Oh, my goodness. The first episode of The Undergrounders drops tomorrow. I’m so excited—and so freaking nervous!
I wanted to share an excerpt with you. Below you’ll find the entire first chapter. The whole episode has six chapters and about 10,000 words. Paid subscribers will get the whole thing tomorrow—a full month before it launches on Amazon.
If you’d like to subscribe, so you can read the whole episode, do that with the button below.
About The Undergrounders.
The Undergrounders is a modern day Robin Hood retelling, set in Las Vegas.
In the first episode: When Rob Huntington comes home to Las Vegas from Harvard to bury his father, he learns a few things. He’s lost his legacy. His father had a secret fiancé—and she’s pregnant. And Mattie Fitzwalter, the girl he’s loved his whole life, has slept with his worst enemy.
The Undergrounders: Episode One
Chapter One
Lights glittered like stars on the ground. People crushed into each other on the sidewalk. A strong smell of sagebrush permeated everything, even on the Las Vegas Strip. The intense, dry heat, even in late spring, was steeped in it.
Tomorrow, when the sun came up, Rob would see the bare mountains without trees to mask their bones. The rolling desert. The big cloudless sky, bleached almost white. It was enough tonight to know they were there.
Rob Huntington didn’t expect to be hit so hard by homesickness. Especially now that he was actually home. He was home, like it or not. And the nostalgia of it mixed with a grief so deep, he could barely touch it without breaking down.
He leaned against the back passenger door of a late-model gold Mercedes, inhaling desert air as it rushed in through the open window.
Traffic was heavy. It was always heavy here, especially on a Friday after the sun went down. Rob tilted his head so he saw nearly to the top of the casinos as the car passed slowly by. He’d been away long enough that, for the first time in his life, he almost experienced the Strip like a tourist.
Almost. But not quite.
He was tempted to ask Vin to keep driving north until they were out of town so he could look back and see Las Vegas from a distance. When he was a kid, he thought it looked like a pirate ship on fire—the casinos like masts floating above a sea of burning city lights.
Vin caught his eye in the rearview mirror and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Huntington.”
Vin had always called him Mr. Huntington. Even when he was a little boy getting a ride to school with Mattie sitting beside him. Vin called her Miss Fitz. The two of them sat in the back of this car together, ferried around the city like royalty.
But taking on his father’s name today felt like a burden he couldn’t bear to be under. And a couple of years away from the Nott had taught him some things about himself.. Vin was family to him. Like an uncle, or even a grandfather.
Rob had never even questioned the older man treating him like a prince.
“Vin?”
The driver looked through the rearview mirror again, his face creased with sorrow. “Yes, sir?”
Rob couldn’t bring himself to try to undo the formality now. But he would, before he left again. “Thank you for picking me up. I was glad to see you at the airport.”
“I’m so glad you’re home.”
Vin pulled into the Nottingham Casino’s wide drive and stopped where he always stopped, in a reserved spot near the massive glass front doors. They were open, and Johnny Cash poured out.
How many times had his father told him the story?
Johnny Cash played the Nott when I was a teenager. Most amazing show I’ve ever seen.
Rob hadn’t been home in two years, but nothing had changed. Kids ran around in their swimsuits. Jackpots paying out jangled under the train-like guitar. People dressed to kill headed for the club inside, right along with families headed in for the buffet.
The Nott hadn’t changed. Except his father was gone.
Vin turned in his seat, one elbow hooked around the butter-soft leather headrest. “Your father was a good man.”
Rob nodded.
“He’ll be missed, Robin. Greatly missed.”
A bubble of pain burst in Rob’s chest when Vin used his mother’s name for him and he inhaled in an effort to contain it. He was home. And he was an orphan.
“Thank you,” he finally managed to say. “I know he will be.”
Vin got out of the Mercedes and walked around to open the passenger door.
Rob would have let himself out, but before he faced the Nott, he needed the time to make sure he could breathe. He watched porters moving between taxi cabs and cars with out-of-state plates, pulling golden carts filled with luggage.
Mattie was inside somewhere. She drew him like a magnet. That finally got him out of the car.
After he stood up, Vin closed the door and stood closer to him than usual. For a moment, Rob was sure the driver was going to hug him. He braced himself for it, even though he felt so brittle that being touched at all might make him disintegrate.
Instead, Vin put a calloused hand on the side of Rob’s face, smiled sadly, and walked away to open the trunk for a porter.
He’d barely had time to throw a few things into a duffle before he left Cambridge.
It was just like his dad to die the day after finals were over. Rob could come home and not worry about school.
Jack Huntington was all about timing.
The weight of his grief took Rob by surprise. It was a physical thing, clinging to him. Every step was difficult. His shoulders and legs ached from the effort of staying upright under it.
When his mother died, he was only six years old and his father shielded him from the crushing heaviness. Jack must have been living under it all this time. The thought of that brought an edge of pain across the bridge of Rob’s nose—tears he wouldn’t let fall threatened to drown him.
Another hard bubble burst in his chest and Rob walked again, trying to outrun the pain.
The Nott was his father’s pride and joy. He’d inherited it from his father, who’d come from New England to build it in the 1940s when Las Vegas was still a gangster’s dream in the desert.
Rob ran away to Harvard. Like the prince he was. He didn’t want to be tied to the Nott, but it hadn’t occurred to him to refuse his father’s money for his expensive education. Or his family’s reputation.
Rob was a third-generation legacy.
Studying pre-law, though. Not business. Because two years ago, he wasn’t going to run the Nott. He wanted to make his own decisions. So, he left and he never looked back. And now?
Now, he supposed, he owned the Nott. And he would trade it for the chance to go back two years and stop himself from being such a little shit.
The Nott still needed Jack Huntington. The employees who kept stopping to tell Rob how much they would miss his father, transferring a few ounces of their grief to him.
They still needed him.
Rob still needed him.
“You’re late, Robert.” Jack’s business partner took Rob’s arm and walked on.
“Wait a minute.” Rob pulled his arm away when Philip didn’t stop.
Philip looked toward the huge, open double doors leading to Ballroom A. People swarmed in and out like ants crawling around a hill. Employees. Regular players.
“What’s going on?”
“We’ll sit down tomorrow,” Philip said. “We’ll talk then, but tonight you need to come with me.”
“But, what–”
“These people are here to say goodbye to Jack. You need to be in there with them.”
Rob couldn’t take another step. Going into that room would make the whole orphan thing real. How did this even happen in less than twenty-four hours? “I can’t do this. I can’t go in there if I don’t even know--”
Philip turned Rob bodily to face him. He was a short man with an impressive head of pure white hair and bright blue eyes that bulged from his too-tan face. When Rob was young, he thought Philip’s eyes looked like they’d been plucked from the head of one of Mattie’s dolls.
Philip shook his head once. “We shouldn’t talk about this here.”
“Did he have a heart attack?”
“No, son.”
Rob inhaled sharply to contain—he didn’t even know what. Sobs. Screams. The pain across the bridge of his nose intensified until he was afraid it would break.
He had assumed that his father had died of a heart attack. Maybe it was a stroke—some tragedy that struck men who worked too hard.
Philip’s eyes darted back to Ballroom A, just for a second. “At least he died here, on his own terms. Take some comfort in that.”
On his own terms.
Rob didn’t know what to say to that, and anyway, Philip didn’t wait for a response. He walked toward Ballroom A and the people who all waited to unload a little of the weight of their grief onto Jack Huntington’s son.
Long before they got there, employees who had known Rob his whole life or some part of it—even some who’d been hired after he’d gone to school—reached for him. They touched his arms and shoulders, even his face, as they told him over and over and over how sorry they were.
“Wait here, Robert.” Philip deposited Rob near a pillar at the front of the room. “I’ll be right back.”
Rob straightened, stretching to his full six feet, and scanned the huge room, looking for the only person he really wanted to see. The only person who could help him make sense of any of this.
He hadn’t seen Mattie outside of a computer for two years and suddenly that felt like two lifetimes. He’d talked to her just before boarding the airplane. Why hadn’t she come to the airport?
He needed her. He wasn’t going to be able to do this without her.
“Rob, I don’t know what to say. I’m just so sorry.”
He looked down at Paolo Lopez. He’d worked in maintenance since shortly after Rob’s mother died. Rob wanted to smile sadly and nod and thank him for thinking of his father. He couldn’t manage it.
Instead, he grasped for the only life line that might save him from drowning in Ballroom A. “Have you seen Mattie?”
Paolo shook his head. He put an arm around a woman standing at his side. “My wife, Maria. She came to pay her respects.”
She said something in rapid-fire Spanish and Paolo started to translate, but Rob put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I really need to find Mattie. Thank you for being here.”
He stood tall again, but he wasn’t tall enough to see over the sea of people filling the ballroom.
“Robert?”
Where was she?
Philip Mack put a hand on Rob’s shoulder. “Robert. I need you to come with me.”
Rob pulled back, his fight or flight instinct kicking in. Flight, it screamed. Get the fuck out of here. “Where’s Mattie? I need her.”
Philip sighed, deep, then turned away from Rob and waved someone over. His nephew. Some automatic file in Rob’s mind, working on auto drive, spit out a memory of Jack telling him that Guy Perdue had been made head of security sometime last year.
“Guy,” Philip said. “Have you seen Matilda?”
Guy met Rob’s eyes with something that felt enough like a challenge to flip the fight-or-flight switch and send out a shot of adrenaline.
“She couldn’t make it tonight.”
A startled bark of laughter escaped Rob before he could stop it. There was no chance Mattie would let him do this alone. None.
Something crossed Guy’s face—like he’d seen, or maybe smelled, something that disgusted him
“Seriously,” Rob said. “Where is Mattie?”
“She had other obligations.”
There was something in the way Guy talked about Mattie and her obligations that made Rob’s skin crawl. “I need some air.”
“You can’t leave,” Philip said.
He had to. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
He left before Philip or Guy or anyone else could try to stop him. Going back through the casino was out of the question. There were even more people there. Rob turned to the left, skirting the table games and slot machines, then up a long, familiar hallway.
He took a flight of stairs , two more hallways, and finally went through a set of glass double doors. The fresh-baked desert air hit him and he gasped in a hard, deep breath like he wasn’t sure when he’d get another one.
A small swimming pool shimmered in front of him. Its million tiny blue tiles glittered like jewels. His father kept it perfectly maintained for employees, but it was mostly only him and Mattie that used it.
He kicked off his Nikes and reached down to pull off his socks and roll up his track pants. He’d go home and change before he went back into the casino. Dressing properly might make it easier to face the people in Ballroom A.
Before he could sit down and put his feet into the water, a wave of guilt washed over him. All those people, waiting to tell him how sorry they were that his father was gone, and he couldn’t face them.
He couldn’t face what on his own terms meant.
This time he didn’t bother trying to hold back the hard bubble that burst in his chest, although there were still no tears.
How could his father be gone? It was like trying to wrap his head around the idea that the sun had decided one day that it was done shining.
The door behind him opened with a soft whoosh and a burst of refrigerated air. Rob kept his back turned, trying to pull it together before he had to face Philip telling him to go back to the ballroom.
“I just need a minute,” he said. “Please.”
A hand slipped into his and Mattie was there.
She pressed against his right side, her forehead on his shoulder. She didn’t say she was sorry. She didn’t have to say anything. He kept her hand and wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her closer.
Her hair smelled like apples. It fell forward and covered her face as she shifted to press her cheek against his chest.
She held onto his T-shirt at the small of his back, her fingers digging into his skin. She whispered something, and it took a minute for him to work out what it was.
You’re home, Robin. You’re home.
Tears finally fell.