My eyes watched transfixed as a piece of her long blonde hair, which had obviously been piled neatly on top of her head when she’d started work, fell out haphazardly and brushed across her prominent cheek bone. My fingers twitched on top of my bicep with something that I didn’t quite recognise, as she lifted a shaking hand and tucked the piece of hair behind her ear. To me she was showing how she was beginning to literally fall apart, she was vulnerable, and a vulnerable woman was my kryptonite.
I watched her expertly, with one flick of her wrist, turn over the new card she’d been dealt, then her face subsequently crumble and fall. I’d seen it so many times before as it was how I made my living, but the look on her face devastated me.
Barbara Daniels was the sister of Brody, who sang lead in Default Distraction, the same band my little brother Cade had found fame and fortune with. The guys in his band were also where Cade had found the solace and escape he had needed, away from our family at a time when I needed him well out of the way of the war that had engulfed us. As the years had gone on, while I was busy sorting out the consequences of the damage our father had done, they’d taken care of my little brother. In doing so, they had become like distant family to me, so I helped them out whenever a situation arose where I could. Within a large Sicilian family doing favours for each other, if that’s what you want to call them, is what kept us close, they tied us together to form strong family bonds. It made us indebted to each other, although generally as our family’s “Godfather” useful people were nearly always indebted to me. It was how our family had worked for centuries. I knew that the other guys in the band had helped Cade to deal with his past, and his demons. This had left me indebted to them whether they understood that or not.
We’d been here before, Barbara and me.
I’d notified Brody when she’d needed help before. Hell, I’d hoped that the rehab he’d placed her into had sorted her out once and for all, but I could see by looking at her body language on the screen in front of me that she’d fallen back down into the hole again. The way her face was now flushed in panic and carried a light sheen of sweat, showed me that things weren’t working out in her favour.
I need to help her. But even more disturbing was the fact I wanted to help her.
I was still busy staring at her, because even under pressure and wearing her cheap uniform, Barbara Daniels was one amazing looking woman.
‘Yeah?’ Franco’s voice interrupted my train of thought.
I turned my head away from observing her on the screens to look at him, he had his first two fingers pressed tightly into his right ear as he listened to the voice coming from his earpiece. I twisted my head at him in question.
‘Raul has just informed me that Miss Daniels has eyes on her… some of Barzini’s men are in the casino, Boss.’
‘Get her up here now and get Raul to escort them from my building.’
Without saying another word to me, he started to relay to Raul my exact instructions and turned to leave the room at the same time to retrieve Barbara. This instantaneous reaction to my instructions was why I paid Franco the obscene amount of money I did.
As my door shut behind him, I inhaled a calming breath. My whole body had jumped up quickly onto high alert as yet again my blood pressure rose higher, making every part of me twitch with the adrenalin that my sudden anger had released around my system.
What the hell was Barzini playing at?
‘Call Antonio Barzini,’ I shouted out loud into my office.
Chapter Five
Barbara
‘Miss Daniels.’ I heard a deep voice behind me, closed my eyes briefly and let out a soft sigh. When I opened them again, I found the others sitting at the same table staring at me in question. ‘Would you come with me please?’
‘Shit,’ I mumbled under my breath. Without turning around, I knew who I was going to find behind me. I couldn’t remember his name, but I knew the voice and it belonged to Nico Morello’s head of security.
You stupid woman, you shouldn’t have come in here. But I had, because so many other doors were now closed to me.
Brody will find out.
I was so fed up with my pathetic life, I could cry. I had just wanted one last attempt at getting my money back and then I could have paid everyone off. The cards had been going well up to about thirty minutes ago, when once again lady luck had turned against me and I’d begun to lose hand after hand.
You should have stopped when it was going well. I heard the voice in my head and let a small laugh leave my mouth at my own stupidity. Because even I recognised that I had a problem, but the fact was I didn’t know how to stop. I’d spent time in rehab courtesy of my brother, who’d employed countless therapists for me to talk to and had bailed me out time after time. After everything he’d paid out for, I was ashamed to be in the same position again, but the roll of the dice and the flip of the cards gave me a buzz I couldn’t find anywhere else in my life, because my life was an empty void of nothing.
Resigned to whatever my fate was, I started to pick up the small stack of chips in front of me and like the pretend high roller I was, I tipped the croupier with a few of them.
‘It’s okay,’ I offered the enquiring eyes taking in everything they could about my interaction with the suit behind me, ‘we’re old friends, aren’t we?’ I tried so hard to sound confident, but knew I’d failed spectacularly.
I turned around on my seat slowly and stepped down gingerly. I hadn’t eaten in nearly twelve hours and I couldn’t trust myself not to make an even bigger fool of myself than I already had. Grabbing hold of the walnut-edged, green baize table I started to bend down low to pick up my bag from the floor.
‘Allow me.’ I could hear the pity in his voice as the guy whose face was familiar, but whose name I couldn’t have remembered even if my life depended on it, bent down to sweep up my bag with one arm.
‘Thank you,’ I whispered back to him, as the situation I was in and its probable ensuing magnitude started to play on my mind.
Once he was back upright, still holding onto my bag, he used his other hand to take a gentle but secure hold on my arm. With apprehension building up inside of me I let him begin to guide me to wherever his boss had demanded he should take me. I walked along beside him, taking two steps to each one of his enormous great strides with my head cast down in shame. My eyes followed the brightly coloured carpet as it twirled and danced ahead of me in its bright reds and golds. The casinos were all the same in Vegas, brightly coloured with flashing lights to tempt you in. They promised you everything and once they’d taken all you had to give, they spat you out like the trash you were.
And here I was, the trash.
Suddenly, the toes of my worn-out black shoes hit the gold coloured metal edging strip of the carpet. We had reached the hard wood of one of the many walkways that threaded themselves through the casino and had strangely come to a complete standstill. I lifted my head to try to work out why and heard a gasp leave my mouth as I saw two of Barzini’s henchmen being walked out of the casino by several of Morello’s security.
What had I been thinking?
It was an unwritten rule, or perhaps it was written down somewhere in the “mafia handbook,” that other families didn’t enter the property of their rivals. Even a nobody like me understood that. I grasped what had very nearly just happened and knew that it would all have been down to me and my stupidity. I owed Barzini so much money that his men had taken the decision to follow me in here. God knows what would have become of me if they’d managed to lay their hands on me before the huge man stood next to me had. Luckily for me it seemed, I’d been seen by the security and rescued.