Page 218 of House of Cards

His eyes flick up to mine, but they drop to his hands a second later. “Gangbangers.”

My skin crawls. “What?”

“They came in the back while I was taking out the trash.”

“What did they?—”

Ricky doesn’t let me finish my question. “Protection money.”

Smith comes closer, but it’s obvious from his expression that he’s heard this story before. I guess he and Ricky have been filling each other in while I was unconscious.

“Mom told them to go fuck themselves.” His voice cracks. “They wanted to beat the shit out of her, but I told her to run and call the cops. So they beat the shit out of me instead.”

Oh my God.

I remember that night.

When I saw Ricky in the morning, he told me he’d gotten drunk and had a fistfight with some idiots outside a bar. I thought Franco’s disappearance had sent him into some kind of self-destructive spiral.

“The cops took our statement.” He scoffs. “Not that it made a lick of difference.”

“They came back,” I murmur, my brain serving up a too-vivid flashback of Elonzo’s silhouette as he stepped into my apartment.

“A few months later, yeah. After we’d both started to relax.”

I know where this story is headed. Elonzo told me his version of it already.

“You weren’t there that night,” I whisper. Not accusing him, but trying to get ahead of the guilt and remorse he surely must feel. “The night they came back and killed Mom.”

Tears well up in Ricky’s eyes, spilling when he gives his head a hard shake. “N-No. Thought I’d scared them off. Thought we were safe.”

“Ricky, it wasn’t your?—“

He doesn’t let me console him. He sniffs hard, swipes a hand down his face to wipe away the tears.

“They came back again after that. Broke in late one night. Thank God you’d already gone upstairs, else?—“

Else I’d have ended up like Mom.

He swallows hard, blinks to clear the tears wobbling in his eyes. “They took all our cash. Beat me up again. Told me they’d kill me and do worse to you if I went to the cops again. So I just…made up a story. Don’t even know what I told you?—“

“You’d gambled it away,” I murmur. “You told me you’d gone to the casino and gambled it all away.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Ricky’s laugh sounds as terrible as he looks. “You seemed to buy it.”

“I did.” I squeeze his hand. “Every time, Ricky.”

He falls silent. “Yeah. They kept coming back. Earlier and earlier every time, like they were hoping to catch some of the staff before they left.”

“That’s why you started closing the diner at like nine?” My heart’s picking up speed as my brain furiously rewinds through the past few years of my life. I thought Ricky was flaking on me, on the diner…on Mom. Slowly losing control, and dragging me under with him.

“Yeah. And they made me pay for it. Put me in the hospital for a week.”

“And I just made things worse,” I mumble, tears pricking my eyes.

When he disappeared that week, leaving me high and dry for the second time that month, that’s when I decided to take over. To salvage what I could, before we lost everything. I kept the diner open until midnight, and thought my efforts were being rewarded every time a customer walked through the door.

“When I got out of hospital and saw the diner was still open, I knew I had to do something.”