“Mikka,” he whispers, pulling away to look at my face. His green eyes are clear, but the dark smudges beneath them worry me. “Mikka, why are you here? You shouldn’t have come.”
“Shut up.” It comes out sounding gentle, which pisses me off. I’m supposed to be angry at him, but once again, I find myself playing mother to my older brother. I breathe a cleansing sigh, pushing every irrelevant emotion away. “Tell me what happened. Every last detail.”
His hands drop to his sides, and he starts pacing. “I was an idiot,” he says bluntly.
“Yeah, I kind of got that from the ‘stupid, stupid, stupid.’ Give me specifics.”
He shoots me a crooked smile. “I’ve missed getting yelled at.” When I roll my eyes, he grins and holds his hands up. “Okay, sorry. I chose to come here.”
My mouth drops open. “You what?”
He shrugs in his rolling, irregular way. “I was in the hole with a dealer. I was supposed to run some product for him, but I was living—well, you know where I was living. Somebody ripped me off. Stole ten grand worth of blow. Dealer assumes I used it all myself or sold it and kept the money, gives me forty-eight hours to get him his cash.”
I can feel a lecture building behind my tongue, but I save it. I can tell this story isn’t anywhere near over yet. Nathan shoots me a tentative glance, probably trying to gauge how close I am to blowing my fucking lid, then barrels on.
“So I go see this guy I know and tell him my problem. He tells me he can’t do ten, but he can do five, and he knows which horse is gonna win the next race. Swore up and down that it was a sure thing. I’m thinking cool, if it’s a sure thing that means I can get the dude his money and still turn a profit, right?”
I really want to shake him right now. But I curl my hands into fists and nod instead. “Go on.”
He grimaces nervously. “So I put the whole five thousand on this stupid horse. It loses. So now I’m fifteen grand in the hole, and I’ve got two really bad people pissed at me. Time’s running out. I freak out right then and there, and some guy tells me to go see the guy who runs the track, says sometimes he’ll let a desperate person do some job or other for him if they want to get their money back.”
Dear god, this town is full of predators.
“Okay, how did that go?” Like I don’t already know.
Nathan blows out a breath. “I talk to the guy. He seems reasonable. Tells me I’m not pretty enough to turn tricks for him, and he obviously can’t trust me to move product, so there’s just one last thing he can think of for me to do. He needs someone to carry a gun and flash it around a little bit to intimidate some guy he’s dealing with down at the docks that night.”
I barely swallow a groan. My brother won’t even look at me now, and I don’t fucking blame him.
“So I go,” he says with a sigh. “And I carry the stupid thing like I’m supposed to, and I mean mug the guy he’s dealing with, everything seems to be going just fine. I mean, I’m still looking at having to come up with five thousand dollars in eighteen hours, but that’s better than ten, right?”
“Sure,” I deadpan.
He clears his throat and gives me a shifty look. “So, um—the guy starts acting a little funny, trying to be all intimidating, and the track owner gives me the signal. So I rush the guy and point the gun in his face, shouting some shit I don’t even remember. The guy—this fucking guy—he falls over. Gets scared, I guess, and just fucking falls over. He almost goes off the dock. The case he was carrying took a long trip off the pier.”
“Oh, no.” My head is starting to hurt, my pulse pounding in my temples like a drum. This would be almost funny if it wasn’t so goddamn sad. “What was in it?”
Nathan shrugs miserably. “Whatever it was, it was apparently worth five hundred thousand dollars. Obviously the track dude pinned that on me. Let me tell you, going from ten to five hundred in three seconds will make you puke.”
“You puked.”
“All over the track dude’s one-of-a-kind hand-made special-order Italian leather shoes,” he admits.
“Goddammit, Nathan.”
He nods, his lips pulling into a grimace, then brightens. “But it’s okay! It’s okay. Because I thought he was going to kill me right then and there, swear to god. But he decided to give me one last chance to redeem myself. He said he had an opportunity for me which would settle my debts with everybody, and would keep me out of trouble for years to come. He, um—sort of said it with malice, and I really thought I was going to be sold to some human traffickers or a cannibal or something. But it was just the vampires! Isn’t that great?”
I stare at him until his face falls, watching the hopeful façade slowly melt away.
“I want you to think about that, Nathan,” I say slowly. “Really, really think about that. You were afraid he would sell you to human traffickers or cannibals. And where did you end up?”
He slumps. “On the auction block.”
“For what purpose?”
“To be drunk from. But they don’t have to kill me to do it, so that’s a plus, right?”
“Jesus Christ.” I bury my face in my hands, smothering a groan.
“I’m sorry,” my brother murmurs softly. “I really am, Mimi. But the way my life was going, I didn’t see any other way out. I really didn’t. Everything was going wrong for me, over and over and over again, and I kept
