“I won’t,” I say, though I’m not entirely sure that’s true.
Sonny gets out first. I follow on unsteady heels, the pavement beneath me damp and uneven. She leads me to the black door and knocks in a rhythm that sounds casual but probably isn’t. A hatch slides open at eye level. Someone inside says something low enough I can’t make out. Sonny answers with a name I don’t recognize and a smile I definitely don’t trust.
The lock buzzes, and the door opens.
Warmth pours out first. Then music. Not loud the way the upstairs bar is loud, but thick and low and expensive, all velvet and pulse with bass mixed in. Sonny tips her head toward the opening.
“Go on.”
I hesitate. For the first time since embarking on this whole insane trip, since packing a bag and fleeing Blackwood House and sleeping in a motel with a kitten as my only witness, I feel completely, entirely alone.
Not just lonely. Alone.
Alone in the way you are right before you step off a ledge and find out whether there’s water or rock below.
My fingers find my wrist automatically, searching for the rubber bands that usually live there, the ones I snap when I need grounding, when I need pain to narrow the world into something manageable.
I find bare skin.
I took them off before leaving Cleo’s. They didn’t go with the dress. Now it’s too late to do anything about it.
Sonny seems to read all of that on my face, because she gives me a small shove between the shoulders. “Move, princess. Before I change my mind and sedate you to keep you from doing something stupid.”
I go.
The door closes behind me with a heavy, final-sounding click.
For a second, all I see is the little anteroom I’ve stepped into—dark-paneled walls, low gold lighting, a small desk sitting vacant, a heavy curtain parted just enough to reveal the room beyond.
Then I look through it, and I stop breathing.
The club opens in front of me with a silent whisper of a secret too rich to be real.
Dark, intimate lighting pools over velvet seating and glossy black card tables. The mirrored bar catches andfractures what little light there is, throwing back shards of movement and skin and diamonds and poured amber liquor. The low hum of conversation never rises above a murmur, but there’s laughter in it, and hunger, and the peculiar confidence of people who believe money can buy privacy for any appetite.
They’re not wrong. In a place like this…their privacy is guaranteed.
It smells like perfume and polished wood and expensive liquor mixed with sex.
Not the blunt, sticky kind upstairs at Noir when bodies grind close and everyone pretends it means less than it does.
This is different. This reeks of wealth and secrets.
A woman in a red silk dress sits in one man’s lap near the bar, her mouth at his throat while another man watches from the next chair over, fingers stroking the inside of her thigh like he already knows how she’s going to taste when he spreads her legs and shoves his face into her pussy.
In a shadowed corner farther back, I can just make out movement—a mouth against exposed skin, the glint of an eye, the silhouette of hands gripping hips. And the unmistakable thrust of a man taking his partner with rapid thrusts.
Couples in various stages of undress do things in the dark with the lazy confidence of people whoknow no one here will stop them. In fact, many of them have an audience, enjoying what they’re doing.
My pulse kicks. But that isn’t what really catches me off guard.
It’s the cages.
There are several of them, hung from the ceiling and lowered onto raised pedestals around the room, perfectly positioned for visibility. They gleam under directed light, making spectacles of the bodies inside them.
In the first, a woman dances nude around a pole, arching and spinning, her skin painted gold by the spotlights. That, at least, I can process. This is a strip club with better tailoring and richer clientele.
An actual gentleman’s club.
