“I knew I shouldn’t give him the money, knew I should make him go into rehab again. But this time he owed money—real money—to the wrong people. If I didn’t bail him out…I didn’t want to think about what would happen to him. To Janet.”
I freeze in horror at his words. Wrong people. Card parlors. Bookies. Money. And suddenly I’m much more disturbed than I was before he started this part of the story. It was bad enough to think that Sebastian’s best friend had gone into a downward spiral that had ended in an overdose and death. Hell, I was sure that’s where this was going. I was prepared for it.
But this…to find out that he’d been involved with the Mafia, because when you start talking about broken teeth and “the wrong people,” everyone knows that that’s who you’re referring to. Especially when you’re talking about gambling debts and Las Vegas. The mob rules it all around here.
I find myself praying that it was an overdose that killed him, with drugs paid for by Sebastian’s money. Or that it was a car accident with Sebastian behind the wheel. Or some freak accident involving New Year’s Eve firecrackers or a bowling ball or nuclear war. A mistake. Something, anything, but what I am suddenly so desperately afraid that it was.
Please, I pray to a god I’m not sure I believe in, to a universe that hasn’t heard my prayers in years. But it’s to no avail. There is no divine intervention, no miracle that turns back the clock. Instead, there is just Sebastian and me and the wild agony that suddenly runs between us.
Unable to bear the uncertainty anymore, I prompt, “So you gave him the money.”
“Of course, I did.” He nods. “What else was I supposed to do? Let them come back and finish him off? Let them set fire to him in the middle of the Strip, like they promised? There was nothing else I could have done.”
I don’t disagree. I know how the Mafia works—you don’t grow up in Vegas without a healthy understanding of what they do and how they do it. Protection money, racketeering, gambling, drugs, guns. In this city, it all runs through the mob. Getting mixed up with them—owing them money—is a really, really bad idea.
“That wasn’t the end of it.” It’s a statement, not a question.
“No.” He shakes his head and I reach out for him again. For the first time, it occurs to me how cold he is. How much it’s taking out of him to tell his story, physically as well as emotionally. Once it registers, I burrow into him, getting as close as I can before he starts with the final piece of the story. Or at least I assume it’s final—I can’t imagine that Dylan has much farther to fall.
“By the time I’m done paying off his latest gambling debts, I’m pretty much tapped out. I have a few thousand left, barely enough to get me by to my twentieth birthday, when I get access to the next chunk of my trust fund. In a little under two years, he’d managed to burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars—and I’d let him. When I figured out that we were both responsible for what had happened—” He shakes his head. “It was a shit realization. I told him I had nothing left, told him I couldn’t do this for him again. He agreed, promised it wouldn’t happen again. The last thing I did on my way out of town was contact a Gamblers Anonymous program for him. Of course, the first suggestion they had was to get the hell out of Vegas, something Dylan seemed pathologically and emotionally unable to do.”
He grabs hold of his glass like he’s going to take another sip, but it’s empty, so he ends up rolling it between his hands instead and staring off into the distance. My insides are churning now, my head is throbbing and I’m regretting making him tell the story. Regretting that I ever heard of Dylan, ever heard of Janet. Because Sebastian doesn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve what Dylan put him through and he sure as hell doesn’t deserve the rehashing I’ve forced on him.
I want to tell him to stop before he says something I can’t ignore, can’t pretend away. Not because I think I’m going to blame him, but because I know I won’t. In this case, I know exactly who’s to blame and it isn’t Sebastian Caine, no matter what he’s been telling himself for the last decade.
Not sure what else to do, I grab his face between my hands and kiss him. Hard. “Get it over with,” I say when I finally pull away. For both of our sakes.
“I don’t hear from him for a while, but then I get a call a few days before spring break—and my twentieth birthday. He’s in trouble again, real trouble, and they’re going to kill him if he doesn’t come up with the two hundred thousand dollars he owes them.” He pauses, gets lost in his own head until sheer will alone drags him out. “I tell him I don’t have anything, tell him I’m as close to broke as I’ve ever been. But he begs. And for the first time since I’ve known Dylan, he sounds afraid. Even after he’d been beat up so badly, he’d been half-defiant, half-resigned. But in that moment, when I was standing in my dorm room in Boston and he was here, alone and in debt to people you should never owe money to, he sounded afraid.
“He begged me to help him, begged me not to let him die. And though there was a part of me that was sure I was getting played, it didn’t matter. Because if I wasn’t…if his life really was on the line, I had to do something.”
“So, what did you do?”
“What any rich boy does when he’s in trouble.” He sounds so bitter it breaks my heart. “I called my father. Explained the situation. Begged him to advance me the money on my trust fund, just for the few weeks until I turned twenty. He argued with me, but in the end he agreed. Told me it was the one and only time it was going to happen. I agreed, partly because I was desperate to get the money to Dylan and partly because I knew he was right. I couldn’t keep doing this, couldn’t keep bailing Dylan out whenever things got rough. We’d both end up on the street.”
He pushes me away now—not to be rude but because he’s filled with a nervous energy that won’t let him sit still. He starts pacing from one end of the office to the other, head bowed and hands tucked into his pockets. I’ve never seen him look so defeated.
“Something went wrong,” I prompt, when I figure out that he’s done talking. That he has nothing else to say.
He snorts. “You could say that.”
“He used the money for drugs instead of to pay off his gambling debts?” It’s the only guess I’ve got, the only thing that makes sense.
“I wish. Then I could find a way to blame him for the whole thing. No,” he says, shoving a hand through his hair. “Dylan didn’t spend the money on something else. He never got the money.”
It’s my turn to stare as I try to assimilate his words. “What do you mean? How could he not—”
“My dad refused to pay. He promised me one thing, but when Dylan came to collect the money, he got a major fuck-you instead. My dad never gave him a cent, even after he told me it was all taken care of. And the Mafia did what they’re known for. They set Dylan up as an example for everyone else who owed them money to see, and then they killed him. Left his body in a ditch next to Mobile Square,” he says bitterly, mentioning the small group of backroom card parlors and gambling houses that the mob runs about fifteen minutes off the Strip.
“I was at school—hell I was at a party—when I got the call,” Sebastian tells me. “And it wasn’t from my dad. It was from Janet, who ended up yelling and cursing and crying at my answering machine because I was out partying. Coming home to that, listening as she demanded to know why I didn’t come through, why, the only time it really mattered, I left her kid out to dry.” He picks up his glass off the table, throws it as hard as he can. It hits the wall, shatters.
And Sebastian curls in on himself, this proud, beautiful man all but staggering under the weight of loss and grief and misplaced guilt.
I’m sick. I’m literally sick—head whirling, stomach churning, body revolting—and it’s all I can do not to run to the nearest bathroom and hurl up the peanut butter sandwich I force-fed myself before coming here. Because this is bad. This is really bad. And with my past, I don’t have a clue how to fix it.
So, in the end, I do the
only thing I can. I cross to Sebastian, wrap my arms around him. And murmur, “It wasn’t your fault. I know you blame yourself, I know you want to shoulder responsibility for everything that happened, but it wasn’t your fault.”
He shakes his head, and I notice for the first time just how pale his skin is, just how dead his own eyes are. “Sebastian, listen to me. You’ve beat yourself up for ten years over this and it’s not. Your. Fault.”
He shoves away from me. Not hard enough to hurt but definitely hard enough to get me to drop my arms. To let him go. When he’s standing next to the window, staring out over the deceptive beauty of Las Vegas’s glittering lights, he says, “I was getting laid while my best friend was being murdered. How the fuck is that not my fault?”
Chapter Four
Sebastian
I keep waiting for her to walk out. For her to decide the story I’m telling is too real, too raw, too brutal for her to listen to. Because while I don’t give her the details of Dylan’s death—the catalogue of damage that to this day takes my breath away, I’m pretty sure it’s self-explanatory how I failed him. How he counted on me to take care of things, to take care of him, and I messed up.
I really messed up.
I trusted my father when I knew better. I believed him when he said he’d do what needed to be done—especially since the money was owed to Nico Valducci, the man my father had been in bed with for years. The man whose fingerprints are, to this day, all over the Atlantis and the Tuscany and every other project my father is involved in in this town.
“He could have stopped it,” I whisper when it feels like I’m going to explode if I don’t say it out loud. If I don’t give voice to the deepest, darkest kernel of my shame. “To this day, my father is business associates—friends—with the man Dylan owed money to. Even if he didn’t want to pay, he could have stopped his execution with barely a word. He didn’t do that.”
And Dylan suffered because of it. He died because my father wanted to get me away from him. He died because my father considered him expendable, a toy that had long outlived its usefulness. And because I was too lazy to follow through. I should have checked. Should have made sure my father did what he’d said he would. But there were mid-terms and papers due, parties and the girl I was fucking at the time—a girl whose name I can’t even remember now. I just remember that instead of calling Dylan, instead of checking on him, I went back to her dorm room. Fucked her. And when it was over, when I got back to my own place, it was to find a message from a hysterical Janet telling me that they’d found Dylan’s body.
How I could have fucked up so completely—how I could have yielded control to my father like it was nothing—I still don’t understand. It’s a mistake that will haunt me the rest of my life, a mistake I’ll never in a million years forgive myself for.
I wait for Aria’s judgment, for the disgust she must be feeling to show in her eyes. But for long seconds, she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, I’m not sure she even breathes as she stands there staring at me, huge tears glistening in her dark eyes. Turning them liquid and lovely. So, so lovely.
Another time I might appreciate the way she looks—tousled and beautiful and just a little bit ravaged. Like she’s gone a few playful rounds with me and lost. Or won, whatever works for the metaphor.
Except there’s nothing playful about the story I just told, nothing playful about how I’m feeling. Catharsis is supposed to make people feel better, but I’ve never felt more like shit than I do right now. Except maybe in the days—and weeks—after I got the call from Janet telling me that Dylan was dead. And that I had killed him.
“You should probably go,” I tell her after the silence stretches between us like a jagged desert canyon. “Tell one of the guys at the valet station you need a ride home and they’ll arrange it. Or they’ll get you your car—whichever you’d prefer.”
“What I’d prefer is for you to sit down and listen to me.” She grabs my hand, tugs me toward the couch. But I don’t move. I can’t. If I do, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I only know that it won’t be pretty.
She catches on eventually, stops trying to pull me where I don’t want to go. And instead gets super close to me, fitting her luscious body against my own. And then her hands are on my face and she’s tilting my head until I’m looking her straight in the eye. Until every breath I take is one she exhaled first.
There’s an odd kind of comfort in that, a rightness that I don’t have a fucking clue how to assimilate right now.
“It’s not your fault,” she tells me, her beautiful dark eyes boring into mine. “It’s not your fault.”
“That’s not true.” I turn my head, try to look away, but she’s right there. In my face. In my space.
“It’s not your fault,” she tells me again. No fuss, no muss, no ridiculous platitudes that I got by the bucket load when he died. Just her and me and the lie that she can’t let go of.
“Aria—”
“It’s not your fault.”
I tug on her hands, pry them off my face. “Stop.”
“You stop.” She grabs on to my shirt, refuses to let me turn away, walk away. Refuses to let me do anything but stare her straight in the eyes and listen to the words she keeps repeating like a mantra. “It wasn’t your fault, Sebastian. Dylan made his own choices in life—bad choices, dangerous choices, deadly choices. What happened to him—it wasn’t your fault.”
“I let him down.”
“He let himself down.”
“I didn’t help him—”
“You tried to help him. You were betrayed.”
“I should have known better. I should have realized—”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she tells me again. “I swear to you, Sebastian, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Stop saying that!” I say and even I can tell that I’m getting louder, more desperate sounding. But doesn’t she get it? Doesn’t she understand that she can’t do this to me? Not now, not today, when I just stood in that parking lot and listened while Dylan’s mother called me a murderer. Not now when all the memories are raw and real and so, so fresh.
“I can’t,” she tells me, her hands soft against my arms, my chest, my face. “Not when it’s the truth.”
There’s a part of me that wants to stay here forever, right here, in this fairy tale that she’s creating. In a world where I’m not culpable for my best friend’s death and all the shit that’s come after it. But this isn’t Wonderland and I’m not Lewis Carroll. I can’t bend time, can’t reshape things just to strike my fancy.
“You have to stop,” I tell her again, injecting as much force and rage into my voice as I can.
She doesn’t even flinch. “I’m not going to. It’s not your fault, Sebastian. What happened to Dylan was a tragedy. It was awful and horrific and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but that doesn’t make it your fault. None of this is your fault.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I do understand, better than you could possibly imagine. There was nothing you could have done to save Dylan, nothing that could have made this thing turn out the way you wanted it to.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I’m not.”
“You weren’t there.”
“I didn’t have to be. I know you, Sebastian. I know what a good person you are and I know that you did everything you could to save Dylan. What happened to him was out of your control.”
The words slam into me like bullets and my much-touted control shatters like glass. Like nothing. The iron grip I’ve kept on my emotions—on myself—for so long rends into a million unfixable pieces.
I grab Aria then, yank her to me. Shut her up the only way I know how, with my mouth against hers. With my tongue and teeth and lips sucking, licking, biting at hers sharply enough to cause pain. To draw blood.
She gasps, her hands coming up to my shoulders and I figure this is it. This is when she finally understands and pushes me away.
But she doesn’t push, doesn’t try to wriggle free from what I know is a punishing grip. Instead, she tangles her fingers in my shirt and pulls me closer. She opens to me, giving herself to me completely when I have never been less deserving.
Frustrated, furious, aroused, I rip my lips from hers. Whirl her around and slam her back against the wall—not with enough force to hurt, but definitely hard enough to soothe the savage pressure building to a boiling point inside of me.
“Do it,” she tells me, her voice low and husky in my ear.
I think about stopping, think about stepping back and walking away before things get completely out of control between us. Pushing Aria’s boundaries is fun, taking her farther, deeper, than she’s ever been before arouses me like nothing ever has. Nothing ever will.
But this is different. This is her deliberately provoking me, deliberately trying to get me to lose control in a desperate need to appease the violence inside of me. It’s wrong. It’s dangerous. And I want it—want her—more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. Even redemption.
Knowing that should stop me, should have me pulling back and walking away as fast as I possibly can. But I’m caught in her web now, completely wrapped up in the sweet surrender of her demand, the desperate demands of her hands and body and soul.
Crushing her mouth with my own, I grab on to the front collar of her shirt, where the first button brings the two sides together. And then I yank hard. Buttons go flying in all directions and the shirt falls to the floor in tatters.
“This is my work shirt,” she murmurs against my lips.
“Yeah, well, now it’s my play shirt.” I reach down, scoop it up from where it fell and rip first one sleeve off and then the other.
She’s gaping at me now, eyes wide and wild. “What are you doing?”
In response, I pull her hands together behind her back, tie them with one of the sleeves. There’s a lot of give in the material and because I know it’ll relax at the first tug from her, I tie it a little too tight. Then double knot it to make sure she doesn’t get free before I let her free.