Sweet Sinful Nights(45)

Brent simply shrugged, an admission that he’d always had some kind of Midas touch at the tables. But he also had another more important skill, and while it was one he’d told Shannon he was not applying in relationships, it was a rule to live by if he wanted to survive in the casinos with a wallet intact.

Scooping up the chips, he tipped an imaginary hat to Mindy. “And on that note, I’d better quit while I’m ahead.”

“Thanks a lot. You killed me there, taking all the good cards,” she muttered.

“Play another round. I’m out.”

The bald man with the pi?a colada took off, too.

“Stay with me. Be my lucky charm,” she said, and Brent relaxed in the chair as Mindy went up against the house again, trying to win back some of her losses. “By the way, have I ever told you that Michael Sloan is insanely hot?”

Brent groaned. “Can we not talk about how hot you think her brother is?”

“Oh, they’re all lookers. All three of them,” she said, with a breathy sigh. “All three. I’d take any of them, honestly. Ryan, Colin, Michael.” She counted off on her fingers.

“Okay, you really need to stop now.”

“Hey,” she said, lowering her voice, a sign that she was downshifting to a more serious moment. “Speaking of tonight, does she ever talk about what happened with her family?”

Brent nodded. Mindy had lived in Vegas her whole life. She knew the Paige-Prince saga, since it had been in the local news when they were both in high school.

“It’s weird, don’t you think?” she continued. “The Royal Sinners.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just the whole idea of them. Like the Latin Kings, or the Crips and the Bloods. I hate them,” she said, her voice a harsh seethe as the dealer slapped her cards on the green felt and “Overjoyed” sounded through the casino.

“They’re street gangs. Of course you hate them. That’s like hating cancer.”

“They went kind of quiet for a while there. A few years ago. Did you know that?”

He shook his head. He honestly hadn’t tracked the goings on of the gang culture. But Mindy knew the underbelly of the city of sin better than anyone. “Five or six years ago, it seemed like they’d all kind of fallen apart. But I hear they’re trying to be active again. Recruiting new members. Hitting the streets again with drugs, tagging, fights over territory.”

He clenched his fists. His blood went cold. “Should I be worried? For her? For her family now?”

Mindy shook her head and squeezed his shoulder. “I wasn’t saying that at all. When you started seeing her again, I did a little digging into Stefano with some of the guys I know on the force. A couple of them were active when it all went down. They say Stefano was on the outs when he killed Thomas Paige. He was doing his own thing. Kind of separating from the Sinners.”

Brent’s jaw tightened. A fresh wave of hate surged through him. He hated that Shannon had gone through that, that this kind of canyon of awful had not just touched her life, but had marked it. Had been the line in it. The before and the after. “So, he was, what? The odd man out in the local gang?” he asked, as the dealer tipped his forehead to Mindy, his way of asking her next move.

“Hit me,” she said to him, then dialed down the volume. “Supposedly. They said his girlfriend disappeared, too, around then. They’d wanted to question her to see what she knew, but couldn’t find her. Anyway, those were just the things I heard. That’s all.”

That’s all. That’s all. That’s all. The words reverberated in his head, mingling with the anthemic chorus of the pop song about a love so powerful it consumes you with joy.

Joy. Hate. Love. Death. They were inextricably linked.

“Hey! Look! I got twenty-one!” Mindy clapped in glee.

“Then it’s time to cash out,” he said.

She shook her head. Her eyes lit up with a fresh wave of excitement. “No way. My lucky streak is just starting. It’s my day off. I’m staying.”

“I’ll catch you later then, lucky lady,” he said, and headed to his office, needing work, needing business, needing the relentless focus on contracts, and deals, and plans to erase the cold metallic taste of hate that the discussion of gangs had left in his mouth. No fault of Mindy’s, and all things being equal, he’d rather know the details than not know them. But he was ready for that part of Shannon’s past to stay firmly in the ground, and never f*ck with her future.

Focus on the present. Focus on today. Focus on tonight.

The trouble was, the conversation gnawed at him. He opened a browser window and searched Google for news on “Royal Sinners.” He read a few articles—drug busts and convictions here and there. That was it. Like she’d said, the gang seemed to have petered out for a bit. All in all, this had to be a good thing—that the gunman her mother had hired hailed from a gang that had dwindled in power and was now focused on drugs. Shannon’s father’s murder had never been about drugs; it was a cut and dried murder-for-money crime.

Brent shut the browser, parked his boots on his desk, and rang his buddy who ran the Luxe hotel chain—Nate Harper, who lived in New York with his wife. After they caught up briefly on work and business, Brent made his request. “Hey man, you know anyone at this hotel who can score me a nice suite last minute on a Saturday night in Vegas? Happy to pay top dollar.”