Page 67 of The Club

“So what’s going on?” he asks between bites.

My heart skips. I’ve been expecting him to ask, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready for it. I’m definitely not ready to tell him the truth.

It’s one thing to be vulnerable with my body. Sex is a whole different headspace. I can be honest there, at least with him. But this is different.

I don’t even talk to Noah about the Collector or anything that happened before the Island. We talk around the subject, not about it.

So I shrug and say, “I get like that sometimes.” It’s not totally a lie. Idoget like that sometimes.

“Where you don’t know where you are and you walk about the city covered in blood?”

Okay, so that was a first. I ignore the question because I don’t have a good answer to it. I cut to what matters. “It won’t be investigated.”

“So Noah was involved. That’s why he was trying to get a hold of you. Because you had vanished.”

In a way, sort of, technically yes, but I know what he’s assuming. He thinks Noah helped me and disposed of the body after. He thinks I freaked out and left.

I’ll just let him keep thinking that.

“Yeah,” I say.

“So there’s no mess,” he presses.

I think about tossing Anton Silva’s severed cock and balls on the blood-soaked bed beside his corpse.

Dominic is backing me into a corner. I can’t answer this one without an outright lie.

“No mess,” I assure him.

***

“Ah, shit.”

“What?” Dominic asks as he pulls up at Lush. His gaze follows mine to an old truck parked down the street.

“Noah’s here.”

Dominic sends me a narrow-eyed look. “Why are you avoiding him?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t want to talk to him last night, you don’t want to see him now. What the hell is really going on?”

I don’t want to have this conversation with Dominic any more than I want to have it with Noah. Anything I say is going to get me grabbed, so I open the door and get out before Dominic can react.

“It doesn’t concern you,” I tell him as soon as my boots hit the pavement, putting me out of reach.

From this angle, I can’t see his face, but his words tell me how angry he is. “Then close the fucking door and fuck off.”

I’m already filled with regret, already wanting to backtrack, but he’s pissed and everything I would need to tell him to fix this feels like a mountain I can’t hope to climb.

So I close the door. He doesn’t give me a chance to fuck off, however, because the instant the door is shut, he hits the gas, cutting someone off to vanish into the traffic.

“Fuck.”

Part of me wants to just walk off down the sidewalk and get away from everyone and everything, but it’s cold and I’m suddenly so damn tired that I walk to the door instead.

The main entrance lets me into the foyer, where one door leads into the nightclub, another to the sex club below. I can cut through either to reach my elevator. I choose the nightclub because it’s more direct.

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