Sins & Needles(49)

“So we’re even.”

I put down the mug. “Nothing’s even when you’re being blackmailed. So, tell me, what’s the plan?”

“I need you to make me disappear,” he said, straight and to the point.

I raised my brow. “Disappear as in…?”

He took a quick sip of his coffee and stared down into the mug. “Ellie, I’m going to be honest with you.”

“Oh what a pleasant change of pace.” I sat back in my chair, utterly intrigued. Camden had been a master at hiding his emotions, but there was a tiny pulse of life at the corner of his eye, magnified by his glasses. I knew that pulse, that twitch. I had it myself. It was fear.

He ignored my sarcastic remark and spoke to the coffee. “I’m not in any trouble, because that’s the first conclusion you’re going to jump to. If I just carried on my life like this, running my shop and following orders,” I raised my other brow but let him continue, “then that would be that. My life would go on and no one would probably get hurt.”

He paused and picked up his pen and began to click the end of it, in and out, in and out. I waited. It was excruciating.

With a sigh he continued, looking everywhere except my face. “But I’m tired of my life. I want out of it. And it’s not the kind of life you can escape from. Not by normal means.” Click click went the pen. “After Ben was born…I did a bad thing. I had my reasons and I have my excuses. But it happened and Sophia divorced me. But no one’s truly free from Sophia. When you marry a Madano, you marry the whole family. And it’s a bad family, Ellie.” Click click. Click click. I eyed the painting of Sophia on the wall. “And they don’t let you go so easily, especially when you owe their sister child support. Do they care, really, how Sophie and Ben get on? No. They don’t. They’d turn on her in an instant. They just care about their image. Their pride. Their family values. And so they said they were doing me a favor. I didn’t have much money back then. Even with LA Ink and the increase in business, I barely got by. LA is an expensive city and they knew I could never make enough there. So they came to me with a deal. They’d give me a shop anywhere I wanted as long as it was in a low-rent town with a couple of paying customers. They’d give me my dream.”

“Sins and Needles,” I said quietly.

“Yes,” he said, finally looking at me. “They gave me this place. But as you now know, everything comes with a price. They said they wanted me to do well and then give most of my earnings to Sophia and Ben. I didn’t have a problem with that, I’d give them everything if I could. But I wondered, if they had the money to buy a shop, why didn’t they just give her the money outright? Well, they said it was because it had to go through me, because I owed her, not them. And then the truth came out, about two weeks into running this shop. Business was slow. Terribly fucking slow. I had a handful of customers and that was it. This goddamn town, it just isn’t the place to make a life. It’s still not.”

“So what happened?” I had a feeling I knew where this was all going, and to be honest, I was starting to feel a bit bad for him.

“I started to panic a little. Vincent came by, that’s her oldest, that’s the guy you never want to see in a bad mood. He flipped the sign over to Closed, and I was so certain he was going to bash my brains in or something. I can do well in fight, believe me, but that’s someone you never want to cross.”

This Vincent was starting to remind me of my Javier. That wasn’t good. Funny how we had both been wrapped up with bad people at the same times in our lives.

“He asked me about my sales and I told him the truth. I couldn’t afford to lie. He owned this building for crying out loud. But, instead of cutting off my finger, he just smiled and shrugged. Like it was no problem. Then he brought out his briefcase, opened it up, and showed me the shitload of money inside. He told me that it was the real reason this business existed, and as long as I held onto the money for him and made slow deposits into my bank account, their bank account, the business would keep going. It didn’t matter how many people wanted tattoos. All that mattered was that, to the outside, it looked like Sins and Needles was making a lot of dough.”

“Money laundering,” I stated the obvious. “Of course, of course this is just a front.”

He glared at me. “I could have done well somewhere else. I could have done really well. I’m not the problem. The town is the problem.”

“I think you’re at least part of the problem,” I dared to say. “You’ve been cleaning money for a few years now, haven’t you?”