“I should claim that ass tonight,” I say, squeezing her cheeks. “Give you a good tongue fucking in your asshole before I fuck you good and hard.”
“That would be an experience,” she says hesitantly. “I’ve never done anything back door related before.”
“Then we’ll have to change that—” My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I let out a loud, annoyed sigh. “Fuck.”
“Ignore it,” she says, turning over on her side.
“I can’t.” A call coming in at three in the morning is never a call that I can ignore. I get out of bed and retrieve my phone. “Yeah?”
“Got a call from our guy.” It’s Ares. “You alone?”
I glance back at Ember, then I tell Ares, “One second.” To Ember, I say, “I gotta take this, baby. Be right back.”
I get up and walk to the bathroom, closing the door behind me. “Go ahead.”
“Abate says it’s a go,” he says. “Tomorrow night at midnight. There’s just one thing.”
“I’m listening.”
“He wants to meet up at the club.”
I sigh. “Okay, we can do it at Steelo’s. They’ve got a big back room?—”
“He wants to meet at the Kitten’s Paw,” he says. “He was pretty insistent about it, actually. Word’s gotten around town about it and he wants to check it out.”
Well. That’s definitely a development I never saw coming. I glance back at the closed door of my bathroom and think of Ember lying on the bed naked and vulnerable. She held me to one rule and one rule only. Keep my business out of the club.
“Can’t meet there,” I tell Ares.
“Believe me, I wouldn’t even bring it up if he would take another option. He won’t, though. He’s pretty insistent that it be the Kitten’s Paw or nowhere.”
“The Kitten’s Paw is off limits. We don’t do business in the new club.”
“I told him that. He says that if we don’t meet there, then the deal’s off.”
I’m pacing the floor, considering the options. Joseph Abate came to us for assault rifles. Said he needed it for a coming war with a rival. Abate and I have always been friendly, just as he had been with my mentor before me. It’s always been smooth sailing with Abate. A sort of friendlyrazryadka,or détente, as they used to say when the Soviet Union was a thing. We are “friendlyenemies” of sorts. Nowhere near the land of allies, but always willing to trade resources when it became necessary. It’s been a pretty easy relationship, all things considered.
Until now. I don’t know how Ember is going to feel about having a meeting like this at the club. She’s only just been plugged into all this. It might be a bridge too far to tell her about this.
“I don’t know what the big deal is,” Ares says. “There are a million strip clubs in this city. And at the end of the day, tits are tits.”
“Not when your place is at the top of the tits and ass food chain,” I say. “And I’m not interested in a dust up because we can’t agree on where to meet. Tell him he’s got it. Midnight tomorrow night.”
I hang up and stare at the closed door. She doesn’t have to know. At the end of the day, I call the shots at the club, not her. I’m the Pakhan. My word is law.
Funny how knowing that doesn’t make me feel less like shit about it.
I walk back into the bedroom. She’s standing by my dresser and wearing one of my dress shirts. She turns to me as she buttons it up, her cleavage still showing.
“I was thinking we could grab something to eat,” she says. “Maybe a little three in the morning snack?”
I walk up to her and wrap my arm around her waist, pulling her into a kiss. “You’re all the snack I need.”
19
EMBER
At least he made an attempt to say no to having the meeting at the club.
