Page 149 of Feed Your Fiends

Round?More like who shook their ass the fastest and made his dick the hardest.

“He should’ve woken me up. I know the ropes.”

“After one day of working?” Rie arches a brow.

“Well, at least I know how to mix drinks and not just balance them on my head. Hale said that client was important. He shouldn’t have taken brand-new, untrained employees. I still have a stake in the club, so I wish he’d spoken to me about it. I would’ve taken the auditions more seriously and not got so shit-faced.”

“I don’t think you had the capacity to,” Rie says. “You looked so broken up there. Like a wounded dove.”

The nickname sends a shot through my heart.

“I thought you didn’t know I was up there,” I say as the cage clears the bar, sliding into its original position.

“I didn’t know you werestillup there. The last time I saw you, you were making it rain.”

“Rain?”

“You sloshed your tears and bottle right between the bars on my head. At least you didn’t give anyone a golden shower. You must have a bladder of steel. Me? I got three shot glasses worth tops.”

Golden shower…Gant gave me one on the first day of Beaulieu. I swear I can’t escape him even when he’s long gone.

“Sorry.” I wince, my bladder suddenly on the verge of bursting. I hold my spinning head with one hand as Rie unlocks the cage, and I pat around the golden metal with the other, but I come up empty. Then I realise I’d put my phone on a table in the lounge before Hale raised me to the rafters, so I wouldn’t keep checking for a message that would never come. I scan the tables, but I can’t find it on any of the coffee tables littered with used shot glasses.

“Rie, have you seen a phone anywhere?” I ask, searching for my shoes. Or rather, Bae’s house slippers.

“Hale gave it to me before he left. He told me to secure it in his room for you.”

I nod and scramble down the hallway on noodle-like legs as I grip the walls for dear life.What the hell was in those shots?

I find my phone on Hale’s dresser beside a photograph. I don’t pay it any mind until something slips from my fingers to the floor. A photograph. One my phone had been resting on top of. The one from the box of stuff Hale’s mother had dropped off. There’s slanted writing scrawled on the back noting the year, and when I flip it over, it’s the photo of Hale and his mother at the beach. The one that was inside the homemade picture frame. But as I scan Hale’s baby face, I realise something’s off. I flip the photo back around.

“Did you find your phone?” Rie asks, plunking into the room.

“Yeah, but look at this,” I say, showing her the writing. “The year’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hale’s eighteen. He wouldn’t have even existed in this year.”

“I asked him about that when I saw his kindergarten diploma. He was held back because Romani is his first language and when his mother emigrated from Hungary—”

“Hungary?!” I cut her off.

Rie looks at me like I’m the dumbest person in the world. “Roma people are Hungary’s biggest ethnic group. You didn’t know that?”

I sway and crumple onto the edge of Hale’s king-sized bed.

I did not. But I can bet who does know.

“Anyway, Hale told me they held him back a year because of the language barrier, and he’s always been too self-conscious to admit it.”

No.

No.

“Why’d he pull this out of the frame?”

Rie just looks at me curiously.

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