No missed calls.
No texts.
The last message was three weeks ago from my brother, Dante, just two words:Don’t contact us.
I’d read it so many times the letters had stopped meaning anything.
A tourist stumbled out of a bar, laughing too loud, and knocked into my shoulder. “Watch it, buddy.”
I kept walking.
The memory came without warning—Loss of control. My mother’s face, her mouth open, her hands raised. The crack of my knuckles against her cheekbone. The way she’d crumpled. The sounds she’d made.
And my arm pulling back again.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, bile rising in my throat. A man in a Saints jersey swerved around me, muttering. I pressed my palm flat against the brick wall of the building beside me and breathed until my vision cleared.
Not me. It wasn’t me.
But it was my hand. My fist. Her blood on my knuckles.
I pushed off the wall and kept walking.
Bernie’s sat on the corner, wedged between a voodoo shop and a place that sold cheap T-shirts. The neon sign buzzed and flickered—half the letters burned out, just like the Mardi Gras Hotel. Bern’s Burg s. The front window was smeared with old grease and a faded poster of a hamburger that looked nothing like the sad patties we actually served.
I pushed through the door. The AC unit rattled overhead, barely cutting the heat. Bernie sat on his stool behind the register, gut straining against his stained white shirt, a flask not quite hidden beside the napkin dispenser. His eyes were already bloodshot at seven in the morning.
“You’re late,” he said. The clock on the wall read 6:57.
I grabbed my apron off the hook without answering. Tied it on. Walked to the grill.
Eight hours. I picked up the spatula, and the grease smell wrapped around me like a second skin.
Nancy appeared at my elbow while I was scraping burnt grease off the grill. Black flakes came off in chunks, and the smell of char mixed with the ever-present stink of old oil. One more grease fire and Bernie would have my head.
She set an unwrapped burger on the counter beside me. The patty sat crooked on the bun, ketchup smeared across the wax paper like a crime scene. “Rocky. Customer sent this back.”
I didn’t look up. “So make him a new one.”
“He’s demanding to speak to you.” She popped her gum. “Specifically.”
My hand stilled on the spatula. “What?”
“You heard me.” She leaned her hip against the counter, arms crossed. “You’re lucky Bernie just left to make a deposit. This is the fifth burger this week.”
“They weren’t all my fault?—“
She reached up and cupped my cheek, her fingers cool against my overheated skin. “Sugar, you’re going to get your cute little ass fired.” She said it almost sweetly, like she was delivering bad news to a child.
I pulled away and wiped the sweat off my brow with the back of my arm. Stepped out from behind the grill, already composing an apology in my head for whatever tourist thought his medium-rare was too pink.
Then I saw who was waiting at the counter.
I stopped dead.
Dimitri Dragan leaned against the Formica like he owned the place, one elbow propped up, ankles crossed. Black leather jacket over a dark henley, the kind of effortlessly expensive look that made everyone else in the room feel underdressed. His dark hair fell across his forehead in that careless way that probably took him twenty minutes to perfect. Dark eyes swept over the grease-stained walls, the flickering fluorescents, the crooked menu board—and then landed on me with a glint of pure amusement.
That stupid-ass grin spread across his face. The one that made you want to punch him and buy him a drink at the same time.
