Page 46 of Texas Hold Em'
Carrie finally looked at me, and as soon as our eyes met, she fell to pieces and started sobbing. Her tears glistened on her cheeks, and I noticed for the first time that her right cheek was bruised. Someone had hit her.
Shit.
What did she need? Should I wrap an arm around her? Console her? Tell her it would all be okay? Did she need tough love—someone to grab her chin and tell her to pull it together and tell the truth? I felt entirely out of my depth as I tried to process how to be there for her without crossing any lines, all the while simultaneously wondering what she could have done that could possibly be this bad.
I glanced at the police station.
Had she turned us in?
I had too many questions and decided she was in no shape to answer them all right now, so I got to my feet and offered her my hand while she sniffled and wiped at her tears.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “Can you drive?”
She nodded.
I told her to follow me back to the apartment, and I drove slowly. She trailed along behind me, the lights of the Chevelle glinting off mymirrors on straight roads. It wasn’t too long of a drive back to my place and by the time we got there she’d stopped crying. Her eyes were still puffy and her nose was pink, and I resisted the urge to tell her she looked adorable.
In my experience, crying women never liked to be told they looked cute when they were crying. It was almost as dangerous as telling them they were cute when they were angry.
Almost.
Carrie followed me down the humid hallway of the warehouse to my unit. It was cool and dim. The sun had just come up to the east and shone through the single window above the kitchen fridge. The light painted everything in an orange haze, and Carrie’s shadow flickered across the far wall as she walked to the sofa and fell into it like a defeated woman.
I grabbed her a glass of water before joining her.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
Tell me what you did that was so bad.
Carrie sipped her water. “I thought I was helping. I need you to know. I really thought I was helping.”
“I believe you.”
She bit her bottom lip. “Okay… well… as you know I tracked down Caroline the other day. I’ve been waiting around for her or her father to reach out to me and I started to worry that they weren’t going to. I couldn’t let them forget about me. I couldn’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers. So I went out looking for her again, and I found her.”
“At the bar,” I said.
She nodded and didn’t ask how I knew she’d been there. Instead, she continued. “She took me out the back door and jumped me.”
That explained the bruised cheek.
Carrie touched her face gingerly and surprised me by laughing bitterly as she remembered her fight with Bates’s daughter. “Sneaky bitch. I should have seen it coming. But it doesn’t matter. She didn’t have the upper hand for long. I was her equal, and when she knewneither of us were going to gain any ground, she stopped. And then she took me to see her father.”
I wasn’t sure how to feel. Furious that Caroline had struck her or in awe that Carrie had held her ground and struck back.
I said nothing and waited for the fierce woman on my couch to continue.
She took a shaky breath. “I went to his estate. He was there waiting for me, and he said he was willing to hear this plan of mine. I proposed I give him the Devil’s Luck on a silver platter, and in exchange, he grant me safe exit out of Reno and back to Austin.”
As I listened, I considered the fact that she might very well be lying to me. There was no way for me to truly know if what she was saying was true or whose side she was really on. For all I knew, she’d gone to Bates and they’d struck a bargain to do just as she said—deliver Jackson and the rest of us to Bates.
Still, I wanted to believe her.
“I thought it would be easy,” she whispered. “I knew I had him right where I wanted him. I knew I was offering himexactlywhat he wanted and that he’s too damn narrow minded and greedy to say no. But I should have seen it coming. I should have known he’d want to make sure he had power over me. That he’d want to twist the knife.”
“What do you mean?”
Her eyes slid to me and once more filled with tears. “He agreed to my terms, but he had a condition. In order to prove my loyalty to him, I have to murder you, Jameson. I have to murder you and I have to prove it to him.” She pulled a small flip phone out of her jean pocket and tossed it to me. “He gave me this to stay in contact with him.”
