Chapter One: Ghost
Summary: After the brutal murder of his pregnant girlfriend, a former addict transforms into California's most ruthless cocaine kingpin, entirely detached from human emotion. But when a chance encounter with a peepshow dancer, Jessa forces him to confront the haunting, vulnerable look of his past, his icy grip on the streets begins to fracture.
FM|Enemies to Lovers|Violence|Alot of other shit. <3
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It was the summer of 1986. The city of Los Angeles was a sprawling landscape of flickering neon and stretching shadows along the vice infested streets. The air was a thick acrid cocktail of gasoline and blooming jasmine, and the heat it possessed clung to the skin like a guilty conscience.
Rick sat in the passenger seat of a black Cadillac Fleetwood, the engine idling with a hum he felt in his bones. He was only twenty six, yet his dark eyes fixed on the horizon of the Sunset Strip looked as if they’d seen the entire world and decided it wasn’t worth mentioning. He was a man composed of sharp angles and a lethal, quiet gravity. He didn’t run the game; he owned the air it breathed.
To the LAPD, he was a ghost, and to the cartels, he was the only man with grade A shit. To himself, he was simply a guy who had forgotten to stop breathing. It’d been four years since he buried Jolene and his unborn daughter. Four years since the light in the eyes of the woman who made him want to be more than a petty burglar and drug addict went out. Since then, his world has been a routine of cocaine bricks, pistols, and the cold logic of the business.
“Fat fuck is inside there,” Augustin said from the driver's seat, checking his gold watch. “Lets get this over with.”
Rick didn’t answer. He stepped out of the Cadillac, his movements fluid and clinical. He entered the Pleasure Dome, a showgirl club that reeked of stale beer and desperation. He didn’t look at the stage; he didn’t look at the waitresses shamelessly lusting over him. He was an arrow aimed at the client's office, focused solely on the business of Blow.
But the boss was running late, and the corridor to the back office was blocked by a group of rowdy patrons. Rick found himself standing in the dimly lit red hallway of the private quarter slot booths, where men paid for a three minute peek of flesh behind glass. His mind was on a shipment coming in from Peru, but his hand acted on subconscious impulse. He felt a stray quarter in his jeans pocket. It was a useless piece of metal taking up space.
With a detachment that bordered on robotic, he stepped into booth 28 and dropped the coin into the slot. The mechanical whir of the curtain rising sounded like a guillotine blade being lifted, then the glass was clear.
Jessa stood on the other side. She was twenty one, though her naturally delicate features made her look like a child playing dress up in a world that wanted to eat her alive. She was midway through a slow rhythmic sway, her silken, loose waves catching in the artificial pink glow of neon above her.
Rick’s lungs seized. It wasn't that she looked like Jolene, she didnt her face was her own, but it was the softness. It was the specific, heartbreaking way she looked at the glass as if she were waiting for the world to strike her and had already forgiven it for the blow. It was the same staggering vulnerability that Rick had failed to protect all those years ago.
Usually, the men in these booths shifted, catcalled, or leaned in close. Rick stood like a statue. He felt a surge of pure unadulterated resentment for the girl behind the glass- for being so fragile, for having those wide doe like eyes, for making him feel a pulse of pity when he had worked so hard to stay numb.
Her softness was loud; it screamed at his silence.
On the other side of the glass, Jessa didn’t see a man. She saw a silhouette, a dark, imposing shape that didn't move. She felt a shiver of genuine fear prickle her skin. This shadow felt different. It felt like a premonition that the soft girl she was was about to be shattered.
Rick didn’t breathe. For five seconds, the business only armor he had built like a fortress crumbled. His dead eyes sparked with a terrifying, agonizing life. Then the coldness rushed back in sharper than before. He hated that she made him feel anything at all. Before the curtain could even fall, Rick reached out and slammed the manual override. The black velvet dropped, cutting her off.
He turned and walked out of the booth, his stride breaking into a near run. Outside, in the humid night, he fumbled for a cigarette, his hands shaking so violently he dropped the lighter twice.
“Rick, you good?” Augustin asked, stepping out of the car.
Rick ignored him, staring at the neon sign until his eyes burned.
His world of cold currency and throwaway lives was suddenly anchored to a pair of wide, terrified eyes—a pulse in a business that was supposed to be heartless.
