Dark Secrets
Author: Jessica Gadziala
ONE
Faith
She didn't want to go to work.
She wasn't one of those people who bitched about work. If you were unhappy with something, her general feeling was that you should stop doing it. It was stupid to waste your life on something you hated. And she damn sure didn't want to sit and listen to your sob stories about it. Which perhaps put her in the wrong field, being a bartender. Men liked to spill their guts to bartenders as much as women liked to spill their guts to hair stylists and manicurists.
But she wasn't someone who dreaded going into work.
Things were off there, that was the root of the problem. And given that she worked at Lam which was a cover of a well-known mob front, things being off weren't just unsettling, they were downright worrisome.
She hated worrying.
That wasn't how she operated.
"Get it together," she told herself as she moved into her bathroom to put on some eye liner.
Her reflection showed her long dark brown hair, her fit body with wide hips and a rack that got her more tips than her personality did, dressed in tight black jeans and a tight tank, combat boots at her feet. She put some liner around her brown eyes, giving them a slightly more exotic look, slipped a pocketknife into her boot, grabbed her wallet, and headed into the hall.
She'd worked at Lam for years, had seen it when parts of it were still being built, ordering the booze for the back bar amid the sawdust and the somewhat fascinating construction of the panic room that was situated in the wall behind the table where Vin, the owner and also the leader of the D'Onofrio crime family, always sat.
How she'd gotten the job when she had about all the hospitality charm of a rabies-ridden raccoon, well, that was between her and Vin.
She walked up to the door, situated beside an all-night diner that she ate at far too often, having no actual cooking skills herself, and let herself into work.
Lam was a nice, upscale place.
You would expect nothing less from Vin who she was pretty sure slept in a goddamn three piece suit. The walls were a deep gray, the floors a sleek hardwood that he had finished every year or so due to the heavy foot traffic. All the tables, the bar, and the back bar were black.
Usually, for reasons she chose not to analyze, Lam always had a calming effect on her. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the owner of it had a lot more respect for her than he did some of his own children or the fact that she wasn't expected to be someone she wasn't. She was known for being rude, if not downright hostile, to the male patrons. She kept a bat under the bar and had been known to use it. And no one ever dared to question her methods.
Except maybe Vin's son Anthony, the shithead drunk who couldn't keep his mouth shut and his opinions to himself, and was jealous that his father had more respect for some 'nobody bartender' than he did for his own son.
But as she walked behind the bar and put her wallet into the safe, she didn't feel relaxed. She felt on edge.
Something was going on.
That wasn't exactly unusual.
It was a mob bar. There were always things going on. There were constantly men around with the bulges of guns in their jackets. There were people casing the place, checking out Vin and his sons. There were meetings with the other organized crime syndicates: the Russians, Polish, Irish, the Chinese. Crime, like any business, had little to do with the actual business and a lot to do with keeping the peace with friends and enemies.
So things were never drama free.
Faith was used to those feelings, that hair on the back of your neck feeling when an unfriendly came in and might cause a problem. That was as normal as kicking out a kid with a fake ID in her business.
But this was different.
This was something she couldn't place, didn't understand, and absolutely didn't trust. It was something that seemed to seep into the paint in the walls, draped the entire building in a sort of weighted trepidation that made her skin feel scratchy and her nerves feel frazzled
As someone who never was really the type to fret, yeah, it was irritating.
"Faith," Vin greeted her, warm smile on his face that made the creases next to his eyes look sweet and fatherly. If you saw him, you would think that was just what he was- a friendly Italian father figure. Albeit a very wealthy one in his expensive suits and a four-thousand dollar watch. He was tall and fit with dark hair that was graying in a charming way and dark eyes that were always working.
It wasn't that he wasn't a nice, Italian father figure. He was. Which was what was so disarming about him. He was friendly, charming, intelligent, worldly, and had a moral compass that often pointed North.