Chapter 6: Bruh
Mya crossed her arms, her fingers digging into her sleeves. The velvet of the booth felt suddenly oppressive, like the walls of a confessional. She stared at Craig, who hadn’t moved an inch since Derek left.
“What exactly does a club have to do with a debt loan whatever thing,” she said, the words flat and hard. “Oh Jesus, don’t tell me it’s some like money crime shit.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut. “God. Of course he did. Because he’s an idiot. And I am too. You came into the coffee shop the first time I met you with a stab wound.” She let out a long, shuddering groan, dropping her hand to look at him with raw exhaustion. “Where’s the wine? I want the bottle.”
She looked directly at him, her blue eyes wide and dangerously clear. “So what, the jeans and leather jacket you’re constantly wearing is just a disguise? And when actually did you connect me to Derek and his debt? Before you showed up at the coffee shop cut up, or after?”
For a moment, Craig just looked at her. The charismatic smirk was gone, wiped clean. In its place was something more guarded, more real. He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he reached for a button subtly embedded in the mahogany table. He pressed it once.
Within thirty seconds, a silent waiter in a black vest appeared. Craig didn’t look at him. “A bottle of the ‘19 Sancerre. And two clean glasses.”
“Just one glass,” Mya corrected, her voice firm. “And leave the bottle.”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched Craig’s lips. He nodded to the waiter, who vanished.
The silence returned, but it was different now. The performance was over. It was just the two of them and the ugly truth she was dragging into the light.
“The club is a business,” Craig said finally, his voice low. “A very profitable, very legal-front business. The other stuff… that’s the family trade. Derek came to us for a loan. He couldn’t get it from a bank. His landscaping company was drowning. We provided capital.” He shrugged, a fluid roll of his shoulders. “At a premium.”
“Vig,” she said.
He seemed surprised she knew the term. “Yeah. Vig.”
The waiter returned with an ice bucket, a slender green bottle, and a single, large wine glass. He uncorked it with practiced silence, poured a splash for Craig to taste. Craig waved it away impatiently. The waiter filled Mya’s glass to the brim and retreated.
Mya didn’t wait. She picked up the glass, took a deep swallow, and then set it down with a decisive click. She then picked up the entire bottle by the neck.
“To answer your question,” Craig said, watching her lift the bottle to her lips. “The jeans and jacket are what I like to wear. The suit is what I wear when I have to be him.” He gestured vaguely around the VIP section. “And I didn’t know who you were when I walked into that coffee shop. Not a clue.”
She lowered the bottle, a trickle of wine tracing a path down her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, not taking her eyes off him.
“After,” he continued, his gaze unwavering. “I had Marco look into the girl from the coffee shop. The one who didn’t scream at the blood. The one who talked to me like I was a person who’d just had a bad day, not a problem to be managed. It wasn’t hard. You’re memorable, sweetheart.” He said the pet name softly, without its usual edge. “The trail led right back to Derek. My debtor. The guy with the controlling texts and the shitty temper.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, closing the space between them. The faint, clean scent of his soap cut through the cigar haze. “Imagine my surprise. My irritation, even. Here’s this guy, this pathetic, small-time clown who can’t manage his money or his emotions, and he has you. Waiting for him. Cleaning up his messes. Letting him…” He paused, his eyes darting again to the faint shadow near her hairline. A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Letting him mark you.”
He said it with a quiet, simmering fury that felt more personal than professional. It hung in the air between them, a accusation wrapped in a confession. Mya stared at him, the wine buzzing softly in her veins, cutting through the numbness. His intensity was a physical force, pressing against the carefully constructed wall of her composure.
She could see the genuine anger in the tight line of his mouth, the almost proprietary concern in his darkened eyes. It was too much. The hypocrisy of it was a spark to tinder.
She rolled her eyes, a hard, dismissive gesture. “Yeah, and you probably break knees, so kettle meet pot.” Her voice was laced with a bitter, wine-fueled clarity. She took a long, deliberate drink from the bottle, the glass cool against her lips. “And from what I’ve heard, you just sleep with a woman for a day then throw her away.”
She lowered the bottle, meeting his gaze head-on, not flinching from the storm brewing there. “And let’s not forget your little line about him having ‘other assets’ while looking right at me. All I’m saying is get off the soap box and admit you have a stupid crush on me and stop trying to play hero.”
For a long second, Craig didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. Her words, sharp as shattered glass, hung in the air between them. Then a rough, humorless sound escaped his throat, something between a laugh and a gasp. He ran a hand through his perfectly styled hair, leaving it disheveled.
“A stupid crush,” he repeated, the words tasting strange. He looked down at his own hands, then back up at her, his dark eyes stripped of all their usual clever armor. “You think that’s what this is?”
“I don’t know what else to call it,” Mya shot back, but her voice wavered. The raw, unguarded expression on his face was disarming. It wasn’t the look of a player. It was the look of a man who’d just been shoved off a ledge he didn’t know he was standing on.
He leaned back slowly, the movement deliberate, putting physical space between them as if he needed it to think. The muted thump of the bassline from the dance floor below vibrated up through the floor. He watched her take another defiant pull from the bottle, her throat working.
“You’re right,” he said finally, the admission quiet and stark. “About the knees. And the women.” He paused, choosing his next words with a care she’d never seen from him. “But the two things have never… collided before. Not like this.”
Mya swallowed another mouthful of wine, the crisp, mineral taste cutting through the sick feeling in her gut. She set the bottle down with a soft thud on the mahogany. It was already a third empty. “Collided. That’s a nice, clean word for it.”
“It’s not clean.” His voice was low, intense. “Nothing about this is clean. You showing up in my coffee shop. Me showing up in your CVS. Him bringing you here, to my table, like some fucking…” He trailed off, shaking his head, unable to finish the ugly thought. “You think I wanted this? To see his hands on you after I’ve…”
He stopped again, his jaw tightening. The memory of the CVS bathroom, of her back against the cold tile, flashed between them as if he’d shouted it. The air grew thick, charged with everything they hadn’t said. Mya felt a flush spread across her chest, a confusing mix of shame and a traitorous heat.
She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, a defensive barricade. “Your current saving grace is the fact that this is the best wine I’ve ever had in my life,” she stated, her voice forcibly even. “So I will sit here and we can talk. But the second I finish this bottle, I’m out. Or if Derek comes back.” She shrugged, a brittle gesture. “Really, whichever happens first.”
Craig stared at the bottle, then at her. A strange, calculating look entered his eyes, but it was softer now. Less about business. “A timer,” he murmured. “Fair enough.”
He reached slowly for his own abandoned whiskey glass. He didn’t drink from it. He just turned the heavy crystal in his fingers, watching the liquid swirl. “You asked me to get off the soap box. So I will.” He looked at her, his gaze direct and unsettling. “I don’t have a crush, Mya. A crush is for teenagers. It’s simple. This isn’t simple.”
He took a breath, as if stepping onto unstable ground. “The first time I saw you, you were humming. It was some folk song, off-key. You had flour on your nose. You looked up, saw the blood on my shirt, and you didn’t scream. You asked if I needed a chair before I passed out.” A faint, almost invisible smile touched his lips. “No one has done that in a very long time. Looked at me and saw a guy who might be tired, not a transaction or a threat.”
Mya’s arms uncrossed slightly. She remembered that morning. The quiet before the rush. The startling, stark reality of the red blooming through his white t-shirt. She’d just moved on instinct.
“Then,” he continued, his voice dropping, “I find out you’re tied to this spineless, grasping idiot who hurts you. Who uses you. And yeah, it pissed me off. In a way that had nothing to do with his debt.” He finally took a sip of the whiskey, his eyes never leaving hers over the rim of the glass. “So maybe I’m not trying to play hero. Maybe I’m just… interested. And massively fucking annoyed at the situation.”
“Interested,” she echoed. The word felt too small for the gravity in the room. She picked up the wine bottle again, not to drink, just to hold onto something solid. The cool glass grounded her. “You have a terrible way of showing it. Ambushing me in a drugstore. Cornering me in a VIP booth.”
“You kissed me back in that drugstore,” he reminded her softly, no smirk, just a fact.
Her face flushed hotter. She couldn’t deny it. The memory was a live wire in her nervous system. “That was a mistake.”
“Was it?” He leaned forward again, the space between them shrinking. The clean, sharp scent of him, of expensive soap and whiskey, washed over her. “It didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt real. It’s the only thing in this whole fucking mess that has felt real to me in years.”
The confession was so blunt, so starkly vulnerable, it stole the air from her lungs. She saw it then, the deep, unspoken loneliness that lived beneath all the money and the swagger. It echoed something in her own hollowed-out chest. She took a hurried drink of wine to hide how his words had shaken her.
The bottle was half empty now.
“Derek will be back soon,” she said, her voice barely above the muffled music. It was a retreat, a grabbing for the familiar cage, even as the door stood open.
Craig’s expression hardened slightly at the name. “Let him come back. He just signed his truck over to Marco. He has nothing left to negotiate with.” He paused, his gaze intensifying. “Except you. And that’s not on the table.”
“You don’t get to decide that,” she whispered, but the fight was seeping out of her, replaced by a dizzying confusion.
“I just did.” The words were quiet, final. He wasn’t bullying. He was stating a law of his universe. “He doesn’t get to use you as a bargaining chip. Not with me. That debt is frozen. He can work it off another way, through the business, on his knees for all I care. But you walk out of here free and clear of it.”
Mya stared at him. The wine was a warm, buzzing static in her head, softening the sharp edges of his proclamation. A laugh bubbled up, unexpected and harsh, escaping her lips before she could stifle it.
She laughed again, the sound dissolving into a shaky sigh as she lifted the bottle. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “But you think I was at any point going to help him with his debt to you?” She took a swift gulp. “I said the truck to keep him from getting killed. That’s it.”
She set the bottle down with a firm thud, leaning forward. Her eyes, bright and suddenly fierce, locked on his. “I have $10,000 in savings he doesn’t know about. That’s my money. Not his. He is fucked. And also not my husband. I have no obligation to help pay his loan.” She jabbed a finger in his direction. “And you’re not touching it either, crime boy.” She picked up the bottle again, squinting at the elegant label. “How much is this wine, exactly?”
Craig watched her, his earlier intensity melting into a look of sheer, arrested fascination. His lips twitched. He didn’t answer her question.
“Ten thousand dollars,” he repeated, his voice low with undisguised admiration. “And he doesn’t know. You’ve been sitting on that, serving him coffee in his own mug, while he flounders.” He shook his head slowly, a genuine smile breaking through. “You are full of surprises, sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me that,” she said automatically, but the heat was gone from it. She was still stuck on the wine’s probable cost, her practical mind reeling. “Seriously. A ballpark. Am I drinking my electric bill for the year right now?”
“It’s a ‘19 Domaine Vacheron,” he said, as if that explained everything. He finally took a proper drink of his own whiskey. “And your secret is safe. I don’t want your savings. I told you. The debt, as it concerns you, is done.”
The debt, as it concerns you, is done.”
Mya blinked, processing the absolute finality in his tone. A weird, giddy relief bubbled up, untethered from the alcohol. She threw her hands up in a quick, silent little yippie motion, then let herself sink back into the velvet cushions, the bottle cradled in her lap.
“So,” she said, drawing the word out, a new, playful sharpness in her gaze. “Is Marco the one you gossip to about your intense crush on me? He got all smirky when I walkeded in with Derek. Even did the whole ‘Ah, Mya, nice to meet you’ thing, like he wasn’t hiding it at all.” She frowned, lifting the bottle to examine it against the low light. “Uh. How full was this when I started?”
Craig’s composed mask slipped completely. He looked genuinely caught, a flush of something that wasn’t anger darkening his neck above his white collar. He opened his mouth, closed it, then ran a hand over his jaw. “Marco has a big mouth and an overactive imagination.”
“Mmhmm.” Mya took another sip, not breaking eye contact. “And you didn’t answer the question. About the wine. This feels… lighter.”
“It’s a bottle. You’re drinking it.” He shifted, suddenly seeming less like a crime heir and more like a guy who’d been put on the spot. “And I don’t gossip. He observes. Annoyingly well.”
“He observed you getting all flustered and weird over a barista.” She grinned, the wine loosening her tongue, blurring the lines of danger. “That’s adorable. The big bad Craig Moretti, thrown off his game by a girl who serves coffee.”
“Flustered?” He leaned forward, the space between them collapsing again, his eyes narrowing. The word was a challenge. “You think I’m flustered?”
“You are right now.” She gestured at him with the bottle’s neck. “Your tell is that little muscle in your jaw. It ticks when you’re trying not to say something. It’s been doing a tiny tap dance for the last ten minutes.”
He went very still. The ambient hum of the club, the distant laughter from another booth, it all seemed to recede. His gaze dropped to her mouth, then back to her eyes. The air grew thick, charged with the memory of the CVS bathroom, with all the things he was trying not to say.
“You’re very observant yourself,” he said, his voice a low rasp. “For someone who’s drank half a bottle of premium French wine.”
“I’m a cheap drunk. It’s efficient.” She tried to sound flippant, but her heart was hammering against her ribs. His intensity was a physical pull, a gravity well. “So, what’s the plan, Craig? Derek comes back. I leave with him. And then what? You just… watch? From your velvet fortress?”
“No.” The word was flat, absolute. A decree.
“Then what?” she pressed, the word leaving her lips quietly. She needed to hear him say it, to make the surreal concrete.
He didn’t speak for a long moment. He just looked at her, his dark eyes tracing the line of her eyebrows, the scatter of freckles, the defiant set of her mouth. When he finally moved, it was slow, deliberate. He reached out, not for her, but for the wine bottle in her loosening grip. His fingers brushed against hers as he took it, setting it firmly on the table out of her reach.
The touch was electric, a jolt that shot up her arm.
“You don’t go back with him,” Craig said, his voice utterly calm now, a terrifying contrast to the storm in his eyes. “You walk out of here. You go home. Your home. And you change the locks.”
The wine haze seemed to crystallize around his words, hardening them into something actionable. Mya blinked, her mind clicking through the logistics. Her apartment. The flimsy deadbolt Derek had insisted was sufficient. The spare key he kept on his ring.
“And you think he’ll just accept that?” Her voice was steadier than she felt. “He has a key. He’ll show up. He’ll yell. He might do worse than yell.” She uncrossed her arms, placing her palms flat on the cool table. “He’s not reasonable. You saw him. The second he feels like he’s lost control, he breaks things.”
Craig’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes grew colder, the darkness in them absolute. “Let him try.”
“No.” The word shot out of her, sharp and definitive. She shook her head, her curls brushing her shoulders. “I don’t want a… a scene. Or a war. I just want him to go away and stay away.” She took a slow breath, the gears turning visibly behind her eyes. A new, calculating light replaced the panic. “I have a better idea.”
She leaned forward, closing the distance he had created. The vanilla scent of her lotion cut through the cigar smoke between them. “When he comes back, you tell him I dumped him. Right here. Tell him I never want to see him again, and I left with you.”
Craig’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. He said nothing, just watched her work it out.
“But,” Mya continued, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur, “we both know that won’t stop him. He’ll come to my apartment. He’ll call. He’ll creep. So, you give me your number.”
A slow, incredulous smile started at the corner of Craig’s mouth. “My number.”
She nodded, a quick, efficient motion. “Well, yeah. That’s the plan. Besides, now I can hold this over his head. I’ll tell him you gave me your number. So when he comes knocking by or creeping on me, I’ll threaten him by saying I’m texting you his location and that he has a bunch of money on him.”
She sat back, spreading her hands as if the solution were obvious. “So when he does come back here after, you just tell him I dumped him and never want to see him again. And say that if he bothers me, I was told to text you his location and how much money he currently has on him.” A faint, triumphant smile touched her lips. “See? Easy peasy.”
She paused, tilting her head. The practical, survivalist part of her brain was fully in charge now, the wine buzzing harmlessly in the background. “Oh. But to be safe, I want a baseball bat.”
Silence engulfed the booth.
Craig stared at her. The calculating mob heir, the charismatic womanizer, looked utterly blindsided. His jaw went slack for a second before he recovered, a rough, startled laugh bursting from him. He ran both hands through his hair this time, leaving it thoroughly wrecked.
“A baseball bat,” he repeated, his voice thick with disbelief and something akin to awe.
“A good one. Aluminum. Not some wooden little league thing.” She met his gaze without flinching. “I’m not asking you to be my bodyguard. I’m creating a deterrent. He’s a coward. The idea of you knowing where he is and that he’s carrying cash—your cash—will scare him more than anything I could ever do. But if the scare doesn’t work…” She shrugged. “I want the bat.”
He was shaking his head, but he was smiling, a real, unguarded smile that transformed his face. It stripped years off him, melting the sharp edges into something warmer. “You’re terrifying. You know that? You come in here, drink half a bottle of wine worth more than your rent, and calmly devise a protection racket against your own boyfriend using me as the threat.”
“Ex-boyfriend,” she corrected quietly. The word felt strange, weightless and heavy all at once. “If your plan works.”
“It’s your plan,” he countered, his dark eyes sparkling. “It’s brilliant. And insane.” He pulled his phone from his inner suit pocket, a sleek, black device. He tapped the screen a few times, then slid it across the table toward her. “Put your number in. I’ll call you. You’ll have mine.”
Mya picked up the phone. It was warm from his body heat. She carefully typed in her digits, saved the contact simply as ‘Mya’, and handed it back. His fingers brushed against hers again, and this time, she didn’t flinch.
He immediately pressed call. Her purse, on the seat beside her, buzzed softly. He ended the call. “Now you have it. Use it. For the threat. Or…” He hesitated, the vulnerability from earlier flickering back. “If you just need the bat.”
The reality of the exchange settled over her. She had the personal number of Craig Moretti in her phone. The absurdity was staggering. She took a final, fortifying sip from the wine bottle. It was nearly empty.
The muffled thud of determined footsteps on the staircase cut through the moment. The tension snapped back into the booth, viscous and immediate. Mya’s spine straightened. Craig’s affectionate ease vanished, his expression smoothing into that impenetrable, polished mask as he slowly leaned back into the shadows of the booth.