Gangster in Love - Camren

18

"Do you know where Chris is? I need to talk to him." Lauren speaks up.

"He's holed up in his room, I think." I answer back.

"Bah. Typical." Heading into the living room, Lauren leans against the wall, pressing an intercom bottom there next to the door. "Hey, loser." There's a moment of quiet and then the intercom crackles again.

"You'd better not be referring to me." I hear Chris his voice appear.

"Well you're the one who responded, aren't you?"

I hear a chuckle behind me and see Zayn saunter in, his hands cushioned comfortably behind his head. Shawn is next to him. Observant as always, I can see his brown eyes flicker down to my handheld tightly in Lauren's. with a big grin spreading across his face, Shawn gives me a thumb's up. Of all the things I expected from Shawn, being my personal love cheerleader was not one of them. Blushing, I roll my eyes as Chris and Lauren dip into a long, bickering back-and-forth.

"What do you want?" Chris says.

"Need to discuss business. Come to the gambling room."

--

The whole gang gathers to join us, Shawn fixing Liam a drink at the bar. "You too, Lo?" he offers her a glass of whiskey.

"Maybe tomorrow night." She flicks her long raven hair over her shoulder with a careless toss of her head. "We need to talk about Michael."

Chris lets out a low growl. "What, is he being a bigger headache than usual?" Since the roulette wheel is still broken, Lauren sets up a game of pool. She breaks, and tosses the pool cue over to Chris. "Corner pocket." He strikes and misses, making Lauren hiss in mock sympathy.

"Lucy's testing how far she can bend the rules by fucking with us." Lauren comments.

"Psyching us out." Chris recommend.

"And on the official side of things, Mike is turning a blind eye to cheating. They're pinching us." Liam speaks up also to make a point.

Lining up the pool cue, Lauren closes one eye to focus, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. Aw, that's cute. It also works, evidently, because she gets her ball into the side pocket and takes another turn. "But when they tried to kidnap me, I had already lost. So what purpose did that serve?" I say.

Chris had been leaning against the bar, arms crossed as he watches Lauren play. But at my words he straightens up, narrowing his eyes at me. "He tried to do WHAT?" Even if I know he's not mad at me, hearing Chris raise his voice makes me wince.

"Did I forget to tell you? Lucy tried to cart her off." Lauren speaks.

"How does an attempted kidnapping just slip your mind, Lo?" Zayn says. He's not mad but he still looks like he is with his eyebrows narrowed. Lauren just shrugs.

"I mean, she stopped it before it happened, so..." I try to help Lauren out.

"You should have called us."

"I'm beginning to wonder id Mike and Lucy are on the same page at all. There's no way he would be okay something like this." Chris says.

"The rules..."

"One of these days you're going to have to write down all these rules for me." I comment, still confused about the rules they're talking about every time.

"It's not anything that's set in stone like that. It's situational." Liam explains. "Context-driven, and honor-based. Lucy must be trying to change how things are run... the little upstart."