Page 59 of Vicious Little Games

“I’m sure they would still want you there.” Smiling she adds, “They think you are young and green, making you an easy target.”

“Then they don't know shit about me,” I assure her.

“Oh god, I'm going to barf,” Cass murmurs from behind me. “Can we please leave now?”

“Nice meeting you,” I say to Inessa as I get to my feet. “See you again soon.”

“Soon,” she agrees with a sweep of her eyes down my body, the look full of interest. “And I would be more than happy to teach you our mother tongue.”

“Ew,” Cass scoffs as she heads out the door in a hurry, her guards behind her.

As soon as I follow her outside, she turns to me and says, “Jesus, Cole. I thought you were going to fall to your knees and eat her pussy right there in the middle of the bar.”

“I was just being nice,” I tell her truthfully as we both start to the SUV. “You should try it sometime. Haven't you ever heard the saying that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar?”

Cass stops walking when we’re halfway to the SUV and holds up her palm toward me. “Seriously, stop talking about nasty shit before I throw up all over your shoes.” When she clutches her stomach and swallows hard, I realize she's not being sarcastic.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. That place, those people just made me feel ill,” she grumbles. Then softer, “Do you think they could've poisoned my beer?”

“You're the one who poured the bottle into the glass,” I remind her.

“Yeah, after the bartender opened it.”

“Shit!” I turn back to the bar, then to the SUV. “Should we go to the hospital and get you checked you out?”

“No, I'm fine. I'm just ready to go home.”

“If they poisoned you...”

Shaking her head, she says, “I doubt that they poisoned me. They know my father would blow the place up with them inside of it if they did something so stupid.”

“Desperate people do stupid things.”

“Why would they be desperate?” she asks.

“Because when Dante took over, most of them either lost their livelihood or had most of their earnings from illegal shit ripped away. Nobody likes losing money.”

“Well, they can go to hell for all I care.” She turns and starts walking slowly the rest of the way to the SUV. One of her guards hurries around to open the back passenger door for her, even though two guards have to squeeze into the back first. Wonder if he’s trying to get in her panties too?

“Seriously, Cass,” I say to her as I climb into the vehicle and sit in the second row next to her. “When we're in these places, pretending to like them could help us worm our way inside their tight-knit group. Don't you want to find out if they sent drones after your sister?”

“God, could everyone please just get over it? A few flying robots took aim at Sophie. So what? She survived. She's fine.”

“You've obviously never been through anything traumatic in your life.”

“Like you have?” she asks as we finally pull out of the parking lot heading back to the casino.

“Other than surviving poverty, being bullied by rich, entitled brats, and surviving the casino bombing that killed twenty-two people and injured dozens of others, no, I haven't been through shit.”

“Sorry,” she says quietly. “I forgot about the bombing. You weren't hurt.”

“Trust me, even if you walk away from a disaster unharmed, you still have to deal with the fact you could've been killed, but you lived when others weren't so lucky,” I tell her. “Do you have any idea how close your dad and my friends and I were to being in that room when it exploded? We were within feet of it. And if there had been a poker table available for us, we would've been sitting down when the bomb went off. So how about you talk to me about how survivors of shit like that should feel after you've been through it yourself?”

For the life of me, I can't tell if it's what I said or if she just couldn't hold it in anymore, but at that exact moment, Cass bends at the waist and pukes all over the floorboard of the SUV, including my shoes.

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