Page 37

“You asked to come in,” Dmitri says.

“I did.”

“I have thought about it…”

I wait. I do not fill the silence. I have learned that much.

“I am willing to bring you on,” Dmitri says.

His tone is easy. Almost kind. The kind of sentence that could be a door or a snare.

Jacque’s words flash in my mind.

More dangerous than anyone you have ever met...

I feel the worry. I push it down so hard my molars ache. If I start running from this offer, I am just a boy with pancakes and a stolen file, still working from hustle to hustle.

“When do I start?”

Dmitri’s mouth curves. Right now.”

He stands, holds out his hand. The diner lights catch the ring on his finger. The clean nails. The hand that held the paddle against my cock until I broke.

I look at his hand. Then I look at him. Internally I take a breath that feels like stepping off a curb into traffic.

Zane wants data tomorrow.

Jacque wants me to stay alive.

My ass still remembers leather.

My pride wants a master who is not a middleman. I want the real deal. I want it all and don’t care what I have to do to get it.

I put my hand in Dmitri’s. His fingers close against me. Warm. Sure. Final.

Dmitri does not pull me like a captive. He waits until I slide out of the booth and stand beside him, backpack on, coffee unfinished, pancake abandoned.

“Where?” I ask.

“Out,” he says. “You wanted work. Work does not happen in a diner.”

We walk. His hand leaves mine once we hit the sidewalk, and I immediately miss it in a way I will not say out loud and can barely bring myself to admit.

The club sits across the street, lit and indifferent.

I look at the man beside me and the city opening in front of us.

“What kind of work?” I ask.

“The kind you already started,” Dmitri says. “Listening. Walking into rooms. Being a boy nobody important watches until it is too late.”

“And what else?”

Dmitri glances at me.

“You will be told when you need to be told,” Dmitri says, firm but friendly with that ever present sense of menace lurking just beneath the surface, like a shark circling its victim.

His words should scare me more than they do.