I Called It a Drunk Mistake, So the Mob Boss Made It Permanent novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Mistake
Linus calls the night a drunk mistake and Leandros pins him and kisses him, then tells him the oath he swore at 3 a.m.: ruin Griffin and he is Leandros's.
"It was a mistake," Linus said, and the man above him kissed the rest of the sentence out of his mouth.
Both his wrists were pinned in one big hand against the pillow over his head.
The other hand sat flat on his ribs, warm through a black shirt that was not his.
The man kissed him slowly and thoroughly, with no hurry at all.
Linus's body answered before his brain did, and he hated that.
He turned his face away and breathed.
"Okay," he said. "We were drunk. I was drunk. It doesn't count, and I'm going to forget it, and so are you."
"Say mistake again," the man said.
His voice was low and flat and very calm.
His name was Leandros Kallis, and Linus knew it the way all of Baltimore did, from the society pages.
Thirty-one, shipping money, a different woman on his arm at every gala, and the grin of a man who had never been told no.
He was not grinning now.
"It was a mistake," Linus said.
Leandros's thumb pressed once against the inside of his wrist, right on the pulse.
"That's four times since you woke up," he said. "I've been counting."
He let go of Linus's wrists and sat back on his heels.
He wore only black suit trousers, and a string of amber beads lay wound around his left fist.
The beads clicked once, then went still.
Linus sat up, and the room tilted.
It was a white room with a glass wall, and the whole harbor lay behind the glass, grey water and cranes and a ship the size of a hotel.
Nobody Linus knew lived in a place like this.
"Where's my phone?" he asked.
"Gone."
"Gone where?"
"You dropped it in the harbor at four in the morning," Leandros said. "You said the screen was lying to you."
Linus stared at him.
That sounded exactly like something he would say drunk.
Leandros nodded at the night table.
A new phone sat there in a plain box, already charged.
Linus picked it up and found his own number on it and one contact saved: LEANDROS.
He had a headache that pulsed behind his left eye, and the taste of whiskey still sat on his tongue.
He remembered the Fells Point bar, and a billboard on Eastern Avenue, and a song.
After that he remembered nothing at all.
The phone buzzed in his hand.
A text slid down the screen from a number he knew better than his own.
GRIFFIN: Dude where did you go?? Call me. Label wants you at the video shoot Monday for the Paper Tigers thing. Don't be weird about it.
Linus read it twice.
His thumb went white on the edge of the phone.
"Paper Tigers," he said.
"I know," Leandros said.
"You know what?"
"I know it's yours. You told me at two in the morning, in my car, and again at three on my floor."
Linus looked up.
"I wrote it in my bedroom two years ago," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle. "Griffin sat on my bed and ate my cereal while I wrote the bridge."
"And now it's number four on the chart with his name on it."
"I saw the billboard," Linus said. "That's why I drank."
"You drank a great deal," Leandros said. "Then you walked into my club and told a stranger you'd do anything to see Griffin Moyer finished."
Linus's stomach dropped.
"What stranger?"
"Me."
The beads clicked again.
"What did I say?"
"You said, ruin him," Leandros said. "Make him lose the song and the name and the money. And you said when it was done you'd be mine."
Linus laughed, because there was nothing else to do.
It came out thin and wrong.
"I said that."
"With your hand in my shirt."
"I don't even like..." Linus stopped.
He looked down at the shirt he was wearing, and at the red mark on the inside of his thigh where it rode up.
He knew exactly what he liked, now.
His body had known all along.
"I don't remember," he said.
"I do," Leandros said. "Every word. I was sober."
"Then you took advantage of a drunk man."
Leandros did not flinch.
"You took your own shirt off in my elevator," he said. "I put mine on you, and I slept on the couch until six. Then you woke up and reached for me. Ask for the footage if you like."
Linus's face went hot.
"I'm leaving."
"The door is there."
Linus swung his legs off the bed, and his knees almost went.
He took the trousers off the chair, found his own boots, and walked to the front door with his chin up.
It opened without a lock.
Two men in dark coats stood in the hall outside, shoulders like doors.
They looked at Linus, up and down, in a way that made the back of his neck go cold.
Then Leandros's hand came to rest on the small of his back.
"Mine," Leandros said, quietly, to the men.
They both looked at the floor.
One of them nodded.
The door closed, and Linus realized he had not breathed since it opened.
"What the hell was that?"
"The hall," Leandros said. "It's full of my people. You don't walk through them alone."
"I'm not your people."
"You are until Moyer is finished. That's what you swore."
Linus turned around and looked at him.
At the broken nose and the hard mouth, and the way he stood completely still while his eyes went over Linus's face.
Linus knew what that look wanted.
He wanted to give it to him, which made him furious.
Griffin's text glowed on the new phone in his fist.
Don't be weird about it.
Linus thought of two years of Griffin's cereal bowl on his floor, and the chart, and the billboard with a smile that wasn't his.
"Fine," he said.
"Fine?"
"I'll do it your way. I'm in." He pointed a finger at Leandros's chest. "But I pick how he ends. Not you."
The corner of Leandros's mouth moved, barely.
"Done."
"And I'm going home today."
"With Manolis," Leandros said. "You don't go anywhere without him."
Linus opened his mouth to argue, and Leandros stepped in close enough that he had to tilt his head back.
"You said one more thing last night," Leandros said. "At the door, with your face in my collar."
"What?"
"You said, keep me."
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