Play Me Real (2 page)

She nods finally, and after I move, stretches out on the couch. She even lets me pull the threadbare blanket from the end of the couch over her.

I make sure the water and her cell phone are on the table next to her, within easy reach, before carrying the tea mug back into the kitchen and rinsing it in the sink. Then I take the trash can from underneath, tie up the bag and put a new bag into it before carrying it the couch. She’s awfully drunk and the last thing she needs is to be cleaning up puke off the floor tomorrow. And neither do I.

She’s down for the count by the time I finish and I quietly let myself out, making sure to lock the door behind me. Once I’m outside, I take a couple seconds to breathe in the cool, clean night air. To breathe and think and just be.

My thoughts are a jumbled mess and I need to clear them before I see Sebastian. Need to figure out what I’m going to say to him. Because I saw him. I saw the torment on his face, the pain he couldn’t begin to hide. My gut screams that there’s more to the story than Janet told me—a lot more. And no matter what she says about his father, I won’t condemn him based on that. Not when I’ve worked so hard and for so long to walk a path different from my own father’s.

When the cloying scent of Janet’s sorrow has faded from my senses and the ache inside me is down to a dull, manageable pain, I head up the stairs to my apartment. But when I get there, Sebastian is nowhere to be seen.

I know, even before I walk to the railing and look down at the parking lot. Even before I register that his sleek, black Mercedes is no longer parked in my spot.

Sebastian is gone. And though I know exactly where to find him, I don’t have a clue how to reach him.

I shouldn’t have left. I’d known that even as I’d climbed in my car and driven away. I owe Aria an explanation, I owed it to her to stick around and let her ask the million or so questions she probably has. After all, it isn’t every day that one of your friend calls the man you’re dating a murderer. Or, more precisely, screams it at him.

She’d asked me to wait, and I’d tried. I really had. But even as I stood in that deserted parking lot, staring at Janet’s door and seeing the ghosts of a hundred other visits to that very apartment, I knew I had to get out of there. If I’d stayed I would have just fucked everything up.

Even now, as I pull up to the valet at the Atlantis, my hands are still shaking on the steering wheel. My stomach’s a twisting knot of sadness and regret, self-loathing and rage. It’s the same emotional cocktail I felt when I walked away from this city ten years ago for what I thought was forever, and it’s the same one that’s dogged my footsteps from Haiti to Costa Rica, from Gaza to Sierra Leone.

Sometime in the last decade, I’d learned to live with it, learned to vanquish it to a small corner of my mind so that I could live, work, breathe. But seeing Janet tonight, knowing that she still hates me as much as I hate myself, has blown it all wide open again.

“Mr. Caine, it’s good to see you,” says Roman, one of the kids who works the night shift at the valet so that he can go to college during the day. “Are you having a good night?”

I nod, hand him a ten dollar tip. Usually, I’d tell him to call me Sebastian, as I have every night since I got here and he’d laugh and tell me that that isn’t how things at the Atlantis operate. We’d banter a little back and forth and he’d tell me something interesting he learned in class that day. But tonight I don’t have it in me. I’m not even sure I have the energy to make it through the casino and up the elevator to my suite.

My phone buzzes in my pocket and I pull it out, glance at the name. Aria. Of course. She’s probably wondering where I am. Probably wants an explanation for what was a truly bizarre scene. Or Janet already told her the whole story and she wants to tell me to get the fuck out of her life.

It’s my fear of the latter that has me directing the call to voice mail and shoving the phone back into my jeans. And it’s that same fear that has me ignoring the texts that come through a minute or so later.

I’m halfway to the elevator—no tour of the casino tonight—when Mickey, my assistant head of security, flags me down. She doesn’t look happy and though I really want nothing more than to ignore her, I stop. It’s her boss’s day off and while she’s proven herself more than competent in the ten days I’ve been here, that only reinforces my belief that if she feels like she has a situation that needs my attention, then I need to give it to her.

“Everything okay?” I ask as she falls into step beside me.

“Actually we have a situation and I’m not sure how you’d like us to handle it. Over at the high roller tables.”

It’s all I can do not to roll my eyes. Of course it’s the whales. Of fucking course. I swear to God, if this casino wasn’t having a cash flow problem right now, I’d ban the whole fucking lot of them.

We make a sharp left at the end of a long line of slot machines, head deeper into the casino to where the buy-ins are often in the five and six figures. “Petrov Rubinov came in about twenty minutes ago and sat down at one of the poker tables,” she tells me as we walk. “I know that you banned him from the casino after the incident with one of the waitresses the other night, and so I sent security over to ask him to leave. His response was to grow loud and belligerent and he’s refused to budge since. I’ve been over to encourage him to leave, as well, but he’s having none of it.

“Our only choice at this point is to bodily eject him, but since he’s got his own bodyguard detail, that’s going to get messy. However, since he is in the middle of the high roller section, I wanted to run it by you before I took that course of action. Because I can tell you, he’s drunk and disruptive and he isn’t going to go easily It’s going to cause a hell of a scene.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK! Of all the fucking nights for him to pull this shit on me, he chooses tonight. Of course he does. Of fucking course he does.

I should probably walk away. When it comes to him, my temper is precarious at the best of times. And right now is pretty much as far away from the best of times as I can get. But someone needs to take care of this and obviously, it’s not going to be Mickey. At least not without the entire casino knowing about it.

“I’ll handle it,” I tell her. “Just get me a couple of security guys to back me up, in case I need to physically remove the bastard.”

“They’re already on their way, sir.”

“Good.”

We’re almost at the high roller area now and I hear him—even over all the bells and slot machines and cash payouts that make the casino a cacophony of craziness at this late hour—before I’ve reached the ropes sectioning this area off from the general public. He’s that loud and obnoxious. And Mickey is right—the way he’s running off at the mouth and slurring his words, he’s obviously drunk.

Plus, his free hand is completely up the skirt of the girl sitting next to him—a girl who I’m ninety-nine percent certain is a prostitute he hired for the evening, and an underage one at that. My annoyance level ratchets up about three thousand percent to infuriated, and only gets worse when he does something—I can’t see what—that makes the poor girl wince, and even whimper.

I come up behind him, stop a couple feet from the back of his chair. I think about trying diplomacy, but the truth is, I just don’t have the patience for it. Not right now, not after how I’ve spent the last hour.

“Rubinov, I believe I made my position clear about your presence in my hotel.” I make sure my voice is ice cold despite the white hot rage rushing through me.

He turns in his seat, glances over his shoulder at me like he’s been waiting all along for me to show up.

“Ah, yes. Caine. Good to see you again.” The words sound particularly snide in his heavy Russian accent. Or maybe my interpretation is colored by my abject loathing of the son of a bitch. “I’ll take a vodka martini.”

No. He really is as loathsome as I think he is. “The bar’s closed.”

“What’s the matter, pretty boy? You don’t like Russians?”

“I don’t like you.”

“That’s too bad, since I enjoy your casino very much. Good atmosphere, good drinks…when the bar is open. Good company.” He pulls his hand out from under his companion’s skirt, puts it on her breast instead. And squeezes until she cries out in obvious distress.

“Okay, that’s it.” I grab him by his collar, yank him to his feet. “You’re out of here. Now.”

I can hear the gasps around us, know that I’m making a spectacle when that’s the last thing I planned on doing tonight. But as his security detail starts to make a fuss behind me—and are stopped by my security people—I have to admit that I don’t give a damn about whether or not we attract attention. I don’t care how many Tumblr or Instagram or Twitter accounts the picture shows up on, I’m not putting up with his shit. And neither is my staff. Not for one more minute. Not for one more second.

“You’ve got two choices,” I tell him, speaking quietly so that any recording devices that are trained on us right now can’t pick it up. “You, and your security detail, can walk out of my casino right now, under your own power. Or I will march you to the door myself and I won’t be gentle about it. Everyone in this casino will see me taking out the trash.”

“Speaking of trash,” he says and he doesn’t sound nearly as intimidated as I’d hoped he would be at this point. “You enjoy taking it out, don’t you? How’s that little waitress of yours doing? I was hoping she’d be on tonight so we could…renew our acquaintance. She had such an ass on her. I enjoyed touching it the other night, enjoyed even more thinking about fuc—”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence because my hand is around his throat, squeezing, dangling him a few inches off the ground before I even know I’m going to move. “Say something about Aria again. I fucking dare you. Say something about her again. It’ll be the last thing you ever say.”

I’m walking now, half-carrying, half-dragging him to the closest wall. It’s got the added benefit of being out of sight of over ninety percent of the casino. I’ve got just enough functioning brain cells left to know that this is a conversation I really don’t want to have in public.

And then even that thought is gone and I’m lifting him up, holding his back against the wall as I get in his face. My hand is still wrapped around his throat—it’s what I’m using to hold him off the ground—and his breathing is becoming labored.

I don’t give a damn. I don’t give a damn if he can’t breathe, don’t give a damn, in that moment, if I end up crushing his goddamn throat. The man’s a monster—a rapist, a child trafficker, a drug dealer and God only knows what else. He’s a pathetic excuse for a human being, a disgusting little worm who has spent the evening fishing—just to see what he could catch.

Turns out he ended up catching a hell of a lot more than he bargained for and I have no problem being the one to drive that lesson home.

Behind me, I can hear his bodyguards yelling in Russian, can tell from the scuffling that they’re trying to get through but are being held back by my own security team—though who knows for how long that’s going to last. And while there’s a small part of my brain that’s still rational, that’s telling me I should put him down and walk away before things get any worse, it’s definitely not the part in control right now. Especially not when I think about him touching Aria, his filthy hands on her ass—or any other part of her.

“Hey, hey!” Suddenly there’s a hand on my shoulder and a familiar voice asking, “Everything okay here, man?”

It’s Ethan, popping up again like a bad penny. Or a best friend. “This is between me and him. Stay out of it.”

“I get that,” he tells me, but his hand is tight on my shoulder and he’s not letting go. “But why don’t you take a few seconds to decide if this is really how you want this to go. If it is, I’ll step back and you can have your security guys bring him somewhere you can beat the crap out of the bastard—hell, I might even help you. You’re a fair guy, so I’m sure he deserves it.

“But I’m just not sure choking him in the middle of the most popular casino on the Strip is really the way to go. If you want to stay out of jail, I mean.” His voice is totally cool, totally collected. But there’s an underlying tension to it, something that tells me he’s going to get in the middle of this no matter what I say. It pisses me off, makes me want to take a swing at him.

At the same time, though, his little speech gave me the time I needed to calm down, to think clearly. To figure out that Ethan is right, no matter how much I wish he wasn’t. Killing a man in the middle of my father’s casino probably isn’t the wisest choice I’ve ever made—no matter how much he deserves it.

I ease back on my grip a little. I don’t let him go, not completely, but I make sure he can breathe. It only takes a few minutes before the sickly gray color he’d been turning slowly dissipates, his face returning to its florid complexion fairly rapidly.

“Look, Rubinov, since you seem a little slow on the uptake, and didn’t understand what I told you the last time we talked, I’m going to explain again now. Slowly. And you’re going to nod if you understand what I’m saying. Okay?”

He doesn’t respond, just looks at me like he wants to kill me. In response, I tighten my hand around his throat, wait until he’s gasping. And then I say, “Nod if you understand what I’m saying to you—now.”

It takes a minute, long, precious moments ticking by while I wait for him to nod his head up and down. He finally does, so I loosen my grip on his throat again. This time he curses me loud and long and in Russian. I don’t understand a word he’s saying and it wouldn’t matter even if I did. I don’t give a fuck who he is or what he has to say. He doesn’t intimidate me. Not now. Not ever.

“You and your goons are going to walk out of my hotel under your own power. You’re not going to stop to collect your winnings if there are any. You’re not going to make a detour by the bar to pick up another prostitute or order another vodka. You are going to leave this casino. Now. Or I am going to have you carried out by my security. And if that happens, I promise you, your life won’t be worth the air it takes for you to breathe.

“Don’t look at them,” I order when his eyes dart over my shoulder. “Look at me. And maybe you’re so stupid, you don’t know who I am or what I can do. If so, that’s your own idiocy at work because you should always know your enemy before you decide to beat your chest and pick a fight. But you screwed up this time. You think it’s my father’s connections here in Vegas that you need to look out for, but that’s not the case. I don’t do things the same way my father did.”

I tighten my hand on his throat one last time, just to make sure I have his attention. “You’ve made your money by staying in the shadows, under the radar of Interpol and the CIA, Homeland Security and ATF and anyone else who might have a problem with your extracurri
cular activities.” He looks shocked, so I smile, but it’s a bloodless smile, one meant to intimidate him instead of set him at ease. “But, you see, I’ve spent the last ten years working in a field where I came into contact with people from those organizations every day. I know a lot of people who can make your life very uncomfortable. And I won’t hesitate to give them everything my head of security has dug up on you if I ever so much as hear your name in my casino again. You’ll be running from every alphabet soup agency in America, Europe and Asia before I’m done with you.