be like my father.
I feel a thousand years old as I stand from the armchair. “I’ll take a look.”
Hope rings painful in James’s eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t leave them there.”
“Don’t mistake me. I’m not making any goddamn promises. Maybe I’ll join her. Maybe I’ll become her best customer, paying to fuck the women that used to be mine.”
James looks shocked. How long has he been working for me? He should know better than to hero worship me. Even the women sometimes do it. They believe that I’m better than I am. But I’m really my father’s son, after all. He taught me. I learned from the best.
James pulls into a shadowed spot in an alley. Front Street is three blocks from here. It’s a warm night, and the humid air seeps into the dark shirt I put on before we left. We follow the alley until James stops at a recessed doorway. He has to shove it open to lead the way into a basement. It’s an office storage building, covered floor to ceiling in file boxes. The stacks hover over my head while we pass by to the stairs. One landing. Two. And then we’re in a disheveled legal aid meeting room, looking over my sister’s stolen kingdom.
One thing is immediately clear: this is a show, and it’s a show for me. The building she’s chosen has a restaurant on the first floor and a ballroom or meeting space on the second. It has huge windows to let in natural light. A wedding venue of some kind, with a closed-in third floor.
Demeter is on the second, where the windows are, with the curtains thrown open.
In the dark, the inner lighting puts everything on display.
Except that it’s empty.
“Where—”
“Wait.” James looks down at his watch. Seconds tick by.
I’m about to ask him what the fuck we’re waiting for when the doors of the ballroom open and a man walks in, carrying a wooden box. James makes a strangled noise. This is his husband, Cal. In all the years James has worked for me, Cal has never failed to pick him up at the end of the night. Not once. At first, I think he’s all right, but halfway across the room he stops and winces.
“Broken ribs,” says James. This is his faux dispassionate voice. I use a similar one often.
“Why—”
“Wait.”
All this waiting makes me want to throw myself through the windows of both buildings and end this now.
Cal goes to the back of the room, where a table waits next to a chair. It’s not as big as the ones I have in the whorehouse—had in the whorehouse—but the symbolism is obvious. He puts the box on the table and takes a spot next to the chair. Hands in his pockets. Trying his best to stay upright.
Demeter herself is the next person in the procession. She pauses at the door, looking down at something on the floor, and jerks her arm. Something tumbles into view behind her.
Someone.
It’s Savannah, and Demeter has her leashed. She’s trying to crawl and failing miserably, but Demeter has no patience for this. She drags her across the floor with all her strength, over to the chair. When they arrive, Savannah crumples against the side and Demeter wraps the leash around her fist.
“What the fuck,” I hear myself say.
“I don’t know,” says James. He knows what happened with Savannah. He knows Demeter got to her before. Savannah should be her most treasured pet. “Zeus—”
Whatever he’s going to say is lost, because the rest of the girls come in. They look right—expensive, beautiful—except for their faces. Their faces, and Savannah’s sprawl on the carpet, makes bile rise into my throat. These are not the expressions of women who are about to negotiate. Who have any choice at all in the matter.
And then—
The men.
Led by Xavier Morris and none other than Brigit’s father. Xavier looks like shit. His eyes are glassy and he casts around, looking over his shoulder, like he’s afraid one of his people might betray him.
Or like there’s a bigger monster in the room than Demeter.
Brigit’s father looks like shit, too. His nose still hasn’t healed from when I broke it. I can’t tell if he’s high, like Xavier, or just salivating at the chance to be playing a starring role in the horror show.
I concentrate on the rest of their faces. Demeter didn’t get all of my previous clients, just quite a few on the police force and the other sick, rich fucks who