Page 12 of Hard Heart

“This guy did. Turns out I’m allergic to hay, and I couldn’t stop sneezing. Then he expected me to do his laundry afterward.”

“What?”

“No kidding. He said he’d go pick up a pizza and showed me where the washer was.”

“Okay, the ‘dating a convict’ thing is looking more attractive by the minute. At least you wouldn’t be expected to do his housework. And it’s a thing, isn’t it? Jailhouse romance, I mean. Although if I were to go down that route, I’d rather pick a bank robber because maybe there’d be loot hidden away somewhere.”

“Levi’s parents were rich,” Heidi said. “And he might not even have done it.”

“You really think that?”

“The cops painted him as a freak who got off on violence, but it was one of his friends who opened a BDSM club. Weird coincidence, don’t you think?”

I stared at her. This was news, and I hadn’t seen a whisper online about that.

“A BDSM club?”

“Bondage, discipline, submission, masochism.” She waved a hand. “Whips and chains.”

“Yes, yes, I know what it is. Not from personal experience,” I added hastily. “But who opened a club? Justin Norquist?”

“No, Braxton. And technically, it’s a ‘private members’ club,’ but I hear a bunch of kinky stuff goes on in the basement.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“From a girlfriend who used to dance at Jackson’s. She moved to DC, and she knew a girl who worked for him as a ‘hostess.’”

Again, she used little finger quotes, and my mind raced. Costello had been abused in the worst way, and now Braxton Dupré had made a career out of that kind of thing?

“You think Dupré is selling sexual services? Like a brothel?”

“Leila never went into the details. It was more of an impression I got. And his name isn’t Dupré anymore—he changed it.”

“Changed it to what?”

“I forget. Why? Is it important?”

“It might be.”

“You want me to find out?”

“Can you do so discreetly?”

“Hey, discretion is my middle name. Okay, so actually it’s Maria, but I know how to keep my mouth shut. We can be detective buddies. This is part of one of your cases, right?”

A shadow whooshed over me as client confidentiality flew out the window. Dammit. Although Sykes wasn’t officially a client, and from what Raelene had said, he probably never would be. He was more of an itch. An itch I needed to scratch because, as my gym teacher once told my parents, “Serafina has no sense of self-preservation and doesn’t know when to quit.”

“Sure, we’re detective buddies. Just make sure you keep this quiet.”

CHAPTER 5

LEVI

…fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.

Levi Sykes rocked back onto his knees and wiped away the bead of sweat that trickled down his temple. When he first moved into his new digs—the Redding’s Correctional Complex—he could barely manage ten push-ups, but now he did two hundred a day, every day. Push-ups, crunches, dips, lunges, squats, jogging on the spot… His body was his gym, and here in this seven-by-twelve box, he was in the best shape of his life. There had to be some kind of situational irony in that.

“What’s this word?” Diesel asked, rolling over on the top bunk. “Seeg?”