Swan Song Read Free

mine. Too close. I just about scream bloody murder when I meet his eyes, but something stops me. Something chokes the cry in my throat and rolls it through my chest like a wave of hot smoke.
    Set in a rugged, tanned face beneath a shock of jet black hair are the most startling eyes I’ve ever seen. They’re ice blue and sharp as daggers. As he looks down at me, his face hovering only inches from mine, I feel like they’re piercing me, puncturing me, and seeing clean through me. Into me. All of me. Past the dress and the whiskey and the diamonds down to the dirty feet of a teenager running nearly naked through the summer hot fields of an Iowa farm. He’s trouble, no doubt about that, and I know in my gut that I should tell him to get lost.
    Instead I shake my head.
    He steps around me, taking the seat just to my right. He remains in the shadows making it difficult to get a good look at him but I can tell he’s not terribly handsome. Not the movie star perfection of Tommy or the boyish good looks of some of the Outfit’s men. His nose looks to have been broken a time or two, and even in the shadows I can see the thin line of scarring along his neck, the white standing out harshly against his tanned skin.
    He looks hard. Worn for his age which can’t be much more than mine. I’d peg his body at twenty seven but his soul at sixty two. It’s in the way he’s looking at me. The way he carries himself, as though nothing in the world matters to him at all. This building could tumble down around his ears right here, right now and he wouldn’t be concerned in the slightest.
    All of this tells me one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt – he’s a mobster. A seasoned one. Powerful. Dangerous.
    I should have told him to piss off.

 
     
     
    Chapter Two
     
     
     
    Music explodes from the stage, filling the room instantly with deep drum beats, sharp trumpet tones, and the slightly off key crooning of a short, blond woman who will never be me. The music snakes through the air, slinking through the clouds of smoke, over the water-stained bar, under the crisp linen-coated tables. Feet tap around it, moving with it. Tripping over it. Busy fingers dusted with the powdered sugar coating of cocaine thread through it. Drinks are spilled, splashing onto patent leather shoes and worn out pumps that brush against each other in a disjointed dance that leaves you dizzy.
    The music slithers its way toward us, barely reaching us. It grapples and strains to enter the darkness of the farthest table, but it’s kept at bay. Blocked by the shadows. Cut down by the steel blue-gray of the stranger’s eyes.
    “You’re the headliner, aren’t you?” he asks quietly.
    Lord, that voice. Its deep tenor sinks lower than the bass until it vibrates in my bones, where I feel it more than hear it.
    I take a slow drag of my cigarette, pacing myself and him. “You’re quite the detective.”
    He grins at my sarcastic tone. “What’s your name?”
    “Are you illiterate?”
    “Are you always this hostile, Adrian?”
    “So you do know my name. Swell.”
    He sits back, taking me in as he knocks out a cigarette. “I know your stage name. I asked what your name is.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “You want my stage name?” he asks, popping the cigarette in the side of his mouth where it dangles carelessly. “Or my real name?”
    “You’re a performer?” I ask suspiciously. This man does not stand in front of a spotlight. As it is, he’s dodging the dim candlelight from the table.
    “Of sorts.”
    “What sorts?”
    He looks around, surveying the entire room before finally bringing his eyes back to mine. He takes his time and I fight a knowing grin. I’m not the only one who likes to be in control. “The unsavory sorts,” he mutters. Suddenly he takes up my whiskey glass, gives it a quick sniff, then takes a large swallow. “The sorts you don’t discuss with a lady.”
    “Very chivalrous of you.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Of course drinking