Risk Me (Vegas Knights Book 2) Read online

  “Your timing is off! Focus, LeVan, damn it!”

  The words came from Sly O’Malley, the man who’d appointed himself our de facto leader.

  We let him get away with it in part because I was too fucking lazy to do it and Mac didn’t care enough.

  But if he kept jumping down my throat…

  As he came stomping my way, his gingery red hair looking like it hadn’t seen a brush in two days, his eyes hooded, wearing a tight t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of motorcycle boots, I figured out pretty fast what the problem was.

  “You’re still half-drunk from whatever party you fell into last night, asshole,” I advised. “Lay off.”

  Under most circumstances, I tended to play peacemaker and Mac was the one telling Sly to kiss his ass.

  It’s not that we weren’t friends.

  We were.

  Each one of us would die for the other.

  For the longest time—even now—we were all each other had.

  After Thea had given me her ‘Until later, John’ letter, I’d all but poured myself into a bottle for a while, something I’m still not too proud of. I’d almost lost the job at the nightclub where I’d been slowly but steadily building myself a name.

  That was where I’d met Mac. His real name was Devin Xavier Mackenzie Knight, but that was a fucking mouthful. Friends like me called him Mac.

  A few years later, we’d headed out west and hit Reno. There, we’d met Sly and eventually, we’d come to Vegas. We didn’t exactly own the town, but we sure as hell had made our mark in the few years since we’d arrived, going from an opening act to having our own show at a hotel we’d bought ourselves—okay, Mac and I had fronted the money. The three of us rotated nights, although we had a big show every week with the three of us.

  That was the only other illusion I committed to and…

  “The hell my timing was off,” I snapped when Sly got in my face, sneering at me. He stank like he’d just gotten off a two-day bender. It was possible he had. Sometimes, the man’s demons seemed to want to eat him alive.

  That didn’t mean they got to take a bite out of my ass.

  “I almost missed my cue because you had your head somewhere else!” Sly shouted.

  Mac got between us.

  Normally, that was my job.

  But Mac didn’t use the tactics I would’ve used. He just shoved the two of us apart and considering the man topped my six feet by several inches—and outweighed me by a solid forty pounds of muscle—it wasn’t a surprise when both of us went stumbling back.

  No, the surprising thing was when Sly swayed a little.

  I thought maybe he looked a little green.

  “Maybe you should go puke the rest of it up,” Mac suggested.

  “I’m fine,” Sly bit off.

  “How about if we fry you up some eggs and bacon? Maybe the eggs could be a little runny…the bacon kind of burnt? Or a steak…nice and rare?” I offered.

  Sly grimaced. And I was right. He was green.

  “Sly,” Mac said, voice far more patient than I would’ve expected. “Go eat some fucking toast or something. Get some ginger ale and nap for an hour or two. You’re not doing any of us any good and the next time you get in LeVan’s face, he can just punch you—knowing him, he’ll do it right in the gut and you’ll throw up all over the place. That’s sure as hell where I’ll aim if you pull that shit on me.”

  Sly flipped him off.

  But it wasn’t a surprise when he turned on his heel and left the mocked-up theatre we used for rehearsals.

  They had a bond I’d never share, and honestly, it wasn’t one I wanted to. There were some things that were born of pain and misery and I wanted no part of it.

  “Thanks, man,” I said, shoving my dreads back. They were sweaty and in the way and the weight of them was getting on my nerves more and more these days.

  “Don’t thank me.” He shot me a dark look. “Your timing was off, LeVan.”

  I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut.

  Mac wasn’t one to take his temper out on anyone else. Sly took it out on himself—and everyone around—but that wasn’t Mac’s style.

  Blowing out a sharp breath, I looked away for a long moment, debating on what to say, if anything.

  In the end, the decision was made on a subconscious level.

  “Her mother is worse,” I heard myself saying. “I talked to my cousin, Shemar. He said that hospice has been called in. And I haven’t talked to her in years!”

  I swung around and threw the water bottle I’d been holding.

  It flew across the room and hit the far wall with a metallic clang—rather satisfying sounding.

  The last communication I’d gotten from her had been a package. Not a letter, not a card. But a package. Inside it had been a tiny little metal knight, his suit of armor polished to a high shine. There had been no note, but I knew who it was from. The knight still sat on my desk in my study at home and it crossed the country with me. Every time I traveled, the knight went with me. Crazy shit there, a man toting around a little knight in his pocket. But it was my one connection to Thea while we waited this out.

  “You’re still waiting, then,” Mac said, his voice neutral.

  “What else am I going to do?”

  “Move on?”

  Slowly, I turned. “Move on?” I shook my head, the idea so…so…foreign, I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. “How do you move on from someone who is so much a part of you, you two might as well be one?”

  Mac eyed me, his pale gaze taking me as he pondered the question. In the end, he shrugged. “I can’t answer that. I don’t know what in the hell that would be like, but it sounds pretty miserable.” He waited a beat. “You so certain you’re doing this to yourself for a reason?”

  I thought about her letter, the knight. I thought about the times we’d been together—what we were together.

  Then I thought about everything keeping us apart.

  Not that there was much.

  It was just that one person…no, two.

  The bitch that birthed her. And Thea herself, and her determination to protect her brother.

  I could only love Thea more for wanting to take care of Nicky, even though I hated what it was doing to us. Even when I wished she’d have chosen me, I thought about the poor kid who’d been put in a home simply because his mother had chosen to use him as a pawn.

  “Who else was she going to choose?” I muttered, hating myself a little bit right then.

  “What?”

  Mac knew the barest details, but that was all.

  I hadn’t told him everything and I’d told Sly nothing. Sly could be ass, but he was fiercely loyal and if he knew anything about what was going on between Thea and me…

  No. It was better he knew nothing, not right now.

  “Just thinking,” I told Mac, slanting a look at him.

  Judging by the look on his face, he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Don’t,” I advised him. “Don’t start in on me about this, okay?”

  “Hey, I’m not going to.” He jerked up a shoulder in a shrug and looked away. “You hurt over this and that pisses me off. But something I understand…fucked up families. Loving your brother, your sister. If I was in her shoes, I don’t know that I could’ve chosen any different. It’s just…” He looked down for a long moment and thick, heavy hair fell to hide his face. When he looked back at me, there was a world of tension in his gaze. “People change a lot, LeVan. I don’t want you to be disappointed if in all that time, you’ve been clinging to a fairy tale that just doesn’t exist anymore.”

  21

  One Year Ago

  Thea

  “Are you happy now?”

  The rasp came from the bed behind me as I poured her some water to take the pain meds.

  She’d told the people with hospice that they could come at night but she didn’t want or need anyone with her at all hours of the night.

  It didn’t matter that she was barely clingin
g to life, her organs shutting down one by one.

  Her brain was still functioning, and as long as that was in working order, she’d call the shots.

  Turning, I met Melody’s gaze from across the room. She’d defied the odds, surviving for so many years, but time had run out. The doctors estimated she’d be gone in a matter of hours, possibly days.

  I translated that to maybe a week.

  If she could possibly survive without a functioning liver or kidneys, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she lived another six months. But her liver had pretty much shut down and her kidneys were all but done. I knew enough biology after reading up on cancer over the past few years to know what was going to happen as the internal organs shut down one by one.

  Still, she could never take the easy way.

  Even now, she got by on as little pain medicine as she could, almost as if she welcomed the pain. Maybe she fed on it. I had no idea.

  As I crossed to her, I checked the PCA pump. The patient-controlled pain medication would be changed by the hospice nurses who came on at six. To Melody Kent, six p.m. was hardly night, but I’d lied to her and told her that the shifts available were six p.m. to six a.m. and nothing else. I wasn’t staying at her beck and call from seven in the morning until almost midnight.

  Perhaps it was cold-hearted of me, but she’d done little to earn my love or loyalty.

  “Have you no answer for me? Are you ashamed of the daughter you’ve been?” she asked waspishly.

  Tossing my hair back, I put her medications down on the table in front of her and sat on the chair at the foot of the bed. “If you were any sort of mother, I suppose I should be ashamed. But you and I both know the only bond between us is biological. Neither of us harbors any love for the other. Why should I pretend love exists where there is none…on either side?”

  “You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” she said.

  “I’m aware. And that is the only reason I’m here now.” I’d moved back to St. Gabriel six months ago after a fall had landed her in the hospital. They couldn’t hire anyone who’d stay with her full-time. Rather, they’d tried. They couldn’t get anyone who’d last more than a few days. Nights weren’t so bad because the pain and exhaustion eventually got the better of her and she’d sleep some—or she had.

  But days were terrible and she had chased off everyone.

  Even bonuses of up to five hundred, a thousand dollars a week hadn’t been enough to entice anyone to put up with her bile. The few who might’ve toughened it out had been too stalwart for Melody and she’d ended up firing them.

  I’d come at the behest of the oncologist and only after he’d done one thing—he’d somehow managed to secure a promise that nothing that was said or done would result in Nicky going back into Sunny Vista.

  Not that I trusted a promise from her. She’d made two such similar promises to me over the years and she’d broken each one.

  But the very first day I was there, I took in a draft for a temporary transfer of guardianship. I told her she could sign it, or I could leave and I wouldn’t be back.

  Melody seemed to have developed an odd fear of being alone in the years since she had done her damnedest to see that I was alone. Perhaps it was karmic.

  She’d sighed without argument, never mind the fact that I’d brought along my own lawyer and hers for witness.

  “If you start seeing him again, I’ll revoke it,” she’d promised.

  “You can try,” I’d told her.

  But I had no intent of seeing LeVan with the shadow of her ghost—or even her life—hanging over us.

  Now, as she lay propped up in bed glaring at me, her blue-gray eyes the only thing even remotely the same, I looked at her and realized I felt nothing but emptiness.

  “Does it make you happy?” I asked her calmly.

  “What?” She sniffed as she reached for the small paper cup that held a cocktail of pills. She still insisted on taking everything they’d prescribed her a year ago, as if she still had a fighting chance. “Knowing that my one and only daughter has nothing but loathing for me?”

  “I don’t loathe you.” I wasn’t going to let her goad me into a fight. She relished those. “If you want the truth, I have absolutely no feelings for you. I stopped wasting them on you years ago.”

  She flinched, her hand tightening on the cup minutely.

  Her bones stuck out against her skin like knives as she cocked her head, staring at me birdlike. “You treat me as though you hate me but you sit there and want me to believe you don’t?”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” I replied honestly. I resisted the urge to look at the time. “What’s with the maudlin ruminations about feelings, Melody? You never did care how I felt.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it, looking away.

  I wondered if maybe hell had frozen over.

  “You are such a cruel child. You always have been…the way you treated your brother, the way you treat me,” she whispered. “I’m dying and this is how you talk to me.”

  I bit back the scoff that came to my lips as realization dawned.

  She wanted pity, sympathy. She’d made a play for them before, tugging on lingering feelings a girl has for a mother who loves her—something I hadn’t ever had, either. And I’d bought into it, thinking my mother might actually regret the relationship we’d never had.

  I’d ended up having my hopes smashed—again—and rather brutally.

  “You don’t expect any different,” I said calmly. “Not after the way you’ve treated me for the past fifteen—hell, the past twenty years of my life. I’m not a daughter to you, Melody. I’m an object, sometimes a tool. But I’m not a daughter.”

  “Get out!” she shouted, picking up the glass of water and throwing it.

  It didn’t even reach the end of the bed. She’d grown so weak, that was the best she could manage.

  Abruptly, pity welled. “Melody…”

  “Get out!” she shouted again, her face going red. “Would it kill you to call me mother again? Just get out! I don’t want to see you! Bring Nicky by but you…you…” She shook her head, her face so red, it alarmed me.

  “Get out,” she said again, her voice coming in a rasp.

  Maybe I should go, let her have a few minutes to calm down.

  I got up then, grabbing my bag from the foot of the bed.

  “Bring Nicky,” she said, her voice weak. “I want to see my boy.”

  I stiffened and looked up at her.

  “I want to see my boy,” she said, her eyes glassy.

  “All right,” I said slowly. “In the morning.”

  Slowly, her lashes drifted down.

  Hitching my bag over my shoulder, I started for the door. I’d give her a few minutes, I told myself. But at the door, I looked back. “Melody, I…”

  She didn’t stir.

  A cold chill raced down my back.

  “Melody?” I said, louder this time.

  No response.

  Taking a few steps closer to the bed, I whispered, “Mother?”

  Nothing. “Mama?”

  22

  Thea

  “Mother’s dead.”

  It had been an exhausting week, one not made any easier by the fact Nicky had gotten used to having me at the house where we’d been living. He was a creature of routine, and heaven forbid that routine be broken.

  Surprises were fine.

  Disruptions were not, and there was a huge difference between the two.

  A surprise was a movie night in the middle of the week.

  Mother’s death, well, that was disruptive. A disruption was me coming to see him on Tuesday because Mother had died. Not that I could tell him right away, but my body language probably did enough to cause him distress. That day I went by to see him, I’d been dealing with the funeral home, notifying everyone who needed to be informed. Then, heaven help me, I had an emotional breakdown.

  I don’t know why. I cried for hours even though I was awa
re she was dying. Some part of me, a small, awful part of me, had been waiting for this day because when I no longer had her to deal with, my life would be my own. Maybe that was why I’d broken down, because the relief mixed in with my guilt and was choking me, eating me alive. I had no idea how to deal with the raging mix of emotions, other than to let them take over me and break me down.

  But showing up to see him in this state, it wasn’t smart. I ended up leaving without letting him know about Mother.

  A small part of me wanted to phone LeVan for support. I hadn’t talked to him in years. I didn’t know if his number was still the same. But I ached to hear his voice, even if I couldn’t bring myself to do that to him. It wasn’t like I could rush into his arms out in Las Vegas.

  Not right away.

  His life was out there, and while I had every intention of joining him there, Nicky’s was…here. All he’d ever known was here. How was I to tell my brother that he had to break apart from all he knew and just…leave?

  Because that was what I had to do.

  And on the heels of his mother’s death, which he knew nothing about yet. I tried to ignore the part of me that reminded me she was my mother too. She’d never been the mother I wanted because she never acted like she wanted either of us. We just got in her way. We were an inconvenience.

  The day after her funeral, I told him.

  “Mother’s dead,” Nicky repeated, his voice insistent as if he needed me to acknowledge that fact so he could, too.

  In a way, he probably did. Turning, I faced him. He looked so much like me. His hair was blond like mine, as was the shape of his face. His eyes were more blue-gray, like Mother’s were, but the shape of his nose, his mouth…he was just like me.

  “Yes, Nicky. She’s dead. Gone…forever.”

  I had no regret about waiting until the day after the funeral to bring him to her grave. Nicky couldn’t deal with death. Well, he couldn’t deal well with change, or any other concepts that were difficult for most people.

  That was also Mother’s fault.

  She had put him in a group home after the car accident, and made it impossible for me to assume his care. Then, during those times where she was in the mood to reclaim her motherhood, she’d uproot him to bring him home again. This had gone on several times, and each time, it set Nicky back. Each time, he would withdraw further and further into a world of his own making. So, of course, getting him to understand something as real-world as his own mother’s death wasn’t easy and would take some time.