The bed creaks as she climbs from it, her naked curves swaying with her naturally seductive strut toward me. “That was my fee for two hours. For the whole night, you will pay me five hundred euro.”
I burst out in a rare fit of laughter. “You want me to pay you because you fell asleep next to me?”
Fire dances in her eyes as she glares at me, waiting expectantly.
I simply turn my back on her, locking the bathroom door behind me, shaking my head. I pay for whores so I can get what I want without a hassle. This is a hassle.
I soak under the hot water a few minutes longer than my usual seven, wanting to give her adequate time to figure out she can’t swindle me, collect her scattered belongings, get dressed, and leave with some semblance of dignity. Mainly, so I don’t have to talk to her again.
Honestly, I don’t know if she’ll leave. She’d probably steal my shit while I’m in here, if I had anything in plain sight worth stealing. This place is a mausoleum, though—empty white walls and sparse furnishings, void of all personality, perfect for renting out. She could take my wallet, with no remaining cash in it, no credit cards, and a false driver’s license, if she really wants to. My passports and valuables are all locked in a safety-deposit box at the city bank. My other IDs and my gun are in a safe, and I assume cracking safes isn’t where her talents lie.
I continue with my morning ritual, taking my time to oil and lather my face before I begin carving the dark stubble from my cheeks with a straight razor. It’s the best tool for a well-defined strip of hair along my jaw, the beginnings of a beard that I like to keep short. A suitable everyday disguise, without going overboard.
Giving my body a good dry, I wrap the towel around my waist and open the door. It’s been twenty minutes. I assume she has given up by now.
My peripheral vision catches the glint of a blade as it approaches my throat from the right. If I weren’t me—with quick reflexes and well-honed combat skills and a steely demeanor—I would have panicked, giving the heavyset man she let into my villa a chance to maim me, perhaps kill me. But because I am who I am—what I am—I’m already moving to respond, my blood surging through my veins, my heart rate picking up with excitement.
Deftly grabbing hold of his meaty wrist, I twist until he yelps and is forced to release his grip on the handle, all while the whore stands in the doorway, her face trying to suppress her fright, her arms roped around that impressive rack in a hug. I retrieve the ten-inch chef’s knife that one of them must have plucked from my kitchen and set it on my dresser, beyond easy reach.
I’m guessing this isn’t the way they expected it to go.
“Who are you?” Besides a three-hundred-pound bastard with an obnoxious layer of chains tangled in the forest of chest hair protruding from a half-unbuttoned shirt.
He answers with a swinging arm, forcing me to duck and throw him face-first against the wall. He rolls his face to the side, smearing blood across the pristine white walls.
And now I’m irritated, because I’ll have to clean up that mess. “Let’s try that again. Who the fuck are you?” I already know who he is. Her pimp, who must have been sleeping in his car nearby, waiting for her call to see if this scam worked and I paid up, or if he’d need to come and put muscle behind it to intimidate me.
When he doesn’t answer, I tug on his arm. If I pull on it any tighter behind his back, his shoulder is going to pop out of its socket.
“You pay Alena for whole night,” he forces out in broken English, his face contorted in pain.
That’s right. That’s her name. “I don’t owe Alena anything. We made no agreements for the entire night and I didn’t ask her to stay,” I simply say.
“You had all night. Pay!” he insists, though it’s lacking any conviction. I wonder how much of a cut he’s getting. On an island of about fifteen thousand residents, you’d think there’d be no use for this racket. Then again, Santorini sees upward of half a million tourists each year, so there’s probably a lot of suckers.
I’m sure she does damn well, especially if letting her gorilla-size boss in when her mark turns his back to extort money is her MO.
I’m well within my rights to refuse, and well within my ability to break a dozen bones in this asshole’s body before tossing him to the curb, but right now I just want them to get the fuck out. I release my grip and the guy’s body sags with relief. “And here I thought it was true love,” I mumble, fishing a twenty from my dress pants that lay rumpled on the floor where they fell last night. Nowhere near the three hundred extra she’s claiming. “This is all you’re getting out of me.”
She scoffs at the single bill. “I could scream,” she hisses with defiance, the remnants of her crimson lipstick making her lips look touched with blood. Fire and fear smolder in her eyes as they trail over my naked chest, over the towel hanging low on my hips.
“Or you could take this money that we didn’t agree to, walk out that door, and pretend we never met. Which option do you think would be smarter?”
She doesn’t answer. She must be able to hear the unnatural calm in my voice, the lack of panic or worry. She must sense that I’m not her average score. I’d like to give her that much credit, at least.
“This scam of yours isn’t really smart, Alena.” I take three steps to hover within inches of her face. “You never know what kind of man you will end up trying to dupe.” Her pimp is behind me but I’ve long been trained to be acutely aware of a threat’s movements, even when out of sight. So I’m ready for his last-ditch effort to save his reputation when he lunges at me. A quick shift and elbow to his solar plexus and fist to his nose—my eyes never leaving Alena’s—stops him abruptly. “And you never know what that man might be capable of.” I promise you, Alena, it’s a lot more than even I ever dreamt of.
She shrinks back now, terror etched across her face.
It’s too bad, really. More and more, I’ve been thinking that I need a home base, after years of simply drifting. Santorini might be the place for me. I would have been a great regular for her. “Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”
Her pimp spouts off a couple of words in Greek to her around his own pain. She snatches the bill from my fingertips and darts out of my apartment with him, slamming the door so hard that it rattles the wall, the dresser, and the knife lying atop it, causing it to slide off. It lands, blade-down, an inch from my left pinky toe.
I start to chuckle.
THREE
IVY
“He never changed even a bit, did he?” Ian swings his foot at the trash can. Not hard. Just enough to shift it.
I quietly watch my cousin from my perch on the front desk as he takes in his dad’s shop—the dusty collectibles, the grungy black-and-red decor, the wall-to-wall mirrors—for the first time in fourteen years. I was able to get crime scene cleaners in the same day that the police finished collecting evidence, which was a twenty-nine-hour process. It’s not like anyone’s in a rush to get the business back up and running. But the idea of Ian seeing the dark red stain where his father bled out was not something I could stomach, even if they were estranged. By the time Ian stepped off the plane from Dublin, you’d never know that a double homicide had taken place in here.