Chapter 114: The Hallway

POV: BRIGAIL

Growing up with Adele Havens had taught Brigail two things: how to make biscuits from scratch, and how to move through a house without making a sound.

This was not a three-room farmhouse. This was one of the largest hotels in Las Vegas, with a hundred cameras and twice as many staff who reported to a man who had been patient for thirty years and was not about to stop now.

She kept the dark wig on. Eyes down. She knew every camera angle on this floor from three weeks of surveillance work with Jimmy. She moved through the casino floor the way water moves around stone, finding the gaps, never forcing anything.

She was ten feet from the high-stakes corridor when the hand closed around her wrist.

Cold. Dry. Unhurried.

She didn't look up immediately. She already knew.

"Evenin', Brigail," Barry said beside her, pressing the elevator call button with his free hand like they had planned to meet here all along.

The corridor was empty except for the single guard posted at the lift. Barry had timed this. Of course he had.

The elevator opened. He steered her in. She didn't resist.

He pressed her floor number and the door-close button and let go of her wrist.

They rode in silence for two floors.

"Bit late for a stroll," he observed, eyes forward.

"You're a bit old to be a babysitter," she replied.

His jaw tightened. She watched it in the mirrored door.

The lift stopped. They walked the hall to her suite in silence. Four doors from Jerry and Michele's room. Three floors below Corbett. She fished for her keycard in Eli's jacket pocket and felt Barry watching her do it.

She knew Eli would be watching from the Obsidian Ace. She kept her posture easy. Nothing to see here.

"I still consider you a dear friend," Barry said, when they were standing in front of her door. "Despite everything."

She turned her head. "I find that genuinely hard to believe."

He pushed his hands into his pockets and balled them. She could see the knuckles move against the fabric.

"This isn't the path I would have chosen for you," he said. "But it's your fate now."

"Is that what you tell yourself?" she asked. "When you decided to throw my life in the woodchipper? That it was fate?"

He clenched his jaw. "You have so much hate in you it's making you blind."

"I was blind when I trusted you," she said. "Turns out I had you completely wrong. I thought you were just a cockroach. You're actually a snake."

He let out a short, bitter laugh. The kind that had no warmth anywhere in it. "A snake? You're sleeping with the biggest reptile in this city. Here's some free advice, Brigail. Vegas is a snake pit. You act like one or you become food. That's not a threat. That's a warning."

She pressed her key to the lock pad. The green light blinked. She grabbed the handle.

"Thanks for the warning," she said. "You can be sure I won't make the mistake of trusting Russell."

He caught her elbow.

She stopped.

"That's where you're wrong," he said, lower now. Quick. Like a man running out of time. "Corbett didn't trust Russell. He betrayed him." He waited for her to turn around. "Do you know how Corbett got that scar?"

She said nothing.

"It was the night he sold the Scarface to Godric Michealson. Russell ordered him to get it back. Corbett refused." Barry let go of her arm. "Victor described it in loving detail. Russell pressed Corbett's face against the dining table and dragged a steak knife from his ear to the corner of his mouth. He watched his own son bleed onto the white tablecloth. Calm as anything."

Brigail's grip on the door handle tightened until she could feel the brass edge cutting into her palm.

"In the end," Barry said, "Russell got his Scarface regardless. Didn't matter if it was on a chip or on his son's face."

She pushed the door open.

She stepped inside.

She let it close behind her.

She stood in the dark for a long moment and breathed through her nose until her knees stopped shaking.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall.

Her father had refused. He had refused Russell, knowing what it would cost him, and he had done it anyway.

She pressed her thumb to the corner of her mouth and thought about that for a long time.