Page 120 of Let the Game Begin

They had a strange relationship.

They’d been sleeping together for years, but ever since Alexia had started fucking me as well, something had changed with Xavier. She’d chosen to be with me. Usually neither he nor I cared about sharing a woman, but ever since then, Xavier seemed to be nursing a strange grudge against me.

I was still hoping I was wrong about that.

“You’re a dick. As usual. I have no idea why I’m here helping you.” Alexia stalked off angrily, but Xavier just kept working without batting an eye.

“What’s your problem? You need to stop treating her that way.” Luke was always trying to restore harmony to our group’s sick dynamics. I rarely argued with him, but lately women had become a problem between us.

“It’s how she deserves to be treated.” Xavier gave me an ambiguous but not remotely friendly look before sighing and continuing with the tattoo. Immediately, I felt a distinct tension in the air, a feeling that Luke only confirmed when he cleared his throat to very obviously draw our attention elsewhere.

He started talking about Carter and his friends and what we’d done, but I knew he was just trying to avoid the impending fight between me and Xavier. I could already feel my nerves lighting up. Something wasn’t right, and I was likely the problem. I tried to keep my mouth shut—I needed to keep my mouth shut—but…

“What the fuck is going on?” I snapped defensively, because that was how I was feeling. I couldn’t pretend that everything was fine. I’d always had the balls to face a situation head-on before, and I wasn’t going to turn aside now.

Luke stopped chattering, and Xavier stopped tattooing. They both knew not to lie to me, I hated it when they schemed behind my back.

“Nothing,” Luke answered immediately.

“Nothing?” I smiled mockingly, getting up off the stool. “I’ve known you two long for that. You can’t bullshit me.” I underscored the message by staring them both in the eyes.

This was how it always happened.

As soon as I got their backs against the wall, they turned into punk kids incapable of fighting back.

“Nothing, man, seriously. Don’t stress about it.” Xavier gave me a fake smile and returned to his work. Luke, by contrast, sighed and looked worried about my reaction.

I would have liked to probe their elusive behavior more fully, but I decided to let it go for the moment. If I’d really wanted to, I could have made them spill their guts with my fists, but I would rather avoid that if I could.

“Do you get what I’m saying? I don’t give a shit what’s going on with you, just send me the stuff that I need. After all, that’s what I came here for,” I told them shortly. I headed toward the curtain to leave but a calendar hanging on the wall caught my attention.

The twenty-fifth of the month was circled thickly in red. I frowned and looked at it. I couldn’t say why, but I suddenly felt an uncharacteristic curiosity about that number. Acting on instinct, I lifted up the calendar page and saw the twenty-fifth was also circled on the previous month. In fact, all the months were like that.

“It’s the day my mother died,” Xavier said, though I hadn’t asked him anything. I didn’t like sticking my nose in other people’s business the same way I didn’t allow other people to snoop around in my shit.

“She died on November twenty-fifth, twenty years ago now.” He set down his gun and stood, peeling off his gloves. He wasn’t finished talking, but I had no interest in hearing his story, despite having heard various rumors about it. Allegedly, he saw his father stab his mother to death. But I was firmly convinced that admitting certain things aloud meant crossing a boundary that couldn’t be uncrossed. If Xavier or Luke told me about their lives, then sooner or later they were going to expect me to talk about mine as well.

“Okay, I’m going,” I said shortly. “We’ll see each other later.”

And that was how I left, as insensitive and uninterested as I could possibly be. I had good reasons for behaving like that, though.

Each member of the Krew came from a disastrous background. Each one of us had suffered somehow. Each of us carried a deep hurt inside. Each of us was fighting an unending battle with ourselves. I shared a lot of thingswith the Krew: my perverted thoughts, my sexual desires, my questionable habits, even my women. But there was something that I would never share with any of them, a part of myself that I guarded jealously: my soul.

28

Selene

Miss Anna knew.

Shit.

She had seen us on the chaise longue, lost in our moment of sin. I didn’t know how it could have happened.

I could feel my cheeks heating up; I was sure that I was blushing just from recalling Neil’s lips on mine, his demanding tongue, his golden eyes staring at me so full of lust and that enigmatic smile that made me lose my mind. I’d felt like I was dying last night when I watched that blond girl come out of the pool house. Fortunately, I hadn’t seen what happened inside, though it had been easy enough to intuit.

I was so furious and eaten up with jealousy that I fixated on my book and sat out in the cold to punish myself and prove to myself that Neil was all wrong for me. That I shouldn’t hold out hope that he would change and become the perfect man I’d dreamed of having by my side since I was a little girl.

I was there in the garden because I needed to accept reality. But all I needed was to see him again, handsome and brazen as ever with a cigarette pressed between his lips and his mind caught up in his own problems, and I fell right back into his trap.