Page 11 of Crushed
He furrowed his brow. “Hardly worth the treatment you’ll go through here.”
Was that not enough? And what did he mean by ‘treatment’?
“I owe it to Dahlia directly,” I said. “So she’s letting me work it off here.”
He cleared his throat, his eyes casting to the side. “Right.”
This was not going as planned. I needed to make a move before he cut me off for good. As long as I made an impression, I could bank on the fact that curiosity would make him intrigued enough to talk to me some more, even if that didn’t mean today.
“We can get to know each other here, or we can do it where we’ll be more comfortable,” I said. “More privacy.”
He didn’t budge. With each second that passed by, he seemed to relax even more, like I wasn’t of any concern to him. He had no idea that I had been hired to kill him.
Or if he did, he had a damn good poker face. Either way, he was going to make me ask, wasn’t he?
“Would you like to go to the Terrariums?” I asked.
“The Terrariums?” he repeated. But he had been coming here for years. He knew that they were the one-on-one themed rooms.
“The private rooms?” I said.
“And what do you suppose we’ll do there?”
Most of the club members and servers were in the lounge. Iris had changed into a shiny leather outfit and was digging her bony stiletto into a man’s upper thigh, while Teagen was sitting on a man’s lap while he read his phone. I should have asked them what was allowed in those rooms, another question I forgot to ask. What was I allowed to say? How much could I allude to?
I blamed my lack of proper inquiry on those damn nightmares, and not having Lizzy there to remind me.
But I needed to do better. I was on my own now. I could recover.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Like I said, I’m new.”
“Second day,” he corrected me again. He stared at my lips, taking in their color, and mugged his own. “I prefer to get to know the servers before I take them back there. Learn their limits. What they’re willing to take. I don’t like to be surprised by what a server is willing to do.”
I tilted my head. “You can get to know me back there. I won’t charge you for that.”
“How can I make this any clearer?” He straightened and scowled at me. “I’m not interested, Scarlett.” He gestured to the lounge. “I’m sure there’s someone who’s willing to take you back there. You’ll find someone who’s intrigued by you.”
Fucking asshole. But this wasn’t about my ego. I had been dismissed by a target before. But in the end, I always won.
I looked around once more. Every server was busy, which left him with only one choice.Me.
“I’m the only one who’s available,” I said.
“I see that.”
“And you want me to go away?”
“Observing the scene isn’t against the club rules.”
I pinched my nose. “Don’t you want a friend?”
“No one is here to make friends.”
I was desperate now. My time was running out. “Can I at least have your number? So we can try to get to know each other through texting?”
He grinned then, the first real smile I had seen on his face. The laugh lines around his eyes showed his age, but there was a sadness lurking behind that expression, growing as the smile faded. He took my device from my hands and entered his number on it, letting it ring to his phone. “I don’t know if Iris already told you this, but I’m the on-site pharmacist.”
I raised a brow. He wasn’t a doctor; he was a businessman. So that offer was illegal, but lots of illegal activities happened in a place like this. An assassin being hired as a server was only one of them.
