"I know." I push my hair behind my ear. "He told me that he didn't see them, but I know I did. I didn't imagine it."
Why is he just now bringing this up anyway?
"No you didn't." He turns his body in my direction and again, his knees brush against mine. "I rolled the cameras back after it happened and I found the interaction." His lips tip down at the corner. "I found something else as well, but I wanted to give you some time before I asked about it." He pauses and his eyes meet mine. 'That is unless you don’t want to talk about it."
What is there to talk about?
I stare back at him in confusion, unsure of what he's talking about. It really has been a while since what happened at the club. The last I heard, they’d found the people responsible for it. So Vito bringing it up now is weird.
And why would rolling the cameras back mean anything important to me?
If he rolled the camera back, he only would have seen that I waitressed all night. Maybe he's talking about the incident that happened with one of the customers. But no, that wouldn't be a secret. Enzo would have told them about it...
My body goes still.
Unless he rolled the cameras back even further than the night of the shooting.
To a few days before I started work.
He's still aiming a pointed look at me.
I look away from him, knowing that he's talking about what happened with Maximo. Bile rises in my throat and I feel sick to my stomach. No one has brought up the alleyway or the Plan B, letting me know exactly the type of response I’d get if I brought it up.
And now he wants me to tell him about what happened in the stock room.
I've done my best to block everything with Maximo out and pretend it didn’t happen. It's not as if I haven't had it happen to me before. My body’s been taken from me more times than I can count.
Yet what happened with Maximo felt so... intense. Worse than before where I knew men were using me for my body and nothing else. It felt as if Maximo was using me for some deeper reason.
And the thought of him coming after me again haunts me every night.
I aim my gaze at my feet, refusing to meet his eyes. "No."
Silence.
"Okay," he finally says after a moment. There's slight tension in his voice before I hear him let out a sigh. "In that case, we can talk about the shootings themselves then."
I keep my gaze low. "What about them?"
Fingers press under my chin, warm and strong. My head is pushed up and I find myself looking into Vito's eyes. "I prefer to look into the eyes of the person I'm talking to, not their hair." His fingers slide over my skin, from my chin to my cheek to my curls. "No matter how lovely it is."
My natural reaction is to correct him, to tell him my curls have been suffering since I got here. After Luanna straightened them to death, I had a hard time trying to get them to revert back with the products in my bathroom. Now they look limp and lifeless.
But instead of saying that, I take the compliment and ignore the warm feeling it ignites in my chest. "Thank you."
He only smiles in response. "Both of the shootings." He returns to the subject. "It must have shaken you up." He withdraws his touch from my curls.
I shrug. "I've seen shootings before." You don't grow up in the neighborhood that I did without seeing your fair share of shootouts and drive bys.
"Still, they must have been shocking. With the first, you were working, you didn't anticipate the bullets. And the second was at a party when you were relaxing."
I haven’t relaxed since I got here.
"No, I wasn’t expecting it." I take a deep breath, thinking about the panic that had gone through me at the time. "But I'm okay. I... I saw the bodies briefly but Enzo got me out pretty quick both times."
A look flits through his eyes. "I suppose Enzo is good at his job when he wants to be." I almost miss the short quip. "As it is, the shootings were connected, and I can assure you that we've beefed up security at the club.”
The hotel shooting was only a week or so ago.