Nothing. “Dammit.”
“What’s wrong?” Gianna returned, clutching a crumpled business card.
Benito shook his head. “Phone’s flat.”
“Use your other one.”
“I can’t. It’s for work.”
“So? Why—”
“G. I can charge this one in the car while I get the cash. Can you call this dude and ask him to come over? He might say yes to you.”
Gianna flattened the business card, already tapping the number into her phone. “He’d come if you asked him too. He’s nice, I swear.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Benito made tracks to the front door. “I don’t care if he’s nice. Just that he shows up and takes this money from us without fucking us over for the rest of it.”
“He won’t fuck us over. He already told Mum he doesn’t want us to leave.”
“Good for him. Don’t swear.”
Benito backed up and kissed the top of Gianna’s head, then he dashed from the flat and down to his car. Behind the wheel, he plugged his phone into the charger. It flashed to life as he started the engine, and he tapped into his banking app.
The online personal loan application took four minutes. The response came back in twenty-nine seconds.
Your credit application has been refused.
Fuck. A heavy weight settled in Benito’s chest. He put the car in gear and gunned the engine.
He had a hole to dig, and somehow it felt symbolic.
Literal.
As if the only direction he’d ever go was down to the fucking bottom.
8
“You have to come. Please. My brother went out to get the money, but he can only get cash.”
Mickey suppressed a sigh, eyeing the clock on the car dashboard. He was halfway to London for a meeting with Dom Ramos, his other boss at DOSHA Housing, heading in the opposite direction to Barnfield Court and Mrs De Luca’s pleading daughter. “I’m not available for a home visit today. I can come on Monday if—”
“But you said it has to be today. Or our account would go back to the council.”
Mickey didn’t have the heart to tell her it probably already had. Isha was in that meeting right now, and Mickey had already told him the De Lucas had failed to make a payment. The five o’clock deadline was a formality. “Even if I can get there,” he said gently, “there isn’t much I can do with a handful of cash. You have to make the payment on your account. Is there a way you can do it online?”
“I don’t know. It’s my brother’s money.”
“What’s your brother’s name—”
The call ended, signal cut off in a black spot on the M1. Cursing, Mickey banged his fist on the steering wheel. He’d been hanging on for a sign from the De Lucas all damn day, and now it was too late. Isha hadn’t wanted to hand their account over any more than Mickey, but his hands had been tied. “I’m sorry, Mickey. I can’t compromise our relationship with the council when we have so many other families to worry about.”
Mickey had understood. He still did. But the guilt in his heart was heavy. His eyes burned and his chest hurt. Fuck this.
He pulled off the motorway into Toddington Services and called Dom Ramos. “I need to reach Isha,” he said before Dom could speak. “The account he’s passing back to the council has come through.”
Paper rustled at the other end. Dom was less technologically inclined than Isha and worked out of a leather-bound notebook, a much-sharpened pencil tucked behind his ear. “Which account?”
“The De Lucas.”
“At Barnfield Court?”
“Yeah. They had until five o’clock to make a payment, but I jumped the gun and told Isha they hadn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because they haven’t reached out since this started and I let that cloud my judgement. It’s my fault. I should’ve waited.”
“But Isha knows they have until five?”
“I think so, unless he’s forgotten.”
“He won’t forget,” Dom said. “If they have until five, he won’t give them up until Monday morning. It’s why we schedule these meetings on a Friday. It gives us more time for shit like this. How much did they pay?”
“I don’t know yet. They want me to go over and collect cash.”
“So I can stop freaking out that I’m never going to make our meeting in time?”
“I’d say so. I’m about to turn my car round and burn in the opposite direction.”
Dom’s dry laugh filtered through the car speakers. “Of course you are. Okay, I’ll ring Isha and let him know. He’ll take my call in the meeting.”
“That’s what I thought, or I’d have called him myself. Sorry to bother you.”
“You didn’t. It’s me that should be sorry you’re facing the wrong direction for no good reason. But listen, Mickey?”
“Yeah?”
“I know it’s hard,” Dom said. “But you need to be clear headed about this. If you rock up there and they hand you fifty quid, it’s not enough. They need to make a substantial payment and commit to a repayment plan on top of keeping up with the rent going forward. If they can’t do that before Monday or give us a plausible reason why not, it’s over for us.”
Mickey breathed through his nose, long and slow. “Isha said two thousand. Can we budge on that if they don’t have it all?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Since when?”
“Since now,” Dom said. “I trust you to make a good decision. Just keep me posted, okay? So I can simmer Isha down if it goes tits up.”
Another sigh escaped Mickey. Though Dom couldn’t see him, he nodded. “I will. Thank you.”
“No sweat. Drive safe.”
Dom hung up. For a moment, Mickey was frozen in place, then his gaze fell on the time: Three o’clock. Fuck. If he had any chance of hitting the bank with the De Luca cash before closing time, he had to go.
He tapped in a call to the number Mrs De Luca’s daughter had called him from. It rang and rang as he drove out of the service station and around the roundabout to the northbound junction until it eventually clicked into voicemail, and Mickey considered the possibility that he was wasting his time. That he’d get back to Bletchley to face a closed front door and the fact that nothing had changed. But he had to try. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t lost sleep over the De Luca case. Only fantasising about Benito had kept him from climbing the walls.
Unbidden, heat rippled through Mickey as he rejoined the motorway traffic. Stop it. You don’t have time to think about that right now. But as committed as he was to helping the De Luca family keep their home, pushing Benito out of his mind was impossible. His dark eyes. His soft hair.
His addictive inked skin and cut body.
Even his rough voice made Mickey shiver. I wanna see him.
And maybe not just to fuck. Benito’s company was . . . intriguing. Mickey had replayed every moment they’d spent together more times than he cared to admit, but was nowhere near close to cataloguing it all. Each time, something else gave him pause.