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By two, the restaurant doesn’t look like a restaurant.

The tables have been shoved into one long line down the middle and covered in whatever came out of somebody’s kitchen. Some of the club members wives have brought enough enchiladas to feed the state; there’s a slow cooker at the far end that nobody will admit to owning, and Havoc has once again turned up with a bag of chips and the confidence of a man who thinks that counts. Kids are running around the length of the room. Somebody’s put music on.

Margot stands just inside the door with her hands twisted in front of her like she’s waiting to be told to leave.

It takes eleven minutes.

I watch it happen from the far end of the room. Kira gets to her first, and then two of the club wives who have decided the new chef is theirs now. By the time somebody puts a plate in her hand, she’s laughing at something one of them said with her whole face. She goes down the table asking what’s in things. She gets the slow cooker’s owner to confess.

Half the room already works for her, and she doesn’t know it yet. Most of the club is on Cathedral’s payroll one way or another—the floor, the garage, security, three men on her own prep line—and I let her find that out one introduction at a time.

She warms to the kid fastest. Of course she does. Jasper’s got that look about him, all elbows and enthusiasm, and when he tells her about the culinary classes, she leans in and asks him questions like his answers matter to her. She’s not being kind to him. She’s genuinely interested, which is worse.

I keep my eyes on her all night. Not on him—on her, on every room she moves through and every hand that touches her arm, on the fact that she’s here at all, in my restaurant, surrounded by my people, laughing.

Four days ago, I didn’t know her name was going to matter.

Chapter Five

Margot

What have I done?

I grip my hair tightly and bite back the urge to scream. What the hell was I thinking, doing whatever that was with Bishop in the kitchen? With my boss. The man who signs my paychecks.

I let him touch me.

No, we did more than touch. I can still feel those quick, skilled hands between my legs. It’s been five days, and the memory hasn’t faded by so much as an inch. And in those days, he’s been driving me to madness with his endless flirting, pulling me into corridors for a quick kiss, a touch that would scandalize people. And I haven’t stopped him. Not once.

I just couldn’t. There’s something about the man that makes me forget myself when he touches me. I can’t think when he’s close.

I stare at the closed file on my desk and don’t open it. I should be making a list of what we need to order for next week. I’ve been distracted all week, and the only place my brain functions properly is in the kitchen. It’s stepping out of it that I don’t know what to do with myself.

God.

I lower my head to my desk and close my eyes.

The box is what I keep coming back to.

Not the drugs. The box—plain brown, unmarked, tucked under his arm like it was nothing. And identical to the one sitting on the floor of my cooler. I’ve turned that over a hundred times in five days, and it always comes out the same way. Either the most powerful man in this building happened to carry an ordinary box into a kitchen that already had one hidden in it, on the one morning I went looking.

Or he didn’t.

And every time I get there, I stop because the Bishop I’ve come to know doesn’t fit it. He doesn’t fit it at all. But I ran into baby-faced drug dealers back in my hometown who didn’t fit it either, and their mothers would have sworn to you the same way I want to swear to myself right now.

“Shit, Margot, you’re in so much trouble,” I whine, feeling sorry for myself. I need to stop this. I need to—

“Hey, Chef, got a minute?”

I shoot up. I left my office door open, and now, a nervous Jasper is standing in it, watching me with uncertainty.

“Uh, sure,” I say, wiping a hand over my face. “Why haven’t you gone home already? The restaurant closed…” I tap my phone and sigh at the time. “Two hours ago. It’s late.”

“Oh, I just came back to grab something,” he says, raising the book in his hand. “I’ve been taking culinary classes, and sometimes, I bring a book to read during my break.”

I smile at him. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”