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They think they found a stranger on the internet. They think they're sitting on a delicious little secret.

They have no idea their little secret files their expenses. Books their flights. Orders their champagne.

What do they know other than a mouth?

I know everything. I’m the captain now.

That’s right, bitches.

I've been running three of the richest men in the city like a card table every night, and it turns out, I've known the players the whole time. I just didn't realize I was already holding their cards.

The house always wins. And I'm the house.

And okay, fine, there's a second thing sitting underneath my newfound power, and I'm not going to make a speech about it, but it's there. Three men I'd decided were NOT FOR ME and NOT POSSIBLE are, as it happens, completely gone for me. Obsessed. Bidding each other up over a laugh and a bare shoulder.

That does something to a woman who's spent her whole life being walked past. I'm not proud of it. I'm also not going to pretend it isn't the best I've felt in years.

So here's what I'm going to do.

I'm not going to quit, I'm not going to hide, and I am absolutely not going to tip anyone off. I'm going to do exactly what I've been doing, which is put my lipstick on, shake my money maker, and take their money all the way to the fucking bank. Except now I'll do it with my eyes open. On purpose. Looking at them, specifically.

I'm going to make Beck Cross spend until it stings. I'm going to make Elias Thorne break his silence. I'm going to make sweet, guilty Theo Marsh forget his own good manners. And every crown from these “Knights” comes off Birdie's loan. Call it a tax. A nightly tax on the three men who can't be bothered to learn my name.

Tomorrow at eight forty-five a.m., I'll hand them their coffee and they'll look through me like glass, always.

And tomorrow at midnight, I'll own all three of them, and they'll thank me for it.

I get maybe an hour of sleep. I don't need more. I feel incredible.

The next night, I'm set up in record time. Slip, lipstick, the crop framed just above my mouth. I don't even hover over the button.

They're already waiting when I go live, all three, stacked at the top of my Round Table with the other Knights, right on schedule.

HouseMoney: THERE SHE IS.

“Evening, boys.” I smile the smile I have never once wasted on the front desk. “Miss me?”

Let the games begin.

4

ELIAS

It's a quarter past midnight, and I'm awake. I'm always awake. Somewhere in the last few years, sleep stopped being something I could expect and turned into something that’s just beyond my reach, teasing me with its promise but rarely delivering. The waiting for it happens here, in my glass apartment forty floors up, with a view I paid a fortune for and have to remind myself to appreciate even though I’m seldom home.

Tonight, though, I look at it, my view. The city goes on for miles down there, all of it lit, every window a person I'll never meet, doing something I'll never know about. Somewhere in all that light, people are laughing at a kitchen table. People are asleep next to someone. People are wanted for nothing but themselves.

So I open my laptop and go looking for a woman I'll never have to say a word to.

I don't do this. Not women, not any of it. Not because I don't want them, oh fuck no, but because I've never been sure what they wanted back from me. When you're one of the men who signs the checks, everyone who looks your way is looking at your money. Your access. Your seat at the table. So I stopped trying. Time passed, and here I am, a guy who’d rather pay a stranger than lie awake wondering what the woman next to me is angling for and how deep she can get her claws into me. And my wallet.

So somebody, one of my buddies, mentioned a place once, a name too ridiculous to forget. CamALot, like a joke website that got funded by some horny investors. I told myself I was curious. That's the lie I started with, in the beginning.

She's new. There's a little green tag next to her name that says so. She's kneeling on a bed in a cheap black slip, in a room lit by one lamp with a scarf thrown over the shade, and the frame cuts her off just above the mouth. I get no eyes, no face, nothing I could name in a lineup. My hand is already moving to click away, because whatever I am, I'm not this.

And then she doesn't rush.

That's the thing that stops me. She lets one strap slide off her shoulder slow enough that a dozen grown men, her “Knights” the cheesy site calls them, forget how to breathe, myself included. Then she stops. Just stops. Leaves us hanging there while she says something dry and filthy and laughs at her own joke, the strap halfway down her arm like a dare, showing nothing. Not even a little tit.