Chapter 3
three
I watch the sky go from bruised to gold and stare at Melinda’s last text like a dumbass.
It’s not the subtle flirting that undoes me.
It’s the unknown. It’s the mystery of her.
I never get my dick in a twist, so it has to be because I don’t know what she looks like.
Hell, she could be hideous. I’m losing sleep over some ugly bitch.
But she’s not a bitch.
In a handful of messages, I know she’s kind and smart. I want to know everything about her. No, I have to know.
If I’m honest, what she looks like matters a hell of a lot less than what I know.
My bones have already stamped her beautiful, sight unseen.
Beauty that’ll match the way she texts: precise, a little feral at the edges.
What I wouldn’t do to see her when she’s rattled, unraveled.
From a handful of texts I can almost see her.
All clean lines and quiet curves. Maybe reserved.
Her words read literal, but there’s a catch in them too.
I want to find where her control frays, where the editor unbuttons.
I want to see the moment she stops apologizing for wanting; I want to cause it.
Maybe my imagination is running wild with what I want to read between the lines, but I don’t think so.
I think I’m right. Either way, I can’t stop imagining it.
But every time I close my eyes, the same picture plays: a woman under a streetlight, chin up, the gold ring of it skimming her silhouette like somebody painted her to be noticed.
She didn’t flinch when the dark looked back.
That image keeps sliding in where it doesn’t belong, but my body already decided whose gravity I’m in and forgot to ask my permission.
I’m split down the middle. The woman under the streetlight hit me like a live wire; the woman on my phone threads a calm I can’t put down.
I can’t reconcile them. One drags me under, one pins me in place.
It’s about knowing too much and not enough at the same time.
Words gentle in my palm. A shadow under a streetlamp sparking through me like a current.
I don’t know how to hold both. I want the woman who writes and the woman who feels like a blade still nicking my skin.
I want both. I want them to be one. Keep Melinda, and somehow still find the girl under the lamp.
If I manage both, I don’t know whether I’ll kneel or burn; if I burn, the city goes with me.
Adrian is probably going to erase my identity and slap me with a fake criminal record for this shit. He’s got enough on me to lock me up for the rest of my life just to prove a point. I dial his new burner number anyway.
“Cassius.” He answers on the first ring. It’s not even six in the morning, but he probably didn’t sleep either. Atlas is the only one who sleeps. He doesn’t carry the baggage the rest of us do.
“I need a favor,” I say, putting my phone on speaker.
“Lay it on me,” Adrian says.
“I’m going to give you a cellphone number. I want to know everything there is to know about the person who owns it. Everything.”
“Fuckin’ hell, Cassius. Is this the number that texted you?”
“Yes.” There’s no point in lying. We’re a lot of things, us Ashenheart brothers, but we aren’t liars, especially not to each other. It’s the only way all the shit we do works without exploding.
“Caleb said this would be a problem,” Adrian mutters. “Told me you’d get too curious. I should’ve made you get a new burner the second it happened.”
“Fucking tattletale,” I grunt, leaning back against the counter. “Anyway, she won’t be a problem. Right now she has no clue who I am, and you’re going to figure out who she is.”
“Jesus. What happened to never engage with civilians? You’ve drilled that shit into us almost daily since we were kids.”
“I didn’t plan this, Adrian. She just texted the wrong number. Don’t make it more than it is.”
“But you texted back.”
“I don’t know why I did,” I admit. “It’s tiring only talking to people who want something from me. She doesn’t want anything. She asked me about books.”
“You read?”
“That’s what you got from all that?”
Silence again. Then a sigh. “I already regret this. What’s the number?”
I recite the number from memory, the digits as fresh in my mind as the first time I read them. I’ll never have to look at it again. It’s branded in my brain, easy to recall, always. “I appreciate this, Adrian. I swear I won’t do anything to compromise us.”
“If you do, I'll have you sitting in the worst prison I can find for crimes you didn’t even commit, which speaks to my craft because we both know the crimes you have committed are plenty to have you never see the sun again.”
“Damn. Did I catch you before coffee? That’s a little much.
” I laugh because of course Adrian threatened prison time.
He does this at least once a week. He has it in his head that out of the four of us I’m the most likely to destroy everything.
Maybe he’d feel differently if he was the one snuffing out lives, mingling with the scum that rots our streets.
My brother has never inhaled someone’s last breath.
I’m not as smart as the rest of them, but I’m not stupid. I don’t want what we have to come crashing down either. My brother writes the rules, plans the strategies, but sometimes I think he forgets it’s me he calls when strategy fails.
“Cassius, we are not stand-up men. We built an empire on carefully crafted deceit and the blood of men worse than us. Just because we didn’t get here on the high road doesn’t mean I want to lose what we’ve created.
” Adrian wears sin like he wears his fucking suits; I wear it under my nails, stained on my goddamn skin.
His we pretends making the cut and making the call are the same job. They aren’t.
“I don’t want that either, Adrian. Look, I swear, she’s just an editor. Some girl who texted my burner by mistake. She’s witty, though, and I want to know more about her. First sign of trouble, I’ll ghost her. Alright?”
“Whatever. You’re gonna look like shit in orange.
” Adrian hangs up the phone, but it doesn’t matter because in twenty minutes or less, I’ll know everything there is to know about Melinda.
Part of me wants to believe in accidents, but people don’t stumble onto me by chance.
A text by mistake is a cute story, but it could definitely be a trap.
I’ve already given too much, my name, the fact I read, the hour I’m awake.
Small pieces become a map if you let them.
I’ll allow curiosity, but I can’t let it be a noose.
She makes it easy to forget that. If she’s a trap, she’s the best one ever made, cracked me like an egg. Something no person has ever done.
I’m on my back porch, sipping my coffee when the chime comes through. Adrian’s email. I pick up my mug and head for my office. I want to read what he’s found on a real screen, something bigger than a phone. Something that’ll make her more real.
Cassius,
Here’s everything. She’s boring as fuck.
Attached to my brother’s message are more than a dozen files. I click the first one. It’s a copy of her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Amherst College. I’m going to have to look it up. I know jack shit about colleges.
Melinda Paige Westbrook.
Her full name right there in a fancy-ass script.
The next one I click on is her master’s degree.
Harvard. There’s a school I’ve heard of.
Adrian is wrong. She’s not boring, she's brilliant. Adrian is too, so he’s probably jealous.
I click through a few more school documents, transcripts dating back to high school.
She attended all private schools. Like me, she came from money.
The difference is her paper probably smells like polish and old wood.
Mine is tinted red. They spend the same, sure, but they don’t live the same.
I don’t know how to braid those strands without one cutting the other.
Do those worlds ever sit at the same table? I doubt it.
She grew up in Massachusetts. She has one younger brother, Nathan Cole Westbrook. If Adrian hasn’t already, I’ll have him dig into Nathan. Can’t be too careful.
She spent the last two years in London, the first of which she was an intern at Simon & Schuster. They hired her the second year and then recently transferred her to Las Vegas.
Transferred?
Adrian’s report says she asked to come here.
But why?
It doesn’t make sense to me why she’d give up one of what Adrian’s report calls The Big Five, to come work in the hot ass desert for one of its boutique companies.
Silver State Publishing. I clock the address.
Its front door faces the back entrance to our warehouse.
She sits across the street from my monthly poker game.
I could have Adrian pull plates and every camera angle remotely close to that entrance.
I make myself kill the impulse. Better for her if I stay the wrong number.
But, if I happen to catch a glimpse of Lindy while I’m looking for the woman under the streetlight, that’s just collateral clarity. Two birds, one shadow.
I look through everything but can’t find the driving factor in her coming to Vegas. I send a text to Adrian.
Figure out why she came to Vegas.
Adrian:
On it. I have a file on her brother and both parents now too. I’ll send them your way.
Almost immediately, my phone buzzes again with the new information on Melinda’s parents. I don’t give a fuck about them and truth be told if there was anything there worth reading Adrian would’ve already called.
I open and close every attachment on Melinda. Not one damn photo.
He did that on purpose.
I could look her up now that I have her full name. My supposed genius brother also conveniently left off all her social media, assuming she has any.
She’s not boring,
I type out to Adrian.
You just only sent boring stuff.