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I push away, but he clings to me and whines when I try to get him off me. He shoves me back into the doorway, and I go stumbling through it over my heels.
“No!” I yell, making a lunge for the doorway as it shuts. The bass still thumps here, like a living heartbeat in the floor. It’s a storage room, but it looks like it had once been a private VIP section. Mirrored walls reflect my own face back to me at every angle. A couch has been wedged into one corner, and I know what he wants to use it for.
I make another lunge for the door, and he matches me motion for motion. My back presses against the cold mirror as he crowds me against it.
“Don’t be like that,” he complains, as if we’re still negotiating something.
The door bangs open, rattling on its hinges.
The boy jumps away from me like a child caught with his hands in the cookie jar, but even that is too slow.
A man enters—a man who effortlessly takes the boy’s hair in one fist and slams his head into the glass wall. I scream as the shards crack and splinter. I fall to the floor, ducking away from the sudden violence, crawling to the safety of the other side of the room.
From the crater of broken shards, a bloodied streak runs down the glass. The boy lays crumpled on the floor at the base of it.
He got what was coming to him, but the way it had been done— was brutal. Ugly.
Savage. And for the first time in four numb months, I lock eyes with my savior, and feel my belly erupt into butterflies.
2
Salvatore
For better or worse, he’ll live.
I kick Lance over with the toe of my boot. He croaks a pathetic whine, fingers knotted in his wet, matted hair. Head wounds always bleed like a bitch. He looks up from beneath his curls as the blood finds a snaking path down his face. He holds a trembling question in his dazed eyes—wondering if I’ve given him the worst of it. If I’m done with him yet.
The girl is still on the floor. Like a model, her lipstick smudged against those plush lips, her already short dress riding up the creamy length of her thigh. Her dress is ripped, and she struggles to keep her tits from bursting through the hem.
Fuck, I want her alone.
“Lance,” I say, the name soft and dangerous on my lips, “One more drop of blood on this carpet, and it’ll be your body we roll up in it when we replace it.”
The kid has enough sense left to lurch to his feet.
“Yes, sir,” he slurs. He stumbles like those drunks out on the dance floor, but he makes it out the door. Glass crunches under my feet as I regard the mess.
The girl gathers herself, smoothing out her dress. She looks good like that—a little frazzled. It puts a wildness in her eyes. She studies me with the same intensity I give her, the two of us sizing each other up. For a half hour, the club security cameras have been trained on Contessa Lovera. Not the tills or the entrances and exits. Only her on a dozen grainy screens.
Sometimes, the universe solves your problems for you.
“Lance has a bad habit of touching things that don’t belong to him.”
“Oh,” she says, the word soft and sweet. I want to taste it on those lips she keeps worrying between her pretty white teeth. “Well, I don’t belong to anybody. Maybe he thought I was free dibs.”
I can almost pity her naivety.
She couldn’t be more wrong about that.
“I won’t tell anyone what happened,” she adds, a little too fast, eager to escape. “Not that anything really happened.” She steps closer, oblivious that she isn’t out of danger; she’s approaching it. “Will he be alright?”
That’s a hell of a question.
“What do you care if he lives or dies, after that?”
She doesn’t come up with an answer. Does she really care about the well-being of some fatherless bastard who just had her pinned against a wall like a cheap, dispensable whore? No wonder daddy dearest isn’t handing over the keys to the kingdom to her.
Slowly, I close the door to the freedom she thinks I’m giving her. Her eyes move between me and the exit. Realization starts to set in. She takes as many steps back as she can until she finds herself against the corner, the pitch of her voice rising as the distance closes.
