Chapter 42 #2
Two barbacks were slicing their way through cases of lemons and limes.
One of the dealers I had never played against—a blonde woman—stood at her table, double-checking cards and chips.
Another employee was vacuuming the dreadful carpet.
None of them paid any mind to the twins being carted in like livestock. It was just another Tuesday to them.
We were unceremoniously dropped onto—oh, lovely—two chairs that were bolted to the floor.
The zip ties around our wrists and ankles were zip-tied to more zip ties on the back and legs of the chairs. Just great . . .
Did John Valentine have stock in zip ties? This seemed like overkill. We were in a casino that wasn’t open yet. That meant locked doors and employees with nothing to do but slice limes and watch us.
The judgmental sarcasm floating through my head was the only thing keeping me calm.
The blonde dealer glanced at us for a moment before going back to preparing her table for the night. She had obviously grown used to this kind of opening shift.
My heart ramped up as the door to the high roller room opened and John Valentine—very much not arrested and awaiting trial—walked onto the casino floor. The men who had dragged us out of the car flanked him.
The men from the train.
I didn’t know their names—Jude probably did—but one of them had an eerie resemblance to someone I had seen before. I just couldn’t place who.
“Joel and Amelia Hawthorne,” Valentine said with a clap of his hands. “You two are a pain in my ass, you know that?”
I didn’t look at him. Instead, I focused on a rather boring spot on the wall to the left of his ear.
“You know how this ends, right?” Valentine said with a giddy lilt to his voice as he stood in front of both of us.
He didn’t wait for us to respond. “With the two of you in little pieces, floating out into the Atlantic.” He braced his hands on the back of Joel’s chair, sneering in his face.
“After I was so generous to you. I even gave you an extension on the loan. All you had to do was pay me back.” Without warning, he reared back and sucker-punched Joel across his jaw.
The crack was sickening. Blood poured everywhere—from his nose, his mouth, his teeth. Joel lurched forward and heaved as he tried to breathe.
The man who had dragged Joel in from the car handed Valentine a crowbar. My stomach turned to a brick as he tapped Joel’s bad knee. “From what my man told me, this is the knee he fucked with when he paid you a visit.”
Jude. He’s talking about Jude in the present tense. He still thinks Jude is his. That’s a good thing.
He cracked a gleeful smile. “I’m about to even the score.” Without a moment of hesitation, Valentine pulled back and swung, breaking Joel’s good knee.
I vomited at the sound of his blood-curdling scream. My breakfast splashed across the hideous carpet.
Valentine immediately gave me his full attention. “And you. You took my best man from me. That’s stealing.” He handed the crowbar over to one of the men before casually strolling to the bar and grabbing a knife. A butcher’s knife.
“Let’s see,” he mused as he circled my chair. “One hand or two?” He wedged the tip of the blade between my wrist and the restraints and tilted it up, using the blade’s leverage to cut the zip ties.
I balled my hand into a fist and swung, but one of the men from the train grabbed my arm and wrenched it behind my back.
“I think two, since you not only took him from me, but you got him arrested by the Feds.” He grabbed my wrist and yanked it out in front of me.
“That would’ve been a pity if I hadn’t known he was FBI.
I’ve already rearranged things, but it’s a shame he was taken from me.
He had such a bright future ahead of him.
” The corner of his mouth curled. “I’m very good at flipping people.
” He cocked his head toward Goon Number One. “Ask his brother. He’s Jude’s boss.”
Jude’s boss? Someone in the FBI?
Blood drained from my face and everything went numb. Agent Sanders. The FBI agent who’d interrogated me in Las Vegas.
That’s who he looked like.
The men weren’t as close to identical as Joel and I, but the genetics were there.
Holy shit.
“Now,” Valentine said as he lazily trailed the tip of the rectangular blade across the veins on the inside of my wrist, making me flinch.
His weathered fingers dug into my skin as he kept my arm taut.
“I have a bone to pick with Al’s brother.
You see, he didn’t tell me he had an agent here.
He just kept information about my operations from getting into the hands of prosecutors.
” Valentine glanced at Joel. “How were those ‘depositions?’ I just wanted to see how much you knew. Turns out, you’re as dumb as you look.
But you—” He turned back to me and squeezed my wrist with the full force of his grip, making me cry out.
“You’re too smart for your own good. I think your hands will be a good present for Sanders.
A nice little reminder of what happens to people who take from me.
I’ll box ’em up real pretty.” He cocked his head over his shoulder.
“Get me some towels, Jolie. This is going to be messy, and I don’t want to delay opening tonight because of a little spilled blood.
” He cracked a smile. “It’s bad for business. ”
“Do I look like a fucking maid?” Jolie, the blonde, sassed, not even looking up from the fresh deck of cards she was opening.
That made Valentine pause, but only for a split second. “Dealers are replaceable. Now get the fucking towels, or you’ll be the next one in the chair.”
She huffed like my torture was an imposition and waltzed to a storeroom, smacking her gum, like she had all the time in the world.
“Please,” Joel rasped. “Take me. Kill me. Just don’t—”
Valentine rolled his eyes and huffed, “Shut up,” as he backhanded Joel.
The door to the high roller room cracked open at the force of Jolie’s put-out stomps. “Here,” she sneered as she held out a stack of bar towels to Valentine. “Just don’t get blood near my table. That’s gross.”
Valentine peeled his eyes away from me entirely and stared her down. “Are you forgetting who you work for?”
She didn’t cower, just stood with her hip cocked as she blew a pale pink bubble with her gum. “No. I know exactly who I work for,” she said. “I think you’re the one who doesn’t know who’s working for you.”
Gunshots rang out, so loud that I heard nothing at all as the warm spray of blood slicked my skin.
The numbness was back.
The nothingness.