Four Seconds to Lose Read Free Page B

who I know will end up at a place like Sin City without me—and the metal teeth of the trap around my chest dig in tighter.
    I can’t abandon them. Not yet. If I could just get this lot out and safe, without adding any more problems to my plate, I could live out my life somewhere quietly. A remote beach in Fiji is sounding pretty damn good.
    None of those thoughts ever gets spoken out loud, though. “Just haven’t been sleeping well,” I say to Ginger, pulling on the fake smile that I’ve mastered. It’s beginning to feel like a suffocating iron mask.
    By the way Ginger’s brow pulls together, I know she doesn’t believe me. “Okay, well, you know you always have my ears if you want ’em,” she offers, grinning playfully as she rolls her hips and winks. “And nothing else.”
    Her soft laughter follows her out the door, temporarily lifting my dour mood as I set to preparing payroll for the small army of dancers, security, kitchen, and wait staff I have under my employ. Serge—a forty-eight-year-old retired Italian opera singer—manages my kitchen as if it were his own, but I handle everything else.
    Unfortunately, the dour mood returns with a vengeance twenty minutes later when Nate’s call comes through. “His blue Dodge is here.”
    My fist slams down against the desk, rattling everything. “You’re kidding me, right?” I take a moment to gain control of the rage bubbling inside me. Nate doesn’t bother to answer. The two of us have always had an easy back-and-forth banter, but he knows what not to joke with me about. Fuckheads taking advantage of women is one of those things.
    “You want me to go in?” Nate offers.
    “No, wait outside. If he’s back, he’s probably carrying.” As stupid as this guy is, he must have learned after the last time. “I’m on my way. Don’t go inside, Nate.” I throw that last warning in with a stern voice. I couldn’t bear to lose Nate over this. I shouldn’t even have let him get involved. I should have made him go to college and lead a normal life. But I didn’t, because he’s all I have and I like having him around.
    I’m out of my seat and crouched in the corner in seconds, dialing the safe combination. My fingers wrap tightly around the biting steel of my Glock. I despise myself for touching it. It represents violence, illegality . . . the life and the choices that I’ve left behind, that I would never let consume me again. But if it means keeping Nate and Cherry and her eight-year-old son—the one who dialed my number on Cherry’s cell phone for help when he found his mother unconscious on the couch the last time—safe, then I will jam the barrel right into the scumbag’s temple.
    I’m about to slip on the holster when the door creaks open. “Cain?”
    I need to start locking my damn office door again, I tell myself. Stifling a curse, I slide the gun back into the safe and stand, struggling to keep the venom from my voice as I growl, “Ginger, you really need to learn—” How to knock is how that sentence is supposed to end.
    But instead it ends in a sharp hiss, as I find myself staring at my past.
    At Penny.

chapter two
    ■ ■ ■
    CHARLIE
    Plan A—Turn myself in and beg for immunity in exchange for information.
    I don’t have enough concrete information to nail him. I’ll probably end up in jail for the next twenty-five years. If I even make it there, alive.
    Plan A – Turn myself in and beg for immunity in exchange for information.
    Plan B—Lose all my identification and fake amnesia so the government will be forced to create new documentation for me . . . eventually.
    What if they put my picture up on the news? He’ll find me. Plus, I could end up locked in a psych ward for an indefinite length of time. And I don’t know that my acting abilities are quite that convincing.
    Plan B—Lose all my identification and fake amnesia so the government will be forced to create new documentation for me . . . eventually.
    Plan