Page 11 of Big Filthy Mobster

“I’d rather not elaborate but…” I shake my head. I need to just be upfront with her. I can’t keep beating around the bush here. “I work with the Russian mafia. My position used to be hands on, but when Delilah got pregnant with Jeannie, I packed us up and moved us to Cherrywood Village. I thought that coming to a small town would be my way out.”

“But it wasn’t,” she mutters, her voice hard. It sounds like she’s upset, but she’s still holding my hand. I haven’t scared her off yet.

“You’re right,” I admit, feeling my body get stiff. “I didn’t want to keep working. They found me, and a group of guysshowed up at my door about a month after we moved in. I didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter.”

“I see,” she replies, finally detangling our hands. “Can I have a second to think?”

“Of course you can,” I agree, folding my hands in my lap. “If you want, I can leave. You can call me when you’re ready to talk, or you can just never talk to me again. It was just important to me that you knew about this.”

“I don’t want you to leave,” she says quickly, running her fingers through her hair. “I just… It’s a lot to process, I guess.”

“It is,” I acknowledge.

The two of us fall into a tense silence. So many things pop into my head, but I force myself to hold my tongue. I can’t imagine what Holly’s thinking right now. I need to let her sort through everything before I lay any more on her. The only bit of solace that I have is that she doesn’t want me to leave. We might still have a chance, but it’s all up to her.

This is even more terrifying than I thought it would be. We’re so close to our happy ending, but decisions that I made as a stupid teenager might keep us from that. I can only hope that she’s willing to take a chance on me and all the baggage that I carry around with me.

“So, there’s never any leaving it?” she finally asks, still not looking at me.

“Not if I stay in the states,” I mutter. “I suppose that I could leave and make myself a new identity. It would be hard, but not impossible.”

She hums, biting her cheek. “And if we were together, would I be in danger?”

“Not immediately, no,” I admit. But I know that I need to tell her the truth. She needs to be able to make an informed decision. “I can’t say that you’d be completely safe, though. I’m rarely involved in the things that are truly dangerous, but we have a lot of enemies. There’s always a chance that one of our guys gets caught and my name comes up.”

“What is it that you actually do?” she questions, finally turning to look at me. “You still haven’t really told me.”

“I’m the person that carries the money and washes it,” I explain.

“So you use the casino, then?” Holly guesses accurately.

“I do.”

“And Maxwell’s involved, too.”

“He is,” I confirm. Normally, I wouldn’t reveal any of my associates, but I’ve already made the decision that I’m going to be completely honest with her. “I think he was looking to get out of the action, too. So, our bosses built the casino and put him in charge of it. I’d argue that his end of the deal is more dangerous than mine, but I don’t know if that really matters in the grand scheme of things.”

“Is there anyone else in town that’s involved with this?” she asks.

“Not that I know of,” I answer. “It’s just me and him.”

She goes quiet after that, thinking about everything again. This time she keeps her eyes on me. I can almost see the gears in her head turning as she figures out what she wants to say next. Finally, she speaks.

“You know why I moved here?” she asks, not addressing anything else I’ve said.

“I don’t.”

“My family has been falling apart since I was a little kid,” she says, looking down at her lap. “My dad gambled away all of our savings, and my mom had a mental breakdown so bad that I practically raised myself.”

“I just couldn’t take the pressure anymore, so I left. I packed as much as I could into a rental car, cleared out my bank account, and came here to start a new life. But the only thing I knew how to do was work in casinos. It’s like I couldn’t get away from it.”

“That’s hard,” I respond, sympathizing with the story. It sounds like the two of us aren’t so different after all.

“It was,” she shrugs. “But I’m used to doing hard things. I’ve done them my whole life.”

“Me too,” I acknowledge, unsure of what else to say or how to comfort her.

She reaches over, grabbing my hand before continuing, “I think it might be nice to not have to do them alone anymore.”

---