CHAPTER SEVEN
“How angelic of you.”
IT’S DARK OUTSIDE WHEN a knock finally comes at my door again. I swing it open to a bruised and disheveled Ellie. Her pale blue eyes are red and puffy, her cheekbone darkened from a nasty shiner, black and blue bruises scattered over her arms and legs.
I throw myself at her. “Oh, thank God! You’re here, you’re out. Thank goodness.”
She hugs me back, sobbing into my neck. “I thought…I thought they were going to kill me.”
“No, babe. You’re safe now. It’s fine. I took care of it.”
She draws back to look at me. “How? Where did you get the money?”
I lift one shoulder then let it fall. “An old friend helped.”
“The one who brought me here?”
I nod and comb my fingers through her matted hair. “How are you feeling? Are you hungry? Come, sit. I’ll make you some tea.”
I help her to the couch then put the kettle on.
“I don’t think your old friend likes me very much,” Ellie says, examining one of the bruises on her thigh. “He was so serious I thought he was taking me to kill me.”
“Oh, don’t mind him. It’s not you. He’s just an asshole, period,” I tell her. “Where is he anyway?”
“He said to tell you he would be back in half an hour.”
I grab some ingredients from the fridge to fix her a sandwich. “So, you know how I said he helped me with this?” I say. “That, uh, came with some strings.”
She pulls her feet up on the couch. “What kind of strings?”
I rest my hip against the counter so I can see her as I make the sandwich. “It includes me moving back home.”
Her chest rises and falls, almost as if in relief. “Oh.”
My eyebrows pull together. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
I point the knife I’m holding at her. “That look of relief you’re wearing like a fucking hazmat suit.”
“Well…” she bites her lip, looking chagrin.
“Well, what?”
“I kinda want to go back with Slim,” she blurts. “I’ve wanted to for a while now, but I didn’t know how to broach it with you because I know how you feel about working with him.”
“Ellie, Jesus, he’s a dirtbag.”
“Yeah, I know, but we still make money with him. And look what happened to me. This would have never happened if we were with him. This is the kind of stuff he protects us from. Is seventy-thirty unfair? Yes. But at least we never experienced anything like this. He removes the danger and makes it fun, and to me, I think that’s worth it.” She shakes her head and emits a whiny noise. “Honestly, Lexi, I really fucking hate being broke. It sucks.”
If she had followed my instructions and kept her head down, none of this would have even happened to begin with. I’m in debt because she blatantly disregarded everything I told her, then lied when she was caught, dragging me right into hell with her.
I stare at her, burning with indignation, but bite my tongue. Doesn’t make sense blowing up at her at this point. It is what it is. She’s out from the clutches of the Castellos, alive and well, and that’s all that matters. Whatever she chooses to do after this is on her.
This is quite clearly the end of our relationship anyway. I can’t ever trust someone who would deliberately put my life in danger.
“I just want to make and save enough to go back home and start a business, you know?” she continues. “I want to open a spa.”
The kettle starts whistling and I switch it off. “That’s nice,” I say. But I’m done caring. A thought niggles at the back of my mind that maybe she did this on purpose, as a harebrained way of getting me to turn to Slim for help so we’d be forced to go back to working with him. But I honestly don’t want to believe she’s that dumb, so I push the thought away.
When I’m done with the sandwich and tea, I take them to the table.
She winces as she makes her way over. I don’t know Ellie’s reason for counting cards. She has never been open about her life. Most of us who worked with Slim had a reason—debt, college tuition, medical bills, or just plain greed. We’d all talked about our “whys” at some point or another, but never Ellie. She’s always been secretive and private and camera shy when it came to social media, opting for shots where she wasn’t looking at the camera.
It’s never bothered me before, but for some reason, it does now. Because as I watch her sit and take a bite of the sandwich, I realize that even though I’ve spent the last few years with her, living together, eating together, sleeping together, I do not know who this girl is. It’s a startling realization, to say the least.
That said, the guilt I felt about leaving her earlier is no longer there.
Instead, all I feel right now, surprisingly, is relief.
~
BY THE TIME Trent returns, I’ve fed Ellie, helped her with a bath, and given her pain meds. As disappointed as I am in her, I choose compassion. There’s no way I could just leave her to her own devices while she’s this bruised and battered, so I called Slim on her behalf, and he agreed to come get her in the morning.
As Trent walks in, picks up my overstuffed suitcase like it weighs nothing, and walks out with it, Ellie whispers, “Just saying, now that I know he’s not here to kill me, your friend is really hot. Like out-of-this-world hot.”
“Is he?” I retort. “I might have noticed if I wasn’t blinded by the fact that I owe him damn near a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Will he take payment in sex?” she asks, biting her lip. “Because I wouldn’t mind making those payments.”
I roll my eyes. “Go sit your horny ass down and get some rest.” I pull up the handle of my suitcase. “I’ll text you when I get to L.A.”
As I start to leave, she lurches and throws her arms around me. “I’m going to miss you so much.”
“I’ll miss you, too.” I hug her back. “Just…just be careful with Slim, okay?”
“I will.”
Trent’s presence shadows the doorway just then. He gestures for me to give him my suitcase.
“It’s fine,” I tell him, “I can take it down.”
He ignores me and pries the handle from my grasp. Then he looks to Ellie. “You good? You got cash?”
“I-um—I think I—Just a li—”
Visibly impatient, he gets out his wallet, plucks out several hundred-dollar bills and thrusts them toward her.
Um, what? I could use those eight hundred dollars! Who’s the one in debt here?
As Ellie shuffles forward and takes the cash, he tells her, “Make good choices.”
And then he all but drags me out of there.
~
“ELLIE SAID YOU were cold toward her,” I say once we’ve left the apartment complex and are out in Vegas’s night traffic.
“So?”
“So, she was coming out of being held hostage and abused, the least you could have done was show her a kind face.”
“Did she thank you?” he asks.
“What?”
“Did she thank you for getting her out?”
“Ye—” I stop and think back on our conversations from the moment she walked through the door. I’m not sure how I didn’t realize it until now, but…no, she didn’t thank me. Not once.
“She might be your friend, Lexi, but you’re not hers,” Trent says when I stumble over answering. “I know her kind. She’ll hang you out to dry and leave you for the dogs. Definitely not the kind of person you should be pulling these kinds of stunts with. When someone shows you they’ll intentionally put your life in danger to save theirs, you chop them off at the head and never look back.”
“Okay…” I chew on my lip. “I mean, she has her flaws, but she’s not a bad person.”
“She’s not a good person either.”
And I’m clearly a terrible judge of character. “If you believe that, why did you just give her eight hundred dollars?”
He tosses me a quick glance. “Didn’t say I’m a bad person. I’m a fucking angel. A beautiful cherub.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s blasphemy.” I yawn and arch my back into a stretch. “Are we driving back?”
“Yup.”
“Well, can we go to a drive-thru or something? I’ll need something to munch on for this long-ass drive.”
“Usually, when I take a woman to a drive-thru, we fuck afterward.”
Feeling depleted, I throw my head back against the headrest and close my eyes. “How angelic of you.”
His deep chuckle rumbles over me.