“Well, it being Black Friday, you’ll get a lot of foot traffic there visiting the shops,” I said. “And even if there’s only a twenty percent increase in traffic, that’s going to make our ability to do our own photos near impossible. We should plan ongetting there first thing tomorrow morning, when crowds will be minimal.”
The skepticism was obvious on everyone’s face. And who could blame them? I wasn’t offering an explanation but an excuse.
Yet when anger coursed through your broken heart as it did with me, was there really much of a difference between the two? And did there really need to be?
“Tomorrow, then,” Delilah said. “I don’t think I’ll have to be anywhere. And even if I do?—”
“I know I can be there,” Bridget said.
“I think I can too,” Talia said. “It’s not like I’m banned from going to competitor’s locations. I’m not important enough to be involved in my boss’ worlds anyway.”
That’s what I had thought, too. Not that Cassius was ever my boss, but I had once thought that I would never get involved in a billionaire’s world.
Funny how that worked out.
Funny how I could see all too easily how that might work out with Talia, depending on if any of the Morrils—or, perhaps more frightening, if any of the Vales—took an eye to her. God help her, it would be the worst thing to ever happen to her.
“So then, sounds like a second group date,” I said, smiling for the first time without forcing it. “Sounds like a good way to end my return to Vegas.”
“Indeed,” Delilah said, and she held out a mimosa glass for cheers. I had never ordered one, yet now that I looked down, I saw that the girls had already ordered one.
That, I thought, that was the difference between true friends and a truly idiotic decision of a man. The former knew your preferences and desires and catered their actions to you, even ensuring that you arrived already having your needs met. Thelatter gave no shits about what you wanted and went about their own way, ignorant of how it might affect you.
Are you really so sure that Cassius was—is—the latter and not the former?
Strangely, even as the conversation moved to other topics, even as thoughts of Cassius became less the main stream of thought and more a series of intrusive thoughts, that question never really disappeared. Nor did the answer I was leaning toward.
Well, wherever Cassius was, I hoped that he wasn’t getting in too deep with the Black Reapers. And if he was, I hope he got exactly what he deserved.
21
CASSIUS
Icouldn’t believe I was fucking admitting this to myself—and I certainly wasnotgoing to fucking admit it to anyone else.
I was nervous.
I wasn’t palms sweaty, forehead damp, constantly swallowing like a pussy nervous. I wasn’t the fucking teenager who had finally worked up the courage to ask out the hot girl; I’d never needed courage to do that. I wasn’t even the businessman trying to wear a poker face as I tried to secure a multi-billion-dollar real estate deal.
No, simply put, I was nervous because I was about to visit men who had killed other men and who were well capable of doing so again.
Funny how it worked, I thought, as my driver took us to the clubhouse—although I was told it wasn’t really a clubhouse, not compared to the true clubhouses of the Black Reapers, but I did not care. I had judged them from afar as too brusque and blunt for their own good. You might see me from afar and know that I was wealthy and confident, but you would never know just how wealthy and just how confident I was until you came too close to do anything about it. I had always assumed with the Reapers,because their tattoos, their jackets, and their club affiliation were always so obvious, it diminished their capabilities.
Boy, I was fucking wrong.
If anything, it made them more powerful than I’d presumed. You could see all those things about them, you could pick them out going eighty miles per hour on the highway, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about them. Dante—who sat in the back of my car with me, my muscle in case things went sideways—had tried for years to get them just to talk, never mind to my side, and they had never budged.
It was pretty fucking telling that in all my years of work, the only group that had never surrendered an inch in negotiations or stood down in a competition was the Black Reapers. Granted, they didn’t try to “win” much with us, they just said no to our entreaties, but still. And now here we were, going to meet them on their turf to ask for their help.
No wonder I was nervous.
Now, that didn’t mean I was going to wire a billion dollars out of desperation. That didn’t mean I thought I was going to die. Tough as shit as these guys were, even they knew the mysterious death of two billionaires would bring the house down on them.
But…
Well, rare was the situation where I did not feel like I had the upper hand. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it hadn’t happened in over a decade.
“Whatever you do,” Dante said, “do not make this about money. You won’t get them to budge a fucking inch, and they’ll shut you out otherwise.”
