She blew a raspberry and stood up on the footrest of her stool to lean over my bar. She grabbed a shot glass and the bottle from me. “Lay off him and the other bartenders. Girls flock to a bar where they get free drinks, not one where the owner has a stick up his ass and makes everyone pay.”
My temper immediately flared. She knew just the button to press. “I’m not worried about people flocking to my bar.”
“Right, because you don’t make your money off Heathen’s Bar anyway,” she mumbled and wrinkled her nose as if the way I really made money disgusted her.
“And you don’t make your money whipping up coffee drinks either.” Every now and then, Katie made her way back to a little coffee shop that she’d taken a job at during her time in college. She was barely a barista and yet every guy waited in line to get a coffee from her on the rare occasion I stopped by. I wasn’t proud to admit I knew because, over the years, I’d kept tabs on her. In my defense, the woman had purposely crossed my path over and over again.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Mario needs me. You basically have us starting at ground zero because you had to confront Georgie for no reason other than to show him who was the bigger man.”
“I was showing him he shouldn’t physically harm you.”
“You and I both know I can handle myself.” She poured another shot and slammed the bottle down on the bar so hard the liquor sloshed over the rim.
“Can you now?”
Her grip on the bar was tight, her olive knuckles turning a paler hue. Katie was fumbling with the idea that she may not have been able to handle her latest victim. “Don’t question my place in the family, Rome. I know what I’m doing and have handled myself since the day Mario brought me in.”
“Do Bastian and Mario know you’re actually seeing Georgie?” I asked the question because Bastian had finally stepped into Mario’s shoes and was heading up the Chicago Family.
She had a death wish, and just looking at her in her next-to-nothing black dress, I wondered if my dick had one too. I constantly had to remind myself how she was bad news, how she’d been tied to my dead ex-fiancée, how I didn’t need distractions, especially ones I might end up caring about. Yet she sat there unmoved, constantly trying to irritate the man who chose murder as his job within the family.
My little Cleopatra was just as fucked in the head as I was.
“Bastian has nothing to do with this. We needed intel, and I told Mario I would get it.”
“By fucking someone who’s going to throw you around?”
“It was barely throwing around,” she snapped at me. Then she slammed her shot back and winced as she swallowed it. I watched her neck bob as the liquid burned her throat. “Look, I gave my word I would get the information. Just remember your place, Rome. It’s not worrying about me.”
“Mario may have brought you in, but I killed Jimmy. We watched him bleed out together. The man you’d tied yourself to had been lying to the family for years. You think I need to remember my place, but you stepped into the family with your judgment—”
“Exactly on point. I knew he was trash the moment he slid between my legs, but I pinned him there long enough to find a way to step over him and be a part of this family, didn’t I?”
My jaw tightened, and I sighed. “Katalina, you looked at Jimmy like he was your savior and lover when no one else was watching. So I’m not ever going to say your judgment was on point. That man should never have slept with you when you were that young.”
Her slate eyes shimmered like wet metal for just a moment before she glanced away from me. “Foster care was much worse. Everyone’s got a story, Rome. Honestly, mine is one of the better ones.” She picked at a crack in the bar like she was annoyed with it, like it was a chink in her armor she couldn’t always cover up. Armor that was marred with experience and bruised by wear and tear.
“We both know that’s not true.” The way her stare went far away, I almost reached for her hand. I fisted my own instead and thought of all the ways a man that took advantage of children deserved to die. “I should have waterboarded JimmyandMarvin for at least an hour.”
A laugh full of sadness and maybe a little shock burst from her. Katie would never tell her story to me. We weren’t close enough, but I knew that the men she’d been with had sex-trafficked women for years, that they knew how to torture a woman or a little gray-eyed girl.
“Well, I’ll be honest,” she said. “Georgie ain’t got nothing on Jimmy. That’s for sure. And I’m furious because I’ve barely got anything on him thanks to you. Next time you want to wave your manhood around and be pissy about nothing, do it somewhere else. Everything I do, I do with awareness, Rome.”
I blew out a breath at her quick redirection of the conversation. She was small, pint-size, vulnerable. But I had to remember she’d danced with some of the most sadistic gang members out there. Her size was a jarring contrast to what she was capable of. Maybe it was her vulnerability that pulled men in, and maybe I was a sucker for it too.
I hated that she’d slithered into the family, hated that she’d intertwined herself in my life and I couldn’t disentangle her.
Yet I knew she’d just been a kid trying to survive, a girl taken complete advantage of.
I knew but couldn’t get her to know it too. She liked to remind me that her actions were consensual always and that she made conscious decisions.
She narrowed her gray eyes at me, as if trying to find the reason for my poor mood.
I came around the bar to sit next to her. “Do you know I could have spared Jimmy? I consider it a lot. Maybe my ex had decided to sleep with him. Maybe he deserved one more chance.” I stopped for a second, not sure I wanted to say the next words. “You know what I kept picturing, though?Youwith him. The way you looked at him like he was your damn world and really he’d just created a world for you so fucked up you thought it was where you belonged, by his side. Did you know that he was sleeping with three other girls who were underage?”
Her eyes didn’t widen; her muscles didn’t tense. She wasn’t at all surprised as I confessed all I knew about that dead boyfriend of hers. Mario would always give me a rundown of the victim, always make sure I knew I was doing justice rather than murder. Most of them I didn’t care about. I would have followed through with it even if I didn’t have the background. It was a way for Mario to try to save my soul, but I’d lost it long ago.
“Jimmy was the firstmanI slept with, Rome. Sure, I’d fooled around with kids, but he was different.” She sighed. “He gave me money to make my father comfortable. No one else offered that. He loved me in his own way, I think. I was naïve and loved him a little too. I can admit that. It doesn’t make me stupid, and it’s ridiculous to think I haven’t learned, that I wasn’t learning when I was with him.”