Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
When the cocktail party comes to an end, I send a delighted Georgia down to deal with the winnings from earlier—she is my wife now and was sitting there when I won—and I go to the suite, anxious to get started and dive into both Ezra’s and Alfie’s secrets.
The room is nicely appointed in variations of gray with gold and brick red accents and a view of the Bellagio fountains and the Paris hotel across the way.
The couch is laughable, designed for beauty instead of comfort—not long enough that I’ll fit on it without pulling it out though, and there is no fucking way I’m pulling out a couch in a Las Vegas suite.
I don’t care how nice or clean the room looks.
I grab my computer and sit at the dining table, immediately getting to work.
My father taught me how to write code before I started speaking.
I was late to that ballgame, having no interest in it, which naturally worried my mother and had doctors throwing out all sorts of diagnoses at me.
But my father—a hacker himself—sat me down and taught me code.
A language I instantly took to. A language I enjoyed communicating in.
Just thinking about him now hits me in the worst ways.
I came home from Switzerland, Suzie’s body in a fucking coffin beneath the plane, and the first things my mother and father did were slap me and blame me for her death in that order.
When Central Square hit it big, they sent me off with Suzie—a wild child if ever there was one—with one mission: keep her safe and bring her home alive.
I remember my mother saying that to me, almost in jest, but when I returned home with their daughter dead, they were suddenly oh-so-serious about my charge and how I had failed.
I failed Suzie. I failed my parents. And our family of four that had been impossibly tight—thick as thieves, as my father called us—was broken.
My father drank and drank and drank until he couldn’t see or think straight, and then he got angry and fought. Fought me, fought my mother, fought anyone who looked twice in his direction.
One night I got called down to his local bar to come and tend to him.
He wasn’t yet ready to leave, and the bartender said fine, so I sat and nursed a beer at the bar, watching bullshit on television when a man was dumb enough to make a joke about Suzie.
That was it for my father. He smashed a bottle over his head and then plunged the broken remains into the man’s throat.
He killed the man before I could act. Before I could reach them.
And after, with his eyes right on mine, he told me it was my fault she was dead and that I had done this to us.
Then he stabbed himself the same way he had stabbed that man.
I stood there and watched it happen. In all fairness, I didn’t know he was going to kill himself.
He was brandishing the bloody, broken end of the bottle like he was going to come after me next, and I didn’t move because I hadn’t decided if I was going to stop him or not.
Plus, the police had already been called and were on their way, and I wasn’t the only one frozen from what had just transpired .
But I didn’t act when he stabbed himself. And I didn’t force him to leave the bar when I knew I should have. I didn’t want the resulting fight it would have caused, and because of it, a man lost his life along with my father.
It became a media cyclone.
My mother was long done by that point, and after my father’s death and with the way the press relentlessly hounded us, she up and left Boston. Left the country. Last I bothered to check, she was living in Australia and teaching English.
Clearing away those thoughts, I’m just about finished when I hear the click and swish of the mechanical lock on our suite door, and in walks my wife followed by a man in a livery uniform carrying bags of what appear to be food and alcohol behind her.
She treats me to a dazzling, happy smile, and my heart thuds painfully against my ribs.
“Where would you like it, ma’am?”
Isn’t that my question for her?
“Right over there by my husband is perfect,” she tells him, indicating the table I’m sitting at with my computer, an amused laugh tickling her lips at the way she calls me her husband.
The man gives me an apologetic look but then sets down three large bags right beside me, the scent of garlic, onions, tomatoes, and something spicy immediately hitting me.
“Thank you so much.” Georgia hands him a large bill, and he gives her a bow like she truly is a queen, then he leaves the suite.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner,” she explains as if it’s obvious. “I was in the mood for Italian. Ten million dollars minus a large chunk that went to the casino and another large chunk that went to taxes is now being sent to my favorite women’s health charity.”
Her cheeky, playful tone has my lips twitching. She’s in a good mood, the brightest I’ve seen her since she showed up at my house in Cambridge last night. I’d marry her every day just to see that smile on her red lips, and it’s thoughts like this that I need to eradicate immediately.
She prances over to me, still in her wedding dress with her hair up and her heels on, and begins unloading dinner from the bags along with a bottle of red wine, a bottle of tequila, and a bottle of expensive bourbon.
I raise an eyebrow and she winks at me. “We’re quasi-celebrating, right? I mean, that’s how I’m trying to spin it in my mind. I didn’t have to marry Ezra, and come Monday, Monroe will be mine. Besides, I didn’t know what you were going to be in the mood for tonight.”
You instantly slingshots through my mind, but I rapidly pull it back and ram it into the locked place in my head, where I seem to be collecting a lot of thoughts about her tonight.
I clear my throat. “I need your phone.”
Without questioning me, Georgia hands me her phone, already unlocked. I text Alfie my link, and when I hand it back to her, she examines it.
“Another one of your phishing schemes.”
“Social engineering is one of the easiest ways to penetrate. And you claim to know nothing about information security or hacking.”
She snorts. “I don’t . But everyone knows what phishing is, though I didn’t know it was a form of social engineering, so there you go, I just learned something new.
” She reads what I wrote aloud. “Is this where you want me to meet you tomorrow?” Her eyebrows rise, and her green eyes find mine.
“Where exactly am I supposed to meet him?”
“The lobby. But I don’t want you to meet him, so it wouldn’t have mattered if I had picked a random lab in China. Don’t click the link, or it’ll fuck up things I don’t want fucked up.”
“Alfie isn’t a bad man,” she tells me as she takes a seat at the table diagonally from me, a mountain of food between us. “He’s nothing like Ezra, and I understand why he’s upset. He’s worried about me, and he’s worried about Monroe.”
“We’ll see once I start digging into his secrets.”
“Unethical. Beautiful. Dangerous.”
“What’s that?” I ask absently, returning to my laptop and entering the commands I need .
“You.” The tone of her voice has me glancing up to find her studying me. “That’s exactly what you are. A vigilante. A dark knight.”
I feel my throat moving as I swallow.
She clears her throat and looks away, a small flush on her cheeks. “Anyway, Ezra has been blowing up my phone. He doesn’t think we’re the real deal or that you’re serious about me. Can you imagine?” Her eyes widen in mock horror, and she puts a hand to her chest.
I smirk, shutting the screen of my laptop, removing my glasses, and opening up one of the containers of food.
“I’ll get the wine then?” she mocks.
“If that’s what you want.”
“I got married today. I want wine, but I also need tequila.”
I wipe at the smile on my lips. “Don’t you need to not be hungover tomorrow?”
“I don’t think a glass of wine and a shot of tequila will leave me hungover.”
I can’t argue with that, so I get up and go over to the bar inside the TV cabinet and pull a few glasses out—two wine, and two regular glasses—since, shockingly enough, there are no shot glasses here.
Setting them down on the table, I twist off the top of the wine, pour us each a full glass, and then a shot and a half of tequila, because it seems I could use some as well.
Georgia raises her tequila glass to me. “Here’s to lying, cheating, stealing, and drinking…If you’re going to lie, lie for a friend. If you’re going to cheat, cheat death. If you’re going to steal, steal a heart. If you’re going to drink, drink with me.”
“Who said that?” I ask as I drink down my shot, watching as she does the same. She winces and blows out a heavy breath, but then licks her lips and does a little shudder that tells me she liked it.
She shrugs. “No clue, but we didn’t make it up. It’s what we used to say in nursing school when we’d all go out. That and please, God, don’t let us kill anyone.”
“Have you? ”
“Not yet, but the night is young.”
“And you are so lovely.” I sit back down. “Do you love what you do?”
She pops the lid on her container and digs into her shrimp fra diavolo. It’s been six years, but if you had blindfolded me and asked me what Georgia had ordered for herself, I would have told you that.
“I love what I do,” she exclaims, her face lighting up in a way that has nothing to do with the food.
“It’s the absolute best. I miss it, and hopefully I’ll be back to it now that this is taken care of.
Do you love what you do? You weren’t tattooing when I knew you. I mean, at least not professionally.”
“I wasn’t doing anything when you knew me other than killing time.” While trying not to kill myself. I sip my wine before setting my glass down. “I love what I do. All of it.”
“If I were brave enough, I’d want you to ink my skin.”