Chapter 16
Aiden looks rattled. Far more so than he did this morning.
Watching him through the window earlier, he’d looked annoyed. Aggravated, even. But now…he seems upset. Spending almost the entirety of the evening staring at his clasped hands on the bar and not even pretending to reach for the whiskey in front of him.
When he does glance up, it’s always in my direction, a deep crease in his brow as he studies me before he notices me watching him back. Then he returns to trying to pull apart the wood grain beneath his fingers through sheer concentration alone.
I think I preferred when he looked like he wanted to lunge for my throat. No, I definitely did. That was far, far better than this.
Did I overstep with the pocket watch? What if I ruined things? I still have the other one if he wants it. He can have it back this instant. I only thought—
“Cypress, are you in this game or not?” someone asks, and I momentarily pull my attention back to the table and my cards, smiling a bit at my three of a kind before putting my hand down to a series of groans from around the table.
“Having a rough go tonight, aren’t you, son?” asks the older man to my left, the pile of cash and coins in front of him a good indication that his luck is treating him as well tonight as it does on plenty of other occasions.
According to Clayton himself, he was barely getting by before he struck gold out in California a few years ago, enough that he got to come back to Texas as a newly minted heir to the aristocracy. Although not enough to have men like Maddock want to count him among their ranks.
New money, I’ve heard Maddock sneer to his men more than once. An apparent insult that they all nod along with as if they themselves are displaced members of the elite rather than working men and women’s sons with barely any money of their own. Thanks in large part to the elite. New and old.
Only more proof that misplaced loyalty can be as dangerous as calculated hostility.
Not that I need more.
“You are playing even worse tonight than you did last night,” agrees Maddock, almost managing to look sympathetic as he rearranges his cards.
“Didn’t actually think you meant it when you said you were looking forward to losing earlier.
” He chuckles before tossing a few more bills in.
“Did your business today at least go as you wanted?”
“Still too early to tell,” I say, even though, as a matter of fact, no, it had not gone as I wanted.
I had wanted to talk to Aiden, had even headed down to the stable after leaving the hotel with the intention of doing so, though I hadn’t been entirely sure what I was going to say when I got there.
An unusual predicament for me, but I had kept walking because…
because what I’d really wanted was simply to see him in the daylight.
No quick glances. No shadows to hide in. I’d have liked to see him clearly, at least once. Just in case. Even if the idea of him seeing me the same way made my stomach turn.
I sneak another glance at Aiden, broad shoulders hunched up to his ears, and think about how I’d instead arrived this morning right in time to see him flying off on his mustang and had forced myself to fight off the impulse to follow him.
Knowing after my conversation with Maddock that I needed to make a few preparations elsewhere while I still had the option to do so.
I’m too invested in this game due to the players. Less able to keep a clear head and therefore less able to keep up the mirage I’ve constructed. Something that I have a feeling Maddock has noticed, even if he can’t exactly put his finger on it yet.
He’s not quite as ignorant as some of them are, I’ll grant him that. But the greater risk is that he is far more entitled. And, like so many men who fancy themselves as gods, far more likely to interpret any disagreement as dissent. And to resort to violence when he does.
“Remind me what line of business you are in again?” Maddock asks, smiling at me as the hand progresses around the table. “Can’t recall how you said you made your living.”
“Transportation,” I reply, easily returning his insincere smile with one of my own. “Trains mainly.”
“Lucrative, is it?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Who is aboard.”
“Right,” he says, nodding as the corners of his mouth turn down into a frown.
“Hate to see the wrong sort crowding in. Sure, they want things more accessible, but at what cost? I have a friend back in El Paso in the stagecoach business. Similar occupation to yours. And I’ve told him time and time again, he needs to just stop offering third-class tickets, but then he always asks who would get out and push the coach when it gets stuck!
” Maddock laughs, looking at his men who quickly laugh, too. Once again, at their own expense.
“Suppose he’s got me cornered there,” he continues.
As if struck by a sudden surge of brilliance, he snaps his fingers, then points one in my direction.
“You know, you really ought to get in on those luxury trains. Have you seen those? I’ve heard they’re really something fine.
Wouldn’t have to worry about them getting stuck, would you? No need then to be dealing with—”
“You not plannin’ to play either, Maddock?
” cuts in a gravelly voice, and given the way I’d been thinking of how satisfying it would be to slam Maddock’s head into the table, it’s a toss-up whether I or he is more narrowly spared when Charley, the oldest cowboy at our table and the only one not employed by Maddock, goes on to tell him that if he is planning to play he’d “better hurry up and fuckin’ do something other than make mindless chatter. ”
Maddock’s face scrunches, intensely offended by the interruption, but he does stop talking long enough to look at his cards and raise his wager. Wisely, I suppress my smile before I let my gaze and my awareness recenter on the one and only cowboy it has any sort of appetite for.
“He makes me nervous, too,” mutters a voice to my right as the game moves to the next man at the table, and I reluctantly turn my head from Aiden to Arty. The young man is also already out on this hand, playing even more terribly than I am tonight.
“Who? That one?” I ask, nodding my head in Charley’s direction as I keep my voice low so as not to embarrass him further. “I think his bark is worse than his bite, but better to be safe than—”
“No,” Arty says, his eyes flicking toward the bar. “That one.”
I barely manage to keep myself from tensing, not needing to look for myself to realize he must mean Aiden. I must have already done plenty of that this evening for Arty to have picked up on it.
Apparently, I’m bluffing even worse than I thought. And certainly not by design.
“The last time I said a word to him he pulled a knife on me,” the young man continues and I frown, more bothered than I should be that I’m not the only one to have had that particular experience, even with the temporary distress. Typically, I’m not the jealous type, but I did think—
“Guess it’s better than him pulling his gun though,” Arty says, and I don’t bother disagreeing given that he’s already glancing around before lowering his voice. “I’ve heard he’s killed twenty-one men.”
My eyebrows rise. “So few?”
Rather than respond, Arty’s mouth drops open slightly, and I berate myself for the comment, knowing he’s easily spooked as it is. “Simply surprised people don’t say he’s killed more. Tall tales and all that.”
“Oh.” Arty looks visibly relieved. “Yeah, I suppose, but don’t you think—”
“Pretty sure I told you that you should be trying to learn something for the rest of the hand,” Maddock cuts in, the disapproval clearly meant for Arty though he still doesn’t deign to look at him. “You need to be watching, not talking.”
“Sorry, boss,” Arty mutters, staring down at the table with his posture remarkably similar to how Aiden’s currently is. “Won’t happen again.”
Maddock’s lip curls with satisfaction, and before he even starts talking again, I know he’s not done with his process of public humiliation.
No matter that he’s scolding Arty for the same exact thing he had just been reprimanded for doing himself.
What better way to recover his pride, as well as his position at the table, than at someone else’s expense?
Especially the one least likely to put up a fight in return.
“All your prattling is probably the reason Cypress is so off his form tonight,” Maddock suggests, knowing as well as I do that he has nothing to do with it. “You’ve been distracting him.” He smiles. “Apologize.”
Arty looks at me out of the corner of his eye, his head still low. “I’m sorry if—”
I shake my head to stop him. “No need. My troubles are my own.”
A hesitant smile begins to appear on his face, but it vanishes as soon as Maddock adds, “Kind of you to say.” He pauses briefly to play his turn, his voice cool and casual as he raises the bet again. “Although, for all you know, he could be counting on your kindness to try to cheat you.”
“To—to cheat? No, boss, I wouldn’t do somethin’ like that,” Arty stammers, his distress growing as he looks around the table to the other men in his group for support. But no one is brave enough to offer any. “We really were just talkin’—”
“Oh?” Maddock smirks, apparently still finding the torture of the young man to be incredibly amusing. “What is there to even discuss? What could you possibly have in common?”
“Nothing really,” Arty says, his hands beginning to twist in his lap. “Was nothin’.”
“Always is when it comes to you,” Maddock sneers. “Not sure cards are the thing you need to be learning after all. Would be far better off learning your place before—”
“That’s enough, Maddock,” I bite out, unable to listen to it anymore, and I see the brief flash of anger on my opponent’s face at the lapse in my loyalties. Before I can cover for it, Arty diverts him with a misfired shot of his own.