Chapter Eighteen

Nina

“Hey, Laurence,” I called to the man on the other side of the glass grinning expectantly at me. This was about to be so awkward. Are you here to kill me or to burn down the store and take all the documents from my office?

“Hey.” Laurence’s brow furrowed, and his smile faded. “It’s cold out here,” he informed me, like I should have figured that out by now. And I had, but that didn’t mean I wanted to let him in. I was the little pig in the warm brick house right now. “Are you going to stand there, or can I come in?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, trying to gauge Laurence’s energy through the glass. He’d always been a perfect gentleman toward me, in spite of my father’s insistence that he would marry me in a heartbeat, and I had never felt unsafe around him—until now. Eli’s words swam in my head: There are probably even more people in your personal life that you can’t trust. “Did my father send you?”

Laurence gave me a meaningful look through the glass. “I want to talk to you,” he said instead. It wasn’t an answer, but at the same time, it was. “You know your dad would never allow anyone to hurt you, no matter what.”

I grimaced, still believing that, in spite of everything. Dad had only wanted Uncle Marv to grab me. He didn’t realize I would fight back and fall down the stairs.

Even though I could still see the shadow of my own fat lip in the window reflection, I reached out and unlatched the front door. The bitter wind followed Laurence inside, and we slammed the door together, even though my eyes never stopped glaring at him.

“Nina,” Laurence said, placing his hands out in a position of surrender. “Your father and I both feel that you are overreacting to a situation you don’t quite understand.”

I planted my hands on my hips and thrust my scowl up at him. How dare they imply that I was the one being sensitive? Delusional? A typical, hysterical woman? “Dad yelled at Uncle Marv to ‘get’ me,” I snapped, eyes flashing. I slid the latch into place again. “He vandalized my boyfriend’s bar.”

Laurence choked on his own breath, obviously thrown by my description of Eli, but he recovered quickly. “Jon-Pierre never meant for you to fall down the stairs,” he explained smoothly. “He simply wished for you to be stopped from leaving before he could explain everything to you. Being hard-headed about it, you kicked Marvin in the leg. Your high heel actually punctured his skin, you know.”

“Good!” I yelped, whirling from the lock and jabbing my finger into Laurence’s chest. “He grabbed me! You can’t do that kind of thing. You can’t restrain your daughter when you want to talk to her! That’s not how families work.”

“It’s how this family works,” Laurence said, gripping my finger and holding it still against his chest. “So, calm down, Nina. Your little boyfriend had that brick coming through his window for a long time now. That wasn’t even about you. He needs to let Jon-Pierre handle Montclair. It’s simply not his city anymore.”

“No shit,” I agreed. Montclair Square was unrecognizable now. “But I think he wants to take it back.”

Lawrence nodded, watching me closely with his fingers still hooked around mine. He was quiet as he released my accusatory finger. “A lot of cities are much worse, you know. There is no world without crime. It doesn’t exist. If Jon-Pierre left, he would create a vacuum that another mob boss would fill. You would realize that he isn’t so bad, and you were privileged to be the daughter of a benevolent king. There’s no murder here.”

“What about the body in the park last month? What about the gas station clerk? There are murders in Darkmont, Laurence. Don’t be naïve.” A mob boss?

Laurence’s eyes darkened, and he reminded me of my father. Neither man could stand to be emasculated by a woman.

“Jon-Pierre isn’t responsible for every little thing,” Laurence hissed down to me. I still wasn’t scared. No one was here to hurt me. Laurence was here to convert me. “Let me show you what Jon-Pierre does. Let me show you this terrible, scary world that your boyfriend wants to dismantle so much. It may not be legal, per se, but it’s not that bad either, Nina.”

My pride wouldn’t allow me to refuse him, and I thrust my chin out with all the casual, stoic bravery I could muster. I wasn’t sure if it was real or not, this bravery, but I was going to let him take me into the belly of the beast. I would let him show me.

“Fine,” I agreed, as if I was ready for the truth. As if my insides weren’t trembling right now. I didn’t know why it wasn’t showing clearly on the outside, but I pulled myself to my full height and planted my hands on my hips. “Show me, Laurence.”

We walked into the center of Darkmont, which was nerve-racking even in the middle of broad daylight. As we reached deeper and deeper into the diseased heart of this slum, Freaks cropped up until there was no normal person among them. They smoked cigarettes and slouched on street corners. They hollered to each other in a vocabulary I couldn’t decode. Some of them even laughed and danced in the streets like this city belonged to them, and it did. They laughed and danced with no coordination, slurred speech, and wide pupils, but no one was going to touch them. The police didn’t even come here anymore.

But no one touched Laurence or me. It was as if they recognized not only Laurence but me as well. We passed through the throng of Freaks without a problem. No one picked my pocket. No one grabbed my pearl necklace. No one even stood too close, even tried to speak to me. They cleared a path for us instead, as if we were royalty after all. This was our kingdom.

I was a princess here.

A dilapidated, condemned factory was the hotbed of activity Laurence chose to showcase for me that night. Its courtyard glowed with torchlight, and the broken windows revealed hundreds of silhouettes migrating from room to room like ghosts. It was appropriate, as the electricity did keep flickering inside, but the place obviously wasn’t haunted. Haunted factories don’t have a rigged-up speaker system to play fast-paced industrial music.

Laurence took my hand and guided me into the packed building. My heels crunched over shards of glass that no one had bothered to sweep up. Laurence laced his fingers with mine, and I was in such shock by my surroundings, I failed to notice. The factory creaked and moaned like it might collapse at any moment. There must’ve been at least two hundred people on this property right now. There was a fistfight in one corner and fellatio in the other. Dice scattered across a dining room table and a cheer went up. Stacks of money. Commonplace guns. Red spray paint on the back wall read WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE.

“It’s kind of beautiful in a fucked-up way, isn’t it?” Laurence mused, tugging me closer and squeezing my hand.

It was that squeeze that alerted me to the fact that we were holding hands, and I unlaced my fingers from his.

“I don’t understand what I’m seeing here,” I told him, body rigid with disapproval and uncertainty. After all, I was in the middle of this chaos in a pearl necklace and heels and a ripped-up skirt. I wrapped my arms around my own torso.

“This is the marketplace,” Lawrence informed me. “Come into the main hall. You haven’t seen anything but hopefuls and hangers-on so far.”

He nodded deeper into the factory and I followed. The room opened up into an expansive ceiling, wires and cobwebs dangling overhead, and a churning crowd of Freaks and others. Smoke filled the air, smelling of dense, wet pine, and Laurence twiddled his fingers in greeting to a cluster of men smoking a thick blunt around a distant table. A clique of scantily clad women sauntered past me, each one giving me a sneering, unimpressed once-over. They didn’t recognize me. They thought that I was here to be traded, like them.

“This is your real Paper Treasure, princess,” Lawrence announced, spreading his hands and cracking a wide grin. The smile was haunting, and it didn’t light up his face the way that Eli’s did. It almost darkened his features instead. One of his hands settled on the small of my back. “Let’s keep walking.”

My nose curled. “There’s more?”

“Of course. It’s a complex biome, darling,” Laurence said, sounding so much like Dad at that moment that I got chills. “Follow me back outside. The fight club is a surprising source of revenue for us. The fighters are free, of course. Gambling is the lifeblood of our organism, Nina. Gambling, extortion, fraud, and light amounts of prostitution and trafficking. Light amounts,” he reiterated, as if that would change everything. As if light trafficking was an acceptable career for my father. As if I could ever look at this place and see my future…

Laurence and I spilled out into the courtyard, where roughly one hundred people congregated, waving torches and wads of cash, screaming at two men on a platform. One of them wore a dirty white T-shirt and jeans, the other was bare-chested, and both of them dripped blood. Their faces were already mottled with bruises, but the bare-chested one flung himself at the other with a caterwaul, swinging wildly.

“Place your bets while you can!” a man in a suit hollered into a megaphone. I recognized him from Redman Corporation. I thought he was an executive or something, but he was a bookie? “Theodore Maxwell, seasoned veteran, versus Anthony Attala!”

The bare-chested man connected vigorously with his knuckles to the chin of the other man. Blood sprayed. Even in the cacophony of the crowd, there was a wet crunch sound, and the shirted man staggered to one side and fell on his knees. A roar rose up around us.

“Mr. Attala owes the Freaks some twenty thousand dollars in cold, hard cash!” the commentator bellowed into his megaphone. “Let’s see if we can double that tonight, or he’s not going home, ladies and gentlemen!”

My lips parted in horror. He was threatening to kill this man for his overdue debts, unless the crowd would place bets on him. These goons didn’t look like they were going to do that, though. They rejoiced as the man in the white shirt fumbled and crumpled onto the cement.

I couldn’t unfreeze my face from its mode of total disgust. The men pummeled at each other, and blood flew everywhere. The Freaks were excited whenever an errant spray caught them, but I wrapped my arms around myself and felt sick.

“Come on,” Laurence called down to me. I was lost in my judgment of this place, its bloodiness, its brutality, and I didn’t notice that Laurence’s hand had slipped back onto my lower back. “Let’s get you home, Nina. You don’t look too good.”

He pressed me forward with his palm and I resisted. “No,” I said, “I don’t want to go back to Masters Heights. I want to go back to Paper Treasure.” Something that Eli said resonated with me now more than ever: it wasn’t my job anymore. It had become my home, too, like Toasty’s became Eli’s when he got kicked out onto the street.

Was Dad treating me exactly like he had treated Eli, deep down?

Laurence frowned and nodded. “All right, but your dad’s not going to like that,” he agreed after a brief hesitation. Maybe he was trying to decide whether he would be able to overpower me and force me back to Masters Heights, but he didn’t make any move to grab me. He let that one palm linger on the small of my back. “Of course, love. We can go wherever your heart desires.”

As we walked from the core of Darkmont, streetlamps snapped to attention, letting us know that night was officially falling. I was so overwhelmed by everything Lawrence had shown me, I forgot Eli’s promise to hunt for me if I hadn’t found my way back to him by nightfall.

Laurence and I trekked to the outer ring of Darkmont, where Paper Treasure was located, and Laurence tried again to justify Dad’s empire.

“I saw that look on your face,” he told me. “But you didn’t have that look on your face when Jon-Pierre paid your college tuition in full. You didn’t have that look on your face when you moved into a luxury apartment. Do you think that those pearls are clean, Nina? Because they’re not. They’re as bloody as that boxing ring was.”

Without missing a beat, I reached behind my neck and unfastened the clasp, letting the pearls tumble onto the street like they meant nothing. “Then take them back,” I commanded Laurence. No bluffing. “I didn’t know that all the money he gave me and my mom came from criminal activity.”

“Well, your mom knew,” Lawrence hissed. “And she was fine with it.”

“That was her mistake!” We rounded the corner at the shiny blue mailbox and stood at Paper Treasure again, still safely locked, the CLOSED sign on the door. I whirled on Laurence, not ready to go inside yet. I needed to give him a message for my father. “I don’t think that Darkmont is ‘beautiful’ in a fucked-up way. I think it used to be beautiful, and now it’s ruined. I don’t want to be the princess of some bloody ruins. I want to be the queen of something real and something good, something that I deserve and that I made by myself.”

Laurence’s gaze softened as he peered down at me. One hand came up and smoothed its knuckles over my cheek, startling me. I bristled but didn’t back away even though his touch was disgusting. I wasn’t afraid of it.

“You can have all of that,” he promised me, “under your father’s wing. You can beautify this city. Run your own business. If you need a legitimate store, you can have one. He wants you to be happy, Nina. He’ll give you whatever you want.” He leaned closer, tilting his lips down toward mine. “So would I,” he added in a lusty rumble, gripping the back of my neck and pulling me into the kind of kiss that suffocates you. I kept my mouth closed and thrashed against him, whining in protest from behind my teeth.

I wedged my leg between us like a crow bar and shoved, freeing myself from Laurence’s embrace. The momentum sent me sprawling backward against my own cement steps, but I didn’t care. Anything to get this brute off me.

Laurence stared down at me, and I rubbed at my lips, clarifying for him how disgusting his kiss had been.

His gaze slid lower, to where my torn skirt rode up my thighs and almost exposed the crotch of my panties.

“Stay away from me,” I commanded him, shoving back onto my heels.

“You’ll change your mind. You need us,” Laurence warned me. He crowded closer, and I sprinted up those steps to the door. “It’s a hard world out here without Daddy’s help.”

I fumbled with the keys and unlocked Paper Treasure. Laurence planted a palm against the doorframe right beside me, but I didn’t look back. I only focused on getting into the store and slamming it tight. “I could help you, too,” Laurence breathed against my neck.

The door fell graciously open and I spilled inside, whirling and slamming it, twisting the lock immediately into place. Laurence glowered at me through the other side of the glass.

“You need us, baby girl,” he promised me, trailing his finger down the glass pane of the front door window. He licked his lips and then winked at me, stepping back from the door. “You’ll see.” He walked down the stairs, never breaking eye contact with me. “You’ll see.”

Shaking and unable to focus, I hobbled into the store and froze.

The office door at the back of the bookstore hung open.

Someone was here.

“Hello?” I called out. Silence.

I strode to the cash register and plucked some sharp scissors from the cup of pens and paper clips on the desk. I held the scissors like they were a switchblade and marched up the back steps. “Who the hell is in my store right now? I’m armed,” I warned them, pushing through the office door.

My heels planted on the floorboards and stayed.

The scissors dropped with a clatter.

The office was strewn in loose papers. My filing cabinet hung open. The safe hung open. My entire computer was missing.

Jaw dropped in sheer disbelief, I marched to the safe and ran my fingers over its cold metal walls, even though I could already see inside. I could see that the money bags were all gone.

I dropped down into my computer chair, trembling. The damn computer chair was about the only thing they didn’t take.

How was I going to afford to pay next month’s rent without that money? And the security guard? How was I supposed to afford one of those?

You need us, Laurence’s words came flooding back to me. It’s a hard world out here without Daddy’s help.

Eli was right. I couldn’t trust anyone. Laurence was only here to get me out the store so Dad could infiltrate it and take back all the dirty money bloating our safe.

And Laurence was right, too.

I can’t do this without Dad’s help. I can’t do this without the blood-spattered wads of cash I saw tonight.

My eyes settled on the wall clock. It was getting late.

I jerked to attention and blinked hard, remembering Eli’s words.

He was going to go looking for me if I didn’t find my way back to him fast… and if he didn’t find me first, he was damn sure going to find trouble.

I have to get to him before that happens.