Start a War (Saint View Psychos #1)(71)

I was going to ask him to double our quantity. We needed more. I wanted a party every weekend. If not twice a weekend. Once or twice a month with no consistency wasn’t enough. I’d already organized the performers, and they were all in, grateful for the regular work. But a huge side of the business was the drugs. People needed a little extra something to get them going, and a couple of tabs of E or a little bag of coke wouldn’t kill anyone. There would be nothing more than that done on my premises, but I wanted people to let loose and have a good time.

And spend big.

Nash wouldn’t like it, but he could lump it. He’d barely spoken to me since he’d snatched the phone from my hand and told Caleb where to go. Caleb hadn’t called since, so I was grateful, but Nash was making the entire thing awkward.

Or maybe we both were.

Sandra’s warning that murders were normally carried out by someone close to the victim kept ringing in my head.

Nash was the closest person to Axel.

I just couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t come up with a reason for something to come between them enough that Nash would do that.

I wandered back out to the bar area, instantly feeling Vincent’s gaze on me from where he stood in the doorway. I’d offered him a stool a hundred times since he’d started working here, but he’d refused every time, preferring to stand, his dark-eyed gaze constantly moving around the room but always returning to me.

I liked it. I liked having him here. He was infinitely better at his job than Solomon had been, though the party on Friday night would be a true test of Vincent’s newfound bodyguarding skills.

Dragging my gaze off the man who looked entirely too good in all black, I found Rebel restocking beer bottles into a refrigerator. “Is it just you out here? Where’s Nash?”

She shrugged. “Boss Man said he had to run out for a bit. It’s quiet so we don’t need him ’til later. If you’re searching for something to do, he put some boxes on his desk for the party on Friday night that he said you need to go through.”

“What are they?”

She shrugged, not really paying attention to me. “No idea. Something he found out back, I think.”

Curious, I left her to her restocking. In Nash’s office, I found the boxes she was talking about. The label on the front simply said, Quantity: 500. “Well, there’s a lot of something in here,” I mumbled.

The boxes were unsealed, but the flaps were tucked into each other, closing their contents off to dust. I opened the first one, pushing back the thick cardboard to reveal the contents.

Inside was a sea of black silk. I reached in, unsure of what I was looking at, and then pulled one out.

A mask. They were blindfold-shaped, long rectangular pieces of material, but with holes cut for they eyes. A Psychos logo was embroidered into the end.

“Haven’t seen those for a while,” Rebel commented from the doorway, paused there with a box of drinks in her arms. She shifted the weight to her side, jutting out her hip like she was holding a baby.

“What are they? I mean, I can see they’re masks. But what are they for and why do we have so many of them?”

Rebel grinned. “We haven’t done it for a couple of months, but we used to give them out at parties. Everybody wore one. Then took it home as a little souvenir.”

“Did people like that?

She shrugged. “Axel thought they would. It’s sexy. It adds to the mystery. I mean, it’s not like they really conceal anyone’s identity, but you can kind of pretend for a minute, can’t you? It gives people a sense of bravery they might not otherwise have when they don’t have anything to hide behind. And the whole aim of our game is to get people dropping those inhibitions so they spend more money, have more sex, and keep coming back, right?”

I understood completely. I already wanted to be wearing one at the next party. Even though I’d be working, not participating, there was a safety in being a little anonymous. “There’s so many here. We should definitely start using them again.”

“Agreed.” Then a smile spread across her face. “Axel fucked up the initial order. He meant to order a thousand. But then ten thousand arrived. The company wouldn’t take them back because they were personalized. He was so cranky. I’d bet there’s tons more boxes of them out back somewhere.”

I smiled at the imagined image of my brother standing helplessly by as box after box of sex club masks were unloaded off a truck.

I turned back to the box. “How many do you think we’ll need for Friday?”

She shrugged. “Anywhere from three to six hundred? It depends on the night really.”

I eyed the box critically. “I’m going to count how many is in this open box so we can be prepared. And think up some sort of display for them so everyone can take one as they enter.”

“Have fun. I’ve got more drinks to deal with, so I’ll leave you to it.”

“Thanks.”

When she left, I squinted at the box critically. Design and aesthetics were not really my thing, but I wanted it to look nice. And handing them out of a brown cardboard box was not going to fly. I dumped them out onto Nash’s desk, thinking again how much I needed an office of my own. Nash was going to kill me when he saw the mess I was making.

The masks tumbled out, a piece of paper fluttering after them. I picked it up, turning it over to see the writing, and then laughed. It was the invoice from the company who’d made the masks. “That definitely says ten thousand in the quantity section, Axel. Not 1000. You really should have checked your order before you hit send.”