49. Cassidy
The Devil’s Den is nothing like I expect. I’ve been out clubbing with some girls from the diner before, but we went to places with two-for-one drinks specials with sticky floors and way too many drunk guys.
Situated on the border of the city’s industrial zones, the building looks like just another warehouse. Concrete walls, extractor fans jutting out from the roof, tiny blacked-out windows high on the walls.
But as soon as I enter, it’s obvious this isn’t a normal club.
Words like opulent, luxurious, and decadent come to mind. A bottle of water probably costs as much as a meal at the Olive Garden. Intimate alcoves dot the walls surrounding the dance floor. VIP areas cordoned off with red ropes and gauzy curtains. The decor is dark and sensual. I can’t help but trail my fingers over the silky wallpaper as I pass.
This definitely isn’t a place where people get drunk and dance their asses off. This is where people come to meet others who share their unique interests.
Their dark urges, as Ethan puts it.
I shudder at the thought and do my best to keep calm. I’m terribly conflicted about the outfit I chose. The short, deep purple cocktail dress is helping me to blend in amongst the other women, but I’m not skinny enough or layered in enough makeup to be just another party goer.
Enough stalling.
Time to find the Balmont Boys.
There’s no big sign up anywhere pointing out the entrance to the so-called gentlemen’s club Ethan told me about, so I guess I’ll have to ask around.
There’s a queue at the bar, but I shoulder my way to the front and lean over as much as the slit in my cocktail dress allows.
“Hey!” I snap my fingers at the closest bartender, and the girl with raccoon-thick eyeliner gives me a wary look before coming over.
“What can I get you?”
“I need to see Myles!” I yell over the music.
Except the thumping beat dips at that exact moment, so I’m shouting at the woman like I have a bone to pick with her.
She cocks a pierced eyebrow at me. “Can’t help you.”
“Then who can?”
“Sweetie, if you legit had business with Myles, you wouldn’t have to ask.” She gives me a tired smile that honestly could have been a hell of a lot more condescending and turns her attention on the dude next to me who’s been giving me the stink eye.
Probably because I elbowed him in the ribs.
Frustrated, I sidle away from the bar and go stand on the edge of the dance floor. I should have used Ethan’s name. It’s how I got in here in the first place. The two bouncers at the door kept ignoring me until I told them Ethan Remington would be furious if they didn’t let me in. One of them wandered off to make a call and came back a few seconds later, opening the red rope and waving me inside without another word.
“Cassidy, isn’t it?” a quiet voice murmurs into my ear.
I try to turn around, but fingers grasp the back of my neck, firmly keeping me in place. I recognize the voice, but I can’t remember which of the Balmont Boys it belongs to.
“Uh…hi.”
“To what do we owe the honor?”
I swivel my eyes and glimpse light reflecting from a pair of designer glasses perched on a perfectly straight nose.
It’s Smith, the man who’d been standing by the window when Myles and his friends paid us a visit.
My heart pounds.
Shit just got real.
My hands are suddenly clammy with sweat, and I’m wondering when my life will start flashing in front of my eyes.
Suddenly, heading to the Devil’s Den by myself to speak to Myles because Ethan was too busy doesn’t seem like a good idea. In fact, it’s probably right up there with the stupidest mistakes I’ve ever made.
“I, uh, Ethan should be here any minute, and?—”
“And he’ll just have to catch up,” Smith says in the same flat voice as before.
“Um, I guess, but maybe I should wait for—” I cut off with a squeak as Smith drags me down a dimly lit hall and into an elevator that has no buttons. He swipes a black keycard against the discrete panel beside the door and says nothing as the doors close us in.
He’s still holding onto my neck.
“Could use some elevator music in here,” I murmur.
Smith makes a sound that could have been a laugh, but was probably just him clearing his throat. Moments later, we step onto a lush white carpet. The hand on my neck guides me to the sleek glass-and-chrome doorway, frosted so I can’t see into the room beyond. A pair of guards stand on either side of the double doors, but they might as well have been statues for their response to us stepping out of the elevator. Smith opens the door and ushers me inside, finally releasing the back of my neck.
I rub at my skin, throwing a quick glance around the room. Two doorways lead off the large room where invisible air conditioners keep the air chilled and fresh.
Despite how large this room is, the clusters of furniture almost makes it look cozy. There’s a sitting area with plush leather couches to one side, a study with a large desk, computer, and office chair with two visitor’s chairs opposite, and a poker table near a dry bar.
Sweet smoke tickles my nose.
It’s coming from Myles, who’s seated on one of the leather sofas, his finger curled around the base of the fat cigar stuck in his mouth.
Richmond sits sprawled beside him, ankle over his knee, watching me and Smith enter with that same unsettling smile pasted on his mouth.
“I told you he’d talk her into it,” Richmond says to Myles.
“First time you’ve been right in years,” Myles quips without taking his blue eyes off me. They’re darker now than when he was at Ethan’s penthouse—but I’m putting it down to the dim lighting inside this place. He’s wearing an emerald-green suit with a pale houndstooth pattern, loud enough to make my eyeballs bleed, but somehow he pulls it off. Even without a tie and wearing brown loafers with white socks.
I guess some people are so good looking, they could wear a trash bag and it would look like haute couture.
Better, in fact.
Myles shoves Richmond away and pats the now empty cushion beside him. “Come, sit.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine over—” I begin, but Smith grabs my arm and drags me over the carpet, forcing me to sit with a hard push on my shoulder.
I bounce, grabbing the hem of my burgundy dress and trying to tug it down my thighs.
God, what was I thinking, wearing this? I might as well be naked.
Does it make me a coward if I’d like nothing more than to bolt out of here and wish I’d never met the Balmont Boys?
“We weren’t properly introduced,” the man with the scar says, sitting forward and holding out his hand for me to shake. “Richmond Colt, but you can call me Rich.”
“Or King of Coke, but he doesn’t like that as much,” Smith says under his breath.
He doesn’t sit—he seems perfectly content to loom over me. In case I decide to bolt for the door? Although the muscle—Ethan called him Troy—would stop me long before I even got close.
Richmond’s expression hardens when I don’t shake his hand. I decide I’ll have to choose my battles, and shaking someone’s hand isn’t the hill I’m dying on today.
“Nice to meet you,” I lie as I shake his hand.
He holds on for much too long, but quickly releases me with Smith clears his throat.
“So, uh, reason I’m here,” I begin, only to be interrupted by Myles.
“We know why you’re here.”
I side-eye him. “You…do?” A nervous giggle escapes me. “Of course you do. Ethan probably told you we were coming.”
Myles’s expression doesn’t change one bit, but something tells me that no, in fact, Ethan didn’t mention anything.
When I look up at Smith, he’s watching me with the most neutral look I’ve ever seen. I don’t bother glancing at Rich. He’s probably still leering at me.
Maybe coming here wasn’t as good an idea as I thought. Ethan’s radio silence, the fact that the Balmont Boys didn’t know we were coming…maybe he was just lying about bringing me through to the Devil’s Den so I would shut up about my mom.
I tug at my dress again. “I have questions.”
“A hundred kay,” Myles says.
My head whips to stare at him. “Excuse me?”
“A hundred kay.” Myles takes a few puffs of his cigar, studying me through the cloud of smoke he creates. “That’s usually the first question. Thought I’d get it out of the way.”
My mind latches onto the first logical conclusion I come to.
“You want me to pay you a hundred thousand dollars just to ask some questions?” I shuffle to the edge of the sofa, about to stand up, although I still have to figure out how I’d do that without bumping into Smith. That’s how close he is to me.
“What?” Rich says through a laugh. “The hell kind of drugs are you on, girl? We want to pay you.”
“Me?” I blink at him, then at Myles.
Oh, shit. Is this about the performance art they were talking about at Ethan’s penthouse?
“No, no, no,” I say quickly, holding up my hands. “I didn’t come here for that.”
“A hundred kay is a good chunk of change.” Myles drags his knuckle down the side of my face. “Think what you could do with all that money.”
I lean away from his touch, anger roiling with panic, sending a hot flush over my cheeks. “I’d send you back to school so they could teach you some damn manners.”
The temperature in the room drops several degrees below freezing.
Whoopsie.
“I mean…”
Myles gives me a slow smile. “If you’re not here for the job, then why are you here, cherry pie?”
I stifle the urge to remind him what my name is, and that it has nothing to do with pie.
“Rebecca.”
Myles frowns. “I already told Ethan we didn’t find her.”
I swallow. “Yes, I know that, but I just…I mean...” I should have prepared something, written it down somewhere. Not my palms, because the sweat would have made everything smudge.
“You want to know how hard we tried,” Smith says. “If we did everything in our power to find her.”
I look up at him with relief. “Yes. Exactly.”
“We left no stone unturned, peaches,” Myles says. “If there was something to find, we would have found it. It’s like she vanished off the face of the planet.” Myles cocks an eyebrow and glances at Smith. “Even her car disappeared.”
I’m glad I’m sitting, because it’s as if the bottom of the world falls out beneath my feet.
Of course I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. It’s been over six months since Rebecca went missing. I should just accept the fact that she’s happier now.
But my toxic trait is that I think I can bludgeon my fucked up life into shape through sheer stubbornness.
“What about the note I found? The one with Ethan’s name on it? She had plans to meet him at Glenmont the night she disappeared.” I cross my arms over my chest, and Myles’s gaze drags down my throat, my breasts, and my belly before working their way back up to my eyes.
“He said he never met her.”
I swallow hard. “What if he’s lying?”
“Strange how you’re the only person who thinks he’s lying, cherry pie,” Myles says as he stands. “Sometimes people just don’t want to be found. You’ll drive yourself insane trying to figure out why.”
He walks over to the dry bar to pour himself a drink and Smith joins him a moment later. I turn to look at Richmond when he stays where he is, my shoulders drooping with disappointment.
“You think I’m crazy too?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer immediately, instead taking a long moment to study me as if considering whether I’m even worth the energy.
“You ever wonder why she’d want to meet with Ethan?”
I flinch when he takes Mom’s pendant and runs his thumb over the gemstone.
“My guess is she had something special to sell,” he says. “Everyone knows Ethan’s the best in the business. Finds the best buyers. Gets the best price. But even he can’t just snap his fingers and scare up a deal. It takes time. Weeks. Months. Maybe she got impatient, went to a pawnshop instead. She was obviously in a rush, and desperately needed the money.”
Rich gives me a bitter smile when he spots the shameful blush on my cheeks. “Think we wouldn’t check? She was drowning in debt.”
I stare down at the man’s hand, the way he’s caressing the jewel, as his words sink in. His story sounds so logical. It all fits neatly together—much better than the theories I’d concocted about Mom’s disappearance.
“Is this part of a set?” he asks.
“Yes, why?”
“It’s spectacular. Worth well over five hundred. Even more with the earrings.”
“Five hundred dollars?”
Rich scoffs. “Five hundred thousand.”
My face has gone cold. I’d been walking around with this necklace the whole time, and had no idea it was so valuable.
Mom never mentioned anything, either. But most of the jewelry she’d smuggled out of her house the night she eloped with my father was flawless gemstones set in platinum, or twenty-four carat gold.
She sold nearly everything to buy our first house, fund her lavish lifestyle, and pay off my father’s gambling debt.
I thought she’d taken everything valuable with her the night she disappeared, but I found the necklace hidden in the false bottom of one of her jewelry boxes, the one where she kept her costume jewelry. She loved the earrings, but hardly ever wore the necklace. Said it was too heavy. I guess the earrings were in one of her newer jewelry boxes, and she left in such a hurry that she forgot all about the necklace.
Or maybe, just maybe…she left it for me to find.
A parting gift.
I sit back, the necklace dragging through Richmond’s fingers until it thumps against my breastbone.
“Okay, fine.” I blurt out. “So she wanted to sell off the last of her jewelry. Do I have to go check all the pawn shops now? Or is there someone else in the city who would buy stuff like this?”
But Rich turns away without answering me, frowning as he mutters something about earrings under his breath.
It’s Myles who answers me as he heads back in my direction with a fresh drink. “That’s why we hired Ethan. We had a lot of stuff to fence, and no reliable people to take it off our hands. If anyone knows where to offload some gems, it’ll be Ethan or Angelo. That was their department.”
“But you don’t want to ask Ethan, do you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here,” Smith says.
I flinch and turn to face him. I was so focused on my conversation with Richmond, I didn’t realize he was sneaking up behind me.
“We…uh…had a bit of a…falling out,” I manage.
“About your mother, or about the play session we want to schedule with Cordelia and her husband?” Smith asks.
Play session?
I throttle my irritation, though, realizing how hypocritical it is of me. I can’t exactly get annoyed if they want to know more about me when I was the one who accepted their help. In fact…maybe I can use it to my advantage.
It’s a long shot, but if I can prove Ethan lied to me about Becks, I might convince these men that he lied about meeting with Rebecca too.
Angelo said only three people knew about Becks, but that’s not entirely true.
Ethan asked Myles to help find her, too.
“It was about Becks, actually.”
Smith nods. “Hmm. That was a troubling time for Ethan. Still a triggering subject, I’m sure.”
“Is it true she just disappeared? Because from what he told me, it sounds a hell of a lot like what happened to my mother. Plucked from the headlines, kind of thing.”
“A coincidence, I’m sure,” Smith says smoothly.
Too smoothly.
He knows what I’m insinuating. Ethan used details from my mother’s case to add some flesh to his story about Becks. But it seems he’s ready to die on this damn hill.
I glare at him. “Yeah, I don’t believe in coincidences.”
Fuck this guy.
Fuck him, and fuck his friends, too.
“Do you have Angelo’s number? I want to call him. Maybe he can find a few more stones to turn over.”
“Maybe he can.” Smith’s lips twitch into something approaching a sympathetic smile. “I’ll get you his number. This time of night, he might still be at his office.”
I drop my head, glancing circumspectly at Myles and Richmond through my lashes as Smith saunters up to the desk and starts flipping through an old-fashioned Rolodex. I guess with the people they deal with, they don’t want their contacts floating around in the cloud.
Smith comes back to me and holds out a business card exactly like the one Angelo gave me at Ethan’s open house. I reach for it, but he pulls it away before I can touch it.
“Don’t go see him alone. Take a friend with.”
As if I have any of those.
“Thanks for the concern, but I’m a big girl. I can look after myself.”
I can handle a perv like Angelo. I know what he expects, but he sure as hell won’t get it from me.
Smith’s eyebrows rise at the frosty tone in my voice. “As you wish. But I insist you tell Ethan where you’re going. The world is a dangerous place, Cassidy.”
I try to take the card, but he holds on.
“Promise me.”
I grit my teeth. “Yes, Sir.”
There’s the tiniest flicker of amusement in his dark eyes as he releases the card. “Good girl.”