Morrison Read online

  As a child, I wasn’t permitted to call him “Dad.” Truth be told, that was fine by me. He wasn’t a father; he was a sperm donor. Fuck that—he was a rapist. Momma calls life with him her penance for poor choices, one that she had to endure until her time was served. “Atonement,” she would say. He mind-fucked her as much as he actually fucked her, which was a lot, so he had the power even when I begged her to leave. He held all the cards.

  Warped. Fucking warped.

  What does a woman do when she is dealt a shitty hand?

  Play the fucking cards she’s dealt until she can find a way out.

  I may be what tied Momma down, but on the flip side of that chip, I am her way out. Me and Momma, a Bonnie and Clyde of our own damn making. After years of watching, years of waiting, my patience is finally paying off.

  Momma worked to get the connection. Then we hustled for the two-thousand-dollar buy-in, and here I sit, at the underground table with the ballers in the back room of a stuffy hotel. The smoke fills my lungs, the window curtains are drawn, and the door is locked until the final hand is played.

  Ante up. Call the bluff. Everyone folds but me and him.

  Sean “Monte” Timmons.

  Some call him dangerous; others say he is sex walking. He is the youngest man to rake it in from the house in New Jersey twice over. His reputation precedes him, and oftentimes, cowards fold before the stakes climb so high.

  I should have tossed my cards. I should have given up the pot. I should have walked the fuck away. Hell, I shouldn’t even have allowed myself to be talked into this in the first place. I know Momma wants off the corner, but at seventeen, I have no business in the big leagues. This is beyond a table game with her pimp and his buddies.

  Only, I don’t fold. I don’t give up. Instead, I raise the pot and go all in on something I don’t have to begin with. I got to the table on a hustle. A flash of a smile, a grab of the right cock, and an innuendo of more to come got me past security. Then, with a stack of counterfeit bills tossed on the dimly lit table while bending over and letting my cleavage hang out, I had these fellas eating out of the palm of my hand.

  That is, until the cards are dealt. Business is all business the minute the first two-and-a-half-by-three-and-a-half-inch paper hit the felt.

  Hand after hand, I manage to survive until the final match.

  Monte smirks at me from behind his aviators after looking over to his phone, which was handed to him by the dealer. All electronic devices have to be silenced and turned over to the dealer so there are no distractions. Why was his given back? Could I be lucky enough to win by default? I have never wished for someone to have a family emergency as hard as I do right now.

  With his lips turned up in a half grin, I feel my chest tighten.

  “Hailey ‘Hard Knocks’ Poe, are you ready for the hand that’s sure to change your life?” His whisper turns my veins to ice. He has me figured out.

  I swallow hard. How the hell does he know my name? I used a fake ID to get in.

  He taps his finger against his mouth menacingly, then pulls his glasses down, his deep, brown eyes cutting into me. I want to crawl under the table, but I hear my momma’s voice in my head, saying, “Show no fear. Never let them see you sweat, Hailey Sue.” Time to make my momma proud, no matter the cost.

  “It’s a practice of mine to know my opponents. You almost had me, minx. Don’t worry, baby. Your secret stays in this room, because, after this hand, I assure you that everything you think you know is about to be changed.”

  I should have folded, but my ego clouded my vision. Now my concentration is gone, the game thrown, and my sight clouded again, this time by the tears I refuse to let fall.

  Five-card draw, Texas hold ’em, jokers wild—all is lost before I can blink.

  Fighting to push back my emotions, I try to still my now trembling hands. He knows too much. When he finds out his payment isn’t real, what happens to me? To Momma? Will I even survive tonight?

  A week later, Momma and I were instructed to pack our bags. Big Daddy Pimp was setting us up. Only, he wasn’t.

  He “set us up” in an upscale condo just outside the Strip, then handed Momma a wad of bills before he turned and walked away. He never looked back, not that either of us expected him to. We weren’t in the place twenty-four hours before a courier service delivered a parcel addressed to Hailey “Hard Knocks” Poe.

  My heart sank. Seeing that name, I should have packed Momma up right then and taken off with the little bit of money Big Daddy had left her. Did I do that? Nope.

  How the hell did he find me?

  Opening the envelope, my heart pounded, my breathing hitched, and my palms sweat.

  Inside was a contract, one that sealed my fate against any future I had ever hoped for.

  We weren’t released by Big Daddy Douchebag. We were bought and paid for. He gave Big Daddy enough to release Momma. He set us up.

  Sean “Monte” Timmons owns me. He owns us. How the hell did this keep happening to me? The cycle of misery—wash, rinse, repeat. From one man’s property to another.

  The glitz, the glam, the lights, and the action of Vegas are all a façade. It’s a black hole of manipulation. Life here is a game. Day in and day out, it’s all a gamble to survive and to thrive. The winner takes all.

  Monte didn’t waste time in moving himself into the place with us. More so, with me. My age didn’t matter. He had me in a position where I couldn’t deny him. If word got around about my counterfeit bills at the table, my age would be nothing more than a number on my death certificate.

  Monte used that to his advantage.

  The situation didn’t seem bad to my mother, who had spent her entire life working the corners. To me, it was hell. Monte didn’t put me on a street or in a hotel bed to repay my debt. No, he made me his wife in a ceremony at a chapel on the Strip, which my mother stupidly signed her agreement to.

  Over the last seven years, nothing has changed. Monte wheels and deals and lives for the next thrill. Lucky seven is a cruel bitch. I have accumulated seven years of debt to him.

  Every meal I have eaten, every shower I have taken, everything I have ever had, done, or been forced to endure is a penny added to the red line. The black marks are for good behavior when I play my part.

  I’m his trophy, his armpiece, and I’m also his whore. The balance gets renegotiated with every pound he gets inside my pussy, but the scales never tip in my favor, no matter how good I suck his dick.

  Seven years and few things have changed, none of those for the better.

  Funny how history repeats itself, even if you don’t want it to.

  Momma is gone from a brain-stem stroke. It happened fast. One night she went to bed, and the next morning, she was unresponsive. One call to emergency services and an ambulance ride to the hospital later, she lay in a bed on life support with a prune for a brain. Decisions had to be made, and the chances of her waking up and ever being normal were slim; as a result, the plug was pulled, and my life crashed around me.

  More bills. More debt paid by Monte.

  Stress consumes and mistakes happen, like missing a birth control pill or two. To keep an eye on costs, I cremated Momma. Two months later, I was allowed a trip to Santa Barbara to release her ashes. Feeling sick, I peed on one of those godforsaken sticks, and the two pink lines sealed my fate.

  I am a statistic. The sins of the mother were passed on to the daughter.

  Regardless of how this baby came to be, I will hold on to hope and give my daughter better than I had. Somehow, some way, the cycle will be broken.

  I shouldn’t complain. Really, Monte allows me friends. His friends, of course, but I’m not nearly as tied down as my mother was. I have a nice car, a nice house, and a closetful of clothes. From the outside looking in, I have it made.

  If only people knew I live in a loveless marriage of manipulation and corruption. I’m not the only one who owes Monte. Everyone in his life is in debt to him for some amount.

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nbsp; The hustler who refuses to be hustled, always in control, always making sure he has the upper hand, Monte has people who handle his other people. The ones who don’t pay up or have a service plan like me deal with those people as Monte keeps up the pressure until the debt is repaid, or someone suffers the consequences. As Monte says, “It’s a world of checks and balances, Hailey.”

  And he keeps the checks and balances in his favor at all times and in all ways.

  If I don’t walk the line, I will pay the price…with my life. My debt to him is beyond anything I could repay with a regular job. Hell, I don’t know if the bastard would ever actually allow me to leave, even if I tried.

  At what point does enough become enough, though? When do I break free of the chains holding me down? When do I break the cycle for my daughter? When does Marisa Noelle Timmons get to see love in action? How can I teach her what love is when I don’t even know myself?

  I haven’t learned a lot in my short life, but I do know I have never seen real love exist in any relationship around me, and it sure as shit isn’t what you read about in books. I haven’t lived what anyone would consider a normal life, but I damn sure know love isn’t about a debt, either. A real marriage, a real relationship—if one could ever exist—isn’t about owing your partner a damn thing.

  I look down at my sleeping, precious baby girl, and my heart swells. I may not know the love of a man for a woman, but I damn sure know that nothing—and I mean abso-fucking-lutely nothing—tops the depths of emotion a mother feels for her child.

  My world is warped. My life is shit. I’d managed to get not one thing right in my meager existence until I had this little girl. Every breath she takes is a breath of new life into me.

  Monte can check and balance himself until the sun falls from the sky as long as I have my baby girl.

  I want out.

  But I want her more.

  There is no way I can leave until I know I get to do it with her. There is no way I can escape until I find a way to make it free and clear with her. She is my very life, my very being, my entire world.

  One day, I’m going to find a way to have something better for us both. I just haven’t figured it out quite yet.

  “Sleep well, my sleeping beauty. Momma’s gonna make it right for both of us,” I whisper to the quiet room around me. “We don’t need Prince Charming, baby girl. Somehow, some way, little princess, I will make it happen.”

  Chapter 3

  Morrison

  After changing my clothes, I step out of the airport bathroom. I am someone different here. I am a high roller. I’m what those jocks and preps from high school wanted to become.

  For a brief moment, I think of Annie and wonder if she found a man she could make over right out of high school. Annie’s tell was the glimmer in her brown eyes when she saw her little socialite friends checking me out. I made her look even better. Apparently to her it was cool to date down. But I had no intention of being anybody’s down.

  Here, nobody would use me that way. I made the man whose reflection I look at in the mirror today. My sister-in-law Livi calls me Slick, and by God, she isn’t lying.

  As usual, I throw a twenty in the airport slots. I walked off the plane with two grand, and that money will get me through a month, if not more.

  The first pull is a loss. The next twenty goes in, and with the next pull, I get my cash back. My third pull, I lose.

  A man like me isn’t superstitious; a man like me is calculating. This loss doesn’t mean I lose. It tells me where to start.

  This is a ritual I do every damn time. If I lose, I start off away from the Strip, where the limits and the rules are lower. When I win, I hit the Strip first, where there are more rules, tighter slots, and higher limits.

  Is there a method to my madness? I’ve switched shit up more than twenty times and learned that this way sets the tone for my game. “My game”—you heard that right. Most people play a game, but not me. The game is mine. I run the game.

  I walk out into the dry desert air. My pores immediately shrivel up, my face flushes, and I breathe deep, feeling like I’m suffocating. I’m not suffocating, though. The burn is my welcome back. Game time. I hail a cab and settle in.

  “3111 Bel Air Drive,” I tell the cabbie as I climb into the air-conditioned vehicle.

  It’s dusk, a time of day when there is just something about the lights in Vegas that sets off a surge of energy in my body. I feel alive, like I have a purpose bigger than the skyscrapers and casinos, brighter than the lights on the Strip. I am bolder in Vegas, and I like bold.

  When the cab drops me off in front of my condo, I feel a grin spread across my face. No, it isn’t a mansion. It isn’t even a single-family home. The building I now own a piece of has a gate and twenty-four-hour surveillance. I own fifteen hundred square feet of something.

  It has two bedrooms, three baths, a state-of-the-art kitchen, and a living room that houses not just a big-screen, but a huge-screen TV and a Bose surround sound system. I also have a garage, and it is the first place I go to, in order to make sure my Porsche is sitting pretty and unharmed inside.

  As the garage door lifts and I look at her, I feel pride swell inside my chest, because everything I own is paid for. I don’t owe anyone shit.

  Tomorrow, she and I will cruise the streets and find some nice, tanned Vegas ass to celebrate with, to give me a proper welcome back to the bright lights and big city.

  I whisper into the night, “I’m back, motherfuckers, and ready to continue building my wealth. You ready?”

  Falling asleep on a mattress I bought online that wasn’t a hand-me-down or from the secondhand store in downtown Detroit was one of the best things I did here. This bed was made for a king. It’s hypoallergenic, a must for me. I am allergic to dust, apparently, which was why I spent so much time at the doctor’s as a kid. I’m sure it’s also the reason Momma didn’t go often herself.

  She had set up a payment plan when I was younger, and the old man bitched about the bills. Five bucks a week was what it was. Five bucks a week, and I paid that shit off with my first big win.

  The description read “California King: plush pillow top with cool foam.” I saw “King,” and I saw cool. Then I looked in the mirror and gave myself a wink. It was made for me, so I one-clicked that bitch. I’m so glad I did, too. I love this damn bed.

  No more sleeping on an old mattress on the floor. I was sleeping king.

  I love being king, but in Vegas, I wasn’t a king. Here in Vegas, I am Aces. I walk into any casino, and they know who I am. I have a nice ride, and I’m dressed to impress. I’ve always had to fake it till I actually make it, but looking around my room, I’d say I made it.

  I wake up early in the morning and stretch, wanting to get a jump on the day, starting with a run. My body needs to be tired so sitting inside a casino for hours doesn’t drive me insane.

  I head into bedroom three, turn on the Bose surround sound, and jump on the treadmill, also bought online and delivered to my door. Hell, I even had them set up the treadmill. I didn’t want to fuck up a five-thousand-dollar piece of machinery.

  After my run and shower, I throw on a pair of gray dress pants, a white wifebeater, and a blue button-down, collared shirt. Blue makes my eyes pop. Then I stand in my walk-in closet, checking out my look in the mirror.

  “Spot on, of course.”

  I go into the bathroom, towel off my hair, grab some gel, and make sure every hair is in place—the look isn’t complete without that. I shave, something I slacked on back in Rock City, then grab my silver Rolex off the counter, strap it on, step back, and admire the reflection in the mirror.

  I busted my ass to become who I am today. Baller, high roller, or Aces, call me what you will, but it all comes back to where I began.

  Before leaving my kick-ass pad, I grab my wallet and a condom. I need to grab me some high-society tail today.

  The first four hours, I hit the California, Binion’s, El Cortez, and Golden Gate for bl
ackjack to ensure my pocket is padded, and I make two grand in four hours. Not a bad fucking day at all. The edge is off now. I have two grand to play and two grand back in the wallet. Why two grand? I always keep two grand tucked away to get me home—always.

  I head back to stash it in the safe and take a breather.

  I flip on the eighty-inch, wall-mounted flat screen and sink down into my leather recliner, my throne. Hitting the remote to the chair, the massage begins, and then I sit back, listening to the news.

  Later, I wake up feeling like a new man, like a winner. I swear I smell hundreds, and those bitches have my name on them.

  Tonight, I roll up to the valet and toss my keys at him.

  “Be gentle with her,” I say as I hand him a twenty. “If she comes back looking the same, that’ll be bigger.”

  “I know it will, Aces.” The kid winks at me.

  This is a gamble—handing the keys over to someone you don’t even know. It tears at the Rock City boy, but no one knows how hard those wheels were to come by. No one knows I’m not just some entitled little punk who’s burning away his trust fund and youth by playing cards, driving cars, and hanging at bars. No one knows because they can’t see my tells. I’ve buried those bitches deep, as deep as the emotions I feel watching someone getting in my prized possession.

  As I watch the kid jump in my car, I see a smile on his face. I know that motherfucker wants to burn rubber as sure as I know I wanted to do the same thing the first time I sat in her black leather seats. And, fuck yes, I did it, but that rubber was paid for by me.

  His grip tightens on the wheel—his tell—but he won’t do a damn thing. Why? He needs this job. He earns bank, then goes and plays the game, hoping someday to be a baller, just like me.

  I know all their tells, even the dealers. I don’t count cards; I count on instinct. I trust my gut. Momma didn’t raise a fool. Momma also didn’t raise an entitled prick. My only tell: I refuse to treat people who have the same damn dream I do like they are less than. Hard work is not foreign to this guy.