Or was it something else? My eyes were drawn to him in that sedan like a magnet, and inside my chest I felt something throb.
“Shit or get off the pot,” the cabbie said.
“Take me to... up the street here,” I stammered, pointing straight ahead.
“How far,” he drawled, annoyed.
“I’ll tell you,” I snapped.
“You got—?”
I had the bills in my hand. They were all clean, new, stacked about a half inch high, and wrapped in a white wrapper with yellow edges. I saw a bunch of zeros, but I didn’t think it could be real money or a real number. Still, the top bill was a hundred, and I yanked it out and tossed it up front as I cut him off. “Here,” I shot.
I could do a lot of better things with a hundred dollars, especially since this pile was sure to have a bunch of ones in the center and evidently, I’d just lost my job.
But damn if I couldn’t think of anything else to do besides ride down Brighton Avenue to the very end, wherever that was, with my hundred-dollar bill, and see where I got.
Chapter Two
Alaric
The last time I saw Natalia in anything but a photograph she was five years old, and she was a real brat.
Well, things had changed in fifteen years, that was for sure—except for the brat bit.
When Andrej pointed her out to me, I was sure I had the wrong girl. All those goofy features I’d seen morph a little in photographs had come into being on her face to make a masterpiece: full lips, quirky nose, and wide eyes with straight, Slavic lids. Her hair was still blonde, a shade or two darker, but blonde, long and cascading to her shoulders, straight and thick.
Shit, I thought. She was gorgeous. She’d blossomed into a stunner.
I get stunning women all the time, but there was something different about her. A kind of regal, ethereal beauty that cut through the ridiculous costume she was wearing and the neon glow and trashiness of that place.
It had been two years since I’d checked in on her, which was part personal shit and part paranoia. It had obviously been too long. I’d thought she was on the straight and narrow. She’d looked like a nerdy little brat who would get some kind of scholarship the last time I saw her. No drugs, no boyfriend. Wearing a sweatshirt the last photo I saw.
Two years, and now she was working in a strip club, her long legs falling out of a slutty black skirt and cheap sequined tops.
Okay. Not what I’d expected.
