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“Where was this taken?” I asked.

“Manhattan. In a gentleman’s club. But that’s as much as we know.”

I looked past Alessia to the blurred wall behind her. I saw black glass, polished brass, and a thin geometric design cut into the smoked mirror.

I knew that room.

Ivan stepped closer as I pulled out my phone and opened the secure employee system for our newest New York acquisition. The search took less than five seconds.

I found her employee file.

Someone had entered a security note twenty-three minutes earlier.

Two Armenian males. Watching exits. Possible surveillance.

I looked up at Matteo.

“Your missing princess is not missing.”

“No?”

I turned the phone toward him.

“She is working for me.”

For the first time that evening, Matteo Bellandi looked genuinely surprised. I closed the Volkov file, slipped Raffaele’s marker into my pocket, and stood.

Alessia Caruso had run from her father’s guards, disappeared into Manhattan, and taken a stage name inside one of my own clubs. Worse, and even more concerning, was that the Petrosyans had already found her.

Now I had found her too.

“Get the plane ready,” I told Ivan.

CHAPTER 3

Alessia

Room seven was darker than the other private rooms at Nocturne.

Theo pulled back the curtain and ushered me inside. There was a man seated in the far corner, half-shadowed beneath a narrow brass light that cast one side of his face in gold and left the other in darkness.

Theo had called him the owner, though that word meant very little where Nocturne was concerned. Owner could mean investor, manager, representative, or even some overpaid executive who visited once every six months to complain about bottle costs and pretend he understood why women preferred one dressing room mirror over another.

This man didn’t look like an executive.

He sat in a wide leather chair positioned at an angle to the door, where he could see the entrance, the smoked glass, and every reflection in the mirrored wall without turning his head. A low table rested beside him with a glass of vodka on it, the surface perfectly still. No condensation disturbed the polished black wood. He hadn’t touched it.

Interesting.

He was tall even while seated, his body too broad for the expensive chair for him to look comfortable. A charcoal suit fit his body perfectly. His shirt was black, open at the throat, with no tie. Close-cropped hair showed more silver than dark at the temples, and the light caught the slight notch in his left ear when he turned his head toward me.

Then I saw his eyes. They were green. Sharp, cold, and startlingly clear, his eyes were the color of sea glass.

He looked at me once, from head to toe.

Slowly.

He didn’t look at me with the open hunger Grant Martin did. His stare was quieter than that. Assessing. He noticed the black silk robe tied loosely around my waist, the crystal bodysuit beneath it, the heels, the velvet choker at my throat, and every possible place I might have concealed something dangerous.