Page 105 of Cook

I slid onto the stool and took the fork. Cook’s food was good, she had that much right.

Roni was still smiling at me, her teeth clenched together. When I swallowed my bite of the delicious omelet, she was still looking at me.

“What?” I asked, wondering if I was somehow eating wrong. Gah, I had no clue what it meant to be normal, have a regular breakfast, make friends.

Her smile faltered, and she waved whatever she was thinking away. She started around the island, toward me. I dropped my fork and knife to the plate, and it clattered.

I pushed the chair out, ready to stand, but Roni said, “Wait! I just want to talk.”

What could we possibly have to talk about? I’d never talked to someone, and whatever normal was, was a foreign concept for me. This, though, didn’t feel normal. She wore the curious look like someone about to eat me.

“What?” I demanded. “Say it.”

Color drained from her face, and she looked down at her hands for a few long seconds. A shudder shimmied her shoulders. “I know about... Enigma.”

That deflated my defenses, and I fell onto the stool. I managed to reply, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Neither do I.” She flashed up her gaze, her eyes glassy. “But you’re the only person I can talk to who will understand.”

“Understand?” I scoffed. What would she understand about what happened to me? “What do you think you know?”

Roni pulled out the other barstool and climbed onto it. Picking at dead skin around her nails, she said, “When I was young... well, not as young as you were back then.”

That was it?

She didn’t continue, but her throat bobbed like the next words were caught there. She stopped picking, curled her hands into fists as if staunching a bad habit. Then she shot me a sad smile. “I ran away from home just before I turned seventeen.”

Home? Why would anyone run away from home? Regardless, something about her manner and words tickled my curiosity, and despite my fear, I wanted to know more. I leaned a little closer.

She took a deep breath. “That part of the story’s not important.”

I frowned. That part seemed more important than anything about Enigma, but I couldn’t force questions out. At least not yet.

Roni took down her hair and re-twisted it, clamping the clip back in before dropping her hands. “Enigma is a lot of things, and I had no clue what would happen when I applied for a waitress position there. I only knew that the girl who introduced it to me said it paid better than any other waitressing job in LA.”

“You, um.. . made money from them?” I finally asked, voice shaky.

She rolled her eyes and bobbed her head—a confusing movementsomewhere between a nod and a head-shake no. “At first, it was good. I made enough to get my own apartment, and I learned to look the other way when men came in with women who couldn’t possibly be their wives and took them into the back.”

I scowled. “Into the back?” That implied there was a front. I’d only ever been brought in through the alley door.

Roni nodded but didn’t directly answer the question. “It was a year and a half before I learned the club was run by the Mafia and Don Tommaso Gambino.”

His name was like a gunshot to my chest, and I placed my hand right above my heart. It had quickened, threatening to blow from my chest.

“Don’t say his name,” I said.

“Sorry.” She gulped. “I’ve learned to say it aloud, so I don’t give him power over me.”

“He doesn’t have power over me,” I retorted. He would never. Cook promised—his cock and no one else’s.

“Right.” She dropped her hand to the island counter.

Somehow, that thin reply eased something in me. She wasn’t talking over me or arguing, only showing me how she had come out of a shitty situation. Maybe Roni was someone I could get used to.

She continued, “They—Tommy and his capos—believe they are above the rules of our society.”

No fucking shit. I grabbed the orange juice and guzzled it.

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