Chapter 3
SEAN
If Sean had to describe the way the guy at the reception desk was staring at him, he’d call it horrified recognition. Or…maybe disturbed recognition. Something in the middle? His expression delicately straddled the line between the two.
But that was impossible. Why would this random stranger recognize him?
Sean had never been to this hotel, had never been to any hotel.
The whole experience was rather jarring if he was being honest. Maybe Blaire had a point about staying home, Sean thought as he stared in confusion, and not a little wariness, at the man behind the counter, still gawking at him.
Appalled. Was that the right term?
Sean glanced behind him, where Cole stood with his hastily packed bag. The golden lion of the MGM Grand’s lobby shone behind him, and people lingered everywhere. More people than Sean had ever seen. More people than even lived in his tiny town in NorCal.
Cole’s shaggy reddish-brown curls flopped over his forehead when his head tilted. “Everything okay?” he asked.
Sean returned his attention to the appalled desk clerk and ignited his most charming smile.
This he knew how to do. With his bright smile and some well-timed winks, he’d always been able to win over even the grumpiest of folks back home.
But maybe that trick only worked in small towns where everyone knew his name because the dude behind the counter was not budging.
“We called a few hours ago to book the reservation.” Sean pulled his ID from his wallet and slid it across the counter to the man.
He glanced down at it and swallowed. “Archer.”
“Yes, the reservation’s under Sean Archer.”
Some life breathed back into the man, almost like relief. “Your first name is Sean?” He had an accent somewhat reminiscent of his aunt’s. She’d always told him she and his mother had immigrated from Egypt, but this man had ginger curls and freckled skin—unlikely to be native Egyptian.
Maybe she’d lied. The thought made his skin hot.
Still, Sean hesitated at the question. As far as anyone else knew, his first name was Sean, but his mother had a different name for him, one she’d made him swear never to reveal.
Always with the secrets. The mysteries. This was why he’d run away.
No. He hadn’t run away. He was a fucking adult.
“Yes, I am Sean Archer.”
The man nodded. Frantic. Then his hands went to work, clicking, typing. “Do you have a brother?” he asked, trying to sound casual but failing entirely.
“No.”
The man’s mouth twitched, and for the tiniest moment, a spark of deep violet lit the blacks of his eyes, eerily similar to the strange bursts of fancy that sometimes took over Sean’s mind. He shook himself, and when he looked again, no such purple existed. Trick of the light.
After a few more minutes, the man slid Sean’s ID and two key cards toward him. “Twenty-third floor. Please enjoy your stay at the MGM Grand.”
Sean swiped them off the counter and retreated at once.
“That guy was weird,” he said to Cole when they were a safe distance from the reception desks.
“I have a feeling he won’t be the only weirdo we encounter in this city,” his cousin replied in his usual dry tone. “Remind me again why we came to Las Vegas?”
“Because this is something normal people do on their twenty-first birthday.”
Cole gave him a half smile. “Yeah, but this?”
They paused at the edge of the casino, where bells clanged and lights flashed and even the carpet seemed to scream at the top of its lungs.
A vague sense of something roused inside Sean’s chest, something that reminded him of those seconds before he broke the surface of the lake near his home after diving as deep as he could reach.
Something like suffocation. Overwhelming. Crushing.
Cole gazed skeptically at the sight before him. “This doesn’t seem like our scene.”
“How would we know what our scene is when we’ve been cooped up in that unchanging town for two decades?”
He sighed. “Listen, you know I’d follow you to the ends of the earth, but this seems like one of your impulse ideas that should have been thwarted.”
Sean scratched his neck, scared his cousin was right. “Then why didn’t you thwart me?”
“You were pretty mad.”
Pretty mad was a mild way to describe that fit of rage. Sean had asked those same questions of Blaire before, of course, and always received vague answers that satisfied none of his curiosity. He’d never gone off the rails like this.
Sean eyed a few strangers who stared into his face far longer than was polite. “Let’s just get to the room.”
They followed the signs to the elevator, then locked themselves inside their hotel room.
The space was overly air-conditioned and smelled faintly of harsh cleaning products.
The windows took up nearly the entire opposite wall, blocked by curtains, but Cole pushed them open to reveal the New York-New York and the Park MGM hotels, gleaming in the desert night.
“What now?” he asked.
Sean shrugged. “Now we…drink?”
Cole took that suggestion and ran with it, heading straight to the minibar. He threw a tiny blue bottle toward Sean and kept a frosted white bottle for himself.
Sean peered down at the label: Skyy Vodka. It was almost cute, it was so tiny.
Didn’t taste cute though.
Tasted like astringent water that burned all the way down.
“Ugh.” Cole glared at his bottle. “I’d take Mom’s too-sweet wine over this any day.”
“To be fair,” Sean said after finishing his bottle and grabbing another, “most people mix it.”
Cole set his bottle aside. “Can I ask a question?”
Sean lifted a brow at him.
“What do you think it is, really? I mean…what the hell would need this much secrecy?”
His stomach fluttered with nervous energy.
Or maybe that was the alcohol.
“I have no idea, but I’m starting to think that whatever it is, I’m not going to like it.”
Cole stole a deep breath into his lungs and let it out slowly. “Mom is probably freaking out.”
Sean rubbed his face. Aunt Blaire had called them both at least a dozen times on the drive. Only when he turned off his phone did he find a modicum of relief.
“Probably,” Sean said at last, polishing off his second bottle of vodka. “I feel bad. But also…I don’t feel bad?”
“So what do you want to do?”
He sighed. “Give me one night to be a normal person, and we’ll go back tomorrow.”
Cole nodded. “Alright, then.” He tossed Sean a third bottle. “So be a normal person and drink your problems away.”
As Sean traversed the casino floor of the sixth resort they’d decided to explore, attempting to keep his drunken steps straight, he found himself staring into several pairs of eyes that peered back with that same horrified recognition as the desk clerk.
Sean had accepted long ago that he was prone to impulse decisions, but this…
He shouldn’t have done this. Even drunk, he knew it had been cruel to Blaire to disappear, to ignore her, to leave her worrying and alone. Given the way these people stared, he began to suspect the secrets she kept were truly dangerous. These people knew him, and he had no idea how.
“People are staring at you,” Cole whispered, and Sean’s thoughts of Blaire faded away.
Across the rows of jangling slot machines, he found surreptitious eyes gazing back, quick to turn away as soon as his attention found them.
One particularly brazen starer locked onto him, unblinking, and he shot her his friendliest smile and a wink.
The color drained from her skin.
Weird.
Cole spun in a slow circle. “Should we be worried about this?”
Sean glanced his way, pausing at the visible anxiety in his cousin’s face.
Cole was the most stoic person he’d ever met.
The guy had no feathers to ruffle and a wit as dry as cotton.
His worry lit a bright warning sign in Sean’s mind, one that promptly guttered out as a wave of alcohol crashed against it. “Nah. Let’s go this way.”
“Whoa.” Cole braced Sean’s elbow when he spun too far and overcorrected. “Maybe four of those bottles on an empty stomach wasn’t the right decision?”
“I always make the right decision,” he muttered. “Let me have one night to make the wrong one.”
Cole said nothing. Or maybe he replied and Sean was too distracted to hear it since his full attention latched onto a glittering sign for a nightclub. He turned a grin on Cole. “Should we?”
Cole’s mouth opened as if he meant to reply, but all that emerged was a laugh. “Sure. Why not? Perfect way to top off this weird day.”
Chuckling, Sean beelined for the club entrance, forcefully ignoring the stares that followed him.