy medium.”
“Self-aware king.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Pike’s little smile flatlined and he cleared his throat. “It’s nothing, just a dumb inside joke I have with O.”
“Is this what Colorado is doing to you?” I shook my head. “What happened to the stoic, killer instinct, badass Delta fighter pilot I used to get in firefights with in the desert?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him shrug nonchalantly.
“You became a self-aware king?” I tossed back. “Man, what are these women doing to us?”
“Yours convinced you to fuck her in cosplay on camera.”
We continued watching Mia chat the ear off the attendant. Angelo was a few feet behind, waiting his turn with a rapt determination—and a flare of annoyance. Finally, she kicked her heels to the side and looked like she might mount the thing, but at the last second realized how impossible it would be in a mini skirt without putting on a whole different kind of show.
She said a few indecipherable words, pointed to her ass, to the bull, back at the man—who looked just as happy to field her antics—and what I thought was an easy win for me and a step closer to getting back to Tally was stalled when the guy shimmied his own blocky beige cargo shorts off his hips and handed them to her.
“What’s going on over here?” Bella and Camilla appeared with drinks in each hand. They noticed Mia at the receiving end of our attention, right as she pulled a complete stranger's clothes up and under her skirt, then unzippered it and stepped out, handing it to the attendant standing there in his underwear.
“Where’s your sister?” I parried.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Bella quipped. Her short hair was in two tiny buns on the top of her head that I stifled the urge to tug on like a doorknob if someone didn’t tell me where the fuck my fiancée was.
Mia hopped atop the bull in her new outfit and threw a mocking wink down at Angelo as the machine started to sway, bucking her slowly. I wasn’t a betting man, but I’d say my luck dried up the same time Mia went from two hands on the saddle to one in the air like a cowgirl.
“She’s done that one before.” Bella whistled proudly. “That’s my twin!”
Having never wished ill on a woman in my entire life, it was amazing how eagerly and unapologetically I wanted my future sister-in-law to get violently tossed like a rag doll off a mechanical bull. The longer she stayed put, the slimmer Angelo’s chances of winning their little wager. Even Camilla, who was the most uptight of them all, was beaming proudly at her younger sibling as she got thrown side to side in concerning jerky movements.
She was more impressed with Mia dry humping the leather saddle than she was with Natalia’s engagement. That said all it needed to about how far out of a hole I’d need to crawl to get my sister-in-laws to help me with Tally. I stole a drink out of Bella’s hand and swallowed the throat-numbing liquid, immediately regretting it. “What the fuck is that?”
“Vodka water,” Camilla said. “Gets you drunk, keeps you hydrated, and saves all the calories.”
“Sometimes I wonder how you four ended up the way you did, and then I’m reminded you were hardwired to hate yourselves to the point of mixing hard liquor with water to appease your parents. Put some fucking cranberry juice in that cup and live a little bit, doc. It’ll save you and Mia the UTI she’s probably gonna have from grinding all over that dude’s sweaty dick shorts.”
Camilla frowned. “God, say what you really feel.”
“You don’t want me to.”
Mia survived another ten seconds, which felt like ten minutes, before losing her grip and slipping gracefully off onto the foam pads below her. She skipped toward Angelo, dusting her hands off arrogantly, knowing her time would be hard to beat. Interestingly enough, my brother leaned down to her ear to say something that caught her off guard instead. Mia froze, eyes narrowing as he stepped around her with a grin on his face.
“Sweaty dick shorts or not, she knows what she’s doing.” Bella smiled. “Switch clothes with a stranger, check. Looks like you boys have some catching up to do.”
The list felt like a rock in my pocket. I pulled it out, looking for an easy win while Ang climbed the bull in the distance. Mia returned to us like the female lead singer of a ska band in her mismatched outfit and wind-tousled hair, heels dangling from her hand.
“That is the most unironic walk of shame I’ve ever seen,” Pike said. “Bravo.”
“It’s called taking one for the team.” She looked back toward Angelo, crossing her arms over her chest. His clock had just started and the bull was already jolting him back and forth aggressively.
My phone rang in my pocket and tore my attention away. Before I could get a word out Wink was already speaking. “We got eyes on Tally.”
“Where?” My eyes darted toward Pike’s and he nodded, understanding we were about to be on the move.
“Poolside bar with O. We’ll step in, but you’re gonna want to get over here, brother.”
Fuck.
That meant one thing, and I wasn’t in the headspace to deal with it sanely. In fact, I was in possibly the worst headspace I’d ever been when it came to Natalia, and I wasn’t about to fend off drunken, handsy men around my woman calmly or collectively like I might in any other circumstance. I could handle the attention she got because it fed my ego to know other men wanted what I had and could never have themselves. But this time I was a little bit too over the edge. Too desperate.
Hurrying in the direction of the pools, Pike followed on my heels.
“Where are you going?” Bella yelled. “You’re just going to leave your brother?!”
He would understand. Taking one for the team and all. We moved without turning back, without an answer, and the huge crowd swallowed us once more as I braved the living obstacle that was pushing back through to the other side.