Chapter One
FINCH
Sometimes I feel like the luckiest little bitch in New York City.
Times like tonight, when I’m waved past the waiting crowd into the club. No one knows my name, but they know my face. And more importantly, I’m young, I’m hot, and the bouncers know that lettingmeinto the club just makes all the losers standing outside want in even more. They’d never dare to card me, because theyneedme.
But even if they did, I’ve got that covered, too. A respectably legal twenty-two according to my fake ID, but I’ve never had to use it.
My blood starts heating up as I go down the stairs, my heart picking up the thumping rhythm of the music. I like this place because it’s a mixed crowed despite the Manhattan setting, but every song is six months past being cool, and the kids in here are tryingsohard.
Howard Fincher Donovan the Third never has to try hard. Not at anything in my whole life. I’ve been blessed with beauty as well as brains, with a mouth made for sucking dick as much as talking smack. That mouth has got me into trouble before, and it will again, no doubt.
Probably right about now, because there’s a big gay bear hulking towards me. “Hey, pretty boy,” he says, leaning over me. I can smell his sweaty underarm.
“Gross,” I say, bored instantly. The molly I dropped has finally kicked in and I’m starting to roll, and I could not give one single sweet shit about this fat fuck.
“I love your look,” the bear bellows.
“How in the hell do you think you have a shot here?”
“What?” the guy shouts back.
“Fuck off,” I holler. “You’ve got no chance.”
The guy grins and nods. “Me too!” he shouts.
I wait until the lights start strobing and when Bear Man glances the other way, I slip off and make my way around the rails that surround the sunken dance floor. I look over the crowd, wondering which lucky guy I’ll allow to have me tonight. When I see him, I’ll know him. I do this every Saturday night: go out and find the one guy glowing among the crowd. That’s the sign that he’s the one for me, for that night anyway.
Only tonight there’s this guy who’s not glowing. He’s on fucking fire.
It’s like he has a spotlight on him. Even when the lights go dark for the drop, or strobe to make the crowd bounce, I can see him lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree. I’ve been staring at him as I wander up and down the outside of the dance floor, but I can’t see his face clearly with all the lights and the crowd throwing their fucking hands in the air or waving glow sticks around.
What does he look like up close?
Out of the corner of my eye I see the hairy, hopeful bear approaching me again, and I slip down the nearest stairs into the throng of people, moving with them, the rhythm carrying me along on the current that leads towards my fiery devil. He’s somewhere in the middle of the crowd, but I have to go in a spiral to get there, circling around and through so many hot, sweaty men. It’s like Dante’s Inferno, and if I fight my way to the seventh circle of this hell, I’ll findhim.
Nothing in life is ever easy, is it?
I’m laughing already, the euphoria coming on in a wave, when the crowd parts and I see him, or rather, the back of his head, his black hair shaggy and hanging over his black turtleneck collar, like he’s a refugee from the seventies, or that shitty early-naughts revival of seventies’ fashion.
He’s sexy enough to pull it off, though. The way his hips move in those black skinny jeans, the way he winds his body as he dances alone, eyes half-closed but with all eyes on him, the way he blocks out the world: it all suggests he’s confident, cocky, too sure of himself.
God, I love that type.
He turns just as I arrive in his space. “Nice threads,” I start to say, the candy high rushing through me and making me bitchy, but the words stick in my throat, because rising out of that stupid rolled turtleneck is the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen.
He locks eyes with me.
This guy’s face is the kind that hangs on the wall in the Uffizi: cream-colored skin pricked with the black smatterings of his five-o’clock shadow. His eyebrows are thick, straight, black as his hair, and his eyes are two burning blue stars staring out from between a fringe of thick lashes. They’re the same blue as the flame of a Bunsen burner, like fucking lasers or something.
“I know you,” I say, and I’m starting to see things swirling a little around the edges of my vision.
He smirks.
“You’re Lucifer fuckin’ Morningstar, cast out of heaven and landed here in the greatest city on earth.”
He grabs me then and pulls me close, pressed up against his body. I can feel the heat coming off him from under his clothes, and I’m hard, instantly. “What the fuck did you just call me?” he asks, half-laughing. I repeat it, my tongue tripping over my words. The drugs are hitting hard tonight, or maybe it’s the sound of his voice that’s doing my head in.
