Page 1 of A Taste Of Darkness
1
PRETTY LITTLE MISTAKE
Sterlie Adams
Flora said I’d regret opening a boutique anywhere near the Tartarus Club. I didn’t believe her, but now I realized that I should have.
My sister had been working there for months, and I should’ve known she would’ve been right, but of course, I had to prove her wrong again.
My boutique hadn’t even been opened for two days, and I already had five masked guys in here. One pointed a gun at my head, and the other four tried to either get into the register to steal the money I’d made today or grab a bunch of designer dresses, jewelry, and more.
I wasn’t worried about the money per se, but the clothes and jewelry were a pain to restock. I didn’t have a huge team working for me since I designed everything myself. For the past year, I’d been sewing my soul out—tailored suits, dresses, shirts, pants, and more in a million different sizes so everyone felt included.
While the jewelry wasn’t handmade, they were designed by me. I indebted myself only so I could afford the materials for them. I wanted quality. Diamonds, gold, silver… even rubies. I’d bought it all.
This morning, I couldn’t wait another second to open the boutique. Now I was ten freaking minutes away from closing, and I was being robbed. Held at gunpoint.
According to my sister, people usually robbed the stores around Tartarus because they believed this would get them a ticket inside the club. It never did.
Tartarus was an all-elite club. There was no way inside that building unless the owner himself offered you a membership. People were crazy about that club, especially criminals.
Milo Marucci, the owner, offered me a membership about two years ago, but I turned it down. I wasn’t a criminal—at least, I tried not to be—so my presence there wouldn’t have been justified.
He probably only invited me because he was my sister’s best friend.
“Three thousand?” one of the men spat out in an unbelievably harsh tone. “There’s only three thousand in that stupid register.”
The man who’d held a gun to my head grasped my chin in his hand and forced me to look up at him. “Where the fuck is the rest?”
“That’s all there is, I swear.” Tears pooled in my eyes and my throat clogged up, but I tried my best not to let it show. “The boutique is ne?—”
My phone started ringing, and I flinched at the sound. It came unexpectedly. In that moment, I thought the guy was going to shoot me for it, but he merely looked toward the counter.
I didn’t dare try to escape as I was sure they’d kill me if I did. No matter the fact that the only armed guy was distracted by my phone.
Then he dropped the gun; still, I didn’t dare move.
“Fuck!” He snatched my phone off the counter and turned the screen toward me. He pointed at it with one black-gloved finger. “The Kai Auclaire?” he asked.
Guess my brother-in-law was calling then. He never actually called me, so I assumed this was about my sister. She was the only reason he ever tried to contact me at all.
“Yes.”
His eyes widened, but it was all I could see as every other inch of his face was covered in a black ski mask. “SHIT.” He turned to his friends. “Drop everything! This bitch knows Auclaire!”
I heard one of the vases break, or perhaps someone smashed one of the glass displays, but either way, something shattered.
“Pick up the phone,” another guy said. His voice was higher than the one of the guy who’d been holding a gun to my head for the past ten minutes.
“The fuck I will.”
“It could be anyone and she just saved their number as Auclaire.”
Yeah, right, because just about anyone wanted to be related to Kai. Technically, I wasn’t genetically related to him… Still, he was part of my family seeing as he was married to my sister.
Another guy, this time with a red mask, ripped my phone away from the black-mask guy. “Hello?”
“Who the fuck are you?” I heard Kai say through the phone. My phone wasn’t unusually loud, but when Kai was mad… yeah, you could hear the entire conversation through the phone three blocks down.