The sister that’d threatened me at the gate, Val, was sitting behind that table, leisurely drinking from a bottle of Grey Goose.
“That’s actually water,” she said, seeing where my gaze was settled or perhaps guessing. “It makes her seem more…badass. Or so she says.”
My lips quirked up at one corner. “It actually does, if you can believe it. Had you not told me, I would’ve thought she was swigging that without flinching.”
“Snort.” She rolled her eyes and caught my hand again before tugging me forward past the rapidly filling line.
“Did you just say snort?” I asked.
“Sometimes that’s the only thing that conveys it more than an actual snort,” she said. “And my sisters say my nose already looks like a pig nose. If I snort on top of it, they give me endless amounts of grief and tease me relentlessly for the next few days until something else catches their attention.”
We’d just stepped around the velvet ropes that kept the people away from Val until she was open when someone called Simi’s name.
I looked behind me, noting one of the sisters that’d been at the bar last night rushing in her direction.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I better see what she wants. Go on in.”
Then she was rushing in the redhead’s direction.
I turned back around to see Val looking at me with raised eyebrows.
“Scared?” she snarked.
I scoffed and walked toward her. “Hardly.”
She waited until I was seated in front of her before she tilted her head and stared at me.
“You know, you don’t hide it as well as you think you do,” she told me.
My brows rose. “I don’t hide what?”
“The act,” she nodded as if my question answered some hidden thought.
“Is this how the act goes?” I wondered.
She swirled her finger around the tip of the crystal ball as she stared at me.
“So you were a killing machine,” she stated.
I felt my stomach clench.
“I wouldn’t say that,” I admitted.
“The tattoos,” she indicated them with a tilt of her forehead. “Why’d you get them on your hands?”
That stomach clench went into a full-on spasm.
She eyed the tattoos. “Are those hash marks?”
I looked down at my hand, then back up at her face. “Of course not.”
They were hash marks.
A way to remind me of each life I’d taken.
Hands that now cooked for a living had once strangulated the life out of them, too.
“A purple heart.” She eyed the small purple heart on the side of my thumb, in that little fleshy part between the bones of your hand. “Did you get hurt in action?”
I felt myself clench. “Let me guess,” she said, eyeing me speculatively. “You got so hurt that they had to send you home.”
I blinked.
It was as if she knew about my life.
In fact, she knew so much stuff, so specifically, that I knew her “act” had a lot of truth to it.
“I feel like maybe you should be telling me what I feel, why I have tattoos on my hands, and whether or not those hash marks represent something,” I said cooly.
Val’s brows rose as if she hadn’t expected me to challenge her words.
Did she somehow have a glimpse into my life? But how?
Until yesterday, I’d not seen any of them before in my life. To get the kind of information she had, she’d have had to go to my sister or my dad. And only one of them was alive. The one that lived hadn’t known about my hash marks, though.
Technically, I’d maneuvered them into a tattoo on my wrist, and the hash marks truly only resembled an extension of that tattoo unless you were looking more closely.
My buddy who’d given me the tattoo had also been in the Navy with me, so he knew how to work it in so it wouldn’t be spotted for what it was—a counter.
Yet, even he hadn’t been someone that knew the significance.
“You’re a feisty one, aren’t you?” she asked, leaning back in her chair to take a swig.
Before I could reply, Simi came back and smiled at the both of us.
The smile was so beautiful that it made my heart hurt.
I stood up and smoothed my jeans down from their bunched position at the crease of my thighs.
“It was nice to meet you, Valhalla,” I said to the woman.
Her eyes narrowed. “Call me Val.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I nodded.
Simi frowned, her gaze hopping back and forth between her sister and me.
But before she could question it, an attendant wearing a red blazer and black pants with a red-and-white undershirt beneath the blazer stopped next to the table and said, “Time to go to work, Madam Val.”
Val sighed, stashed her vodka bottle underneath the table, and stood up to smooth her skirts and don a Sarai that covered her hair and gave her an even more mysterious vibe.
Simi pulled me once again to where she wanted me, which ended up being the funnel cake line.
“There’s a lull,” she beamed. “Let’s grab one of these for you, and then we’ll go to the show that’s about to start.”
“What show is that?” I asked, feeling my heart start to pound with her nearness.
Her sister freaked me the fuck out—she knew way too much stuff about me to make me feel comfortable—but Simi, on the other hand? She did things to my heart that made me feel like a teenager with his first crush.
“What happened with Val?” she asked when we moved up to the second in line.
I sighed. “She was a little…invasive.”
Simi groaned. “Invasive how?”
“Invasive, like she knew stuff about my life that not many people know,” I admitted.
Simi swore a blue streak, then whirled around as if she was about to go back to her sister’s tent and give her a piece of her mind.
I caught her around the waist just as the person in front of me vacated their spot.
“What can I get you two?” the woman in the black apron asked.
She was looking at Simi with a sweet smile on her face.
“He’ll have a funnel cake.” Simi looked at me, “What do you drink?”
I thought about it for a moment and then said, “Do y’all have milk?”
Simi snickered. “They serve beer here, and you ask for milk?”
“Beer and powdered sugar are two very conflicting flavors. They don’t complement well,” I informed her. “But something sweet with milk? Perfect.”
“I don’t usually give milk out because it’s for the batter, but you can have a glass since you’re with one of my favorite people,” the server chirped.
Simi sighed and finally settled against my side, and that’s when I realized how incredibly soft she was against me.
At around five foot four or so, Simi was very beautiful. She had tanned, smooth skin, freckles upon freckles, and she looked like she had a lot of curves that her uniform was doing a piss-poor job of hiding. Though it was putting forth a valiant effort.
I imagined that having body parts slipping out while you were trying to roll yourself up in a sheet might be very difficult.
Then, only when my milk was delivered and my funnel cake was steaming in my hand did she explain her earlier outburst.