Chapter Text
An entire acre of waterfront lawn is covered in white flowers, each bloom a gaudy display of obscene wealth which attendants buzz around with spritz bottles in a vain attempt to keep the impractical arrangements from wilting in the heat of Miami in July.
“Shit’s gonna die anyway,” I mutter, leaning over the railing and closing my eyes in defeat.
“Chista è a zita.”
I knock back the rest of my champagne, then pitch the empty flute over the balcony. It shatters on the veranda below, glass flying across the terracotta into the manicured grass. The bright crack draws a strangled squeak from a woman I’m assuming is some politician’s controversially young wife.
“Paige Maddelena Buccheri Luciana, getting married is no fucking excuse to throw a goddamn tantrum and make more work for the people keeping your tacky-ass engagement party afloat.”
I groan, drop my chin to my chest, and drag my head around toward that irritating, grating voice with exaggerated reluctance, letting my dome hang off one shoulder as though holding it upright is too much to ask.
Nika is practically vibrating with irritation and visibly unimpressed, with one hand still lifted from assaulting me. She has Ma’s deeper coloring and thick brunette hair, styled in glossy curls over the shoulders of a sharply tailored black skirt-suit. Beside her, to my pleasant surprise, my baby sister Kate holds out two flutes brimming with more champagne. The sight of it puts a little life back into me.
Kate and I share the same fair coloring, long faces, and sharp noses, though her blonde hair falls straight past her shoulders, sleek despite the humidity already raising hell with mine. I left my own hair down tonight, the pale waves falling nearly to the small of my back in long, choppy layers that are already lifting around my face. Our oldest sister, Cameron, is probably whining about the same thing wherever she’s disappeared to with her husband—likely off charming some bureaucrat into investing in their tech startup—since her hair is every bit as disobedient as my own.
For all her perfectly frizzless hair, however, Kate has managed to make a mess of her Prada suit. The forest green jacket hangs crooked from one shoulder, the right cuff is shoved toward her elbow, and the silk blouse beneath it is only partially tucked into her trousers. The sight makes my eyebrow twitch, but I decide against picking a fight with the only sibling responding to my distress with the appropriate amount of alcohol.
I accept her champagne offering and straighten by several grudging degrees.
“Ah! It’s a miracle!” Kate exclaims triumphantly. “She has been revived!”
I grunt and roll my eyes at her optimism. There is no reviving this. The champagne is only keeping my corpse amenable.
Nika folds her arms tightly across her chest. “Can you please stop acting like this is some punishment invented just for you? You may be marrying a woman with the personality of a brick—”
I can’t believe this bitch is sincerely lecturing me for sulking over an engagement to a woman she once accused of getting her turkey-teeth veneers from some part-time med-spa hack high on beta blockers.
“—but at least he’s letting you marry a woman at all.”
Well, that was never up for fucking debate. Severl of my unlucky bi-flexible relatives have let Geno bully them into getting locked down by the lesser sex, but for all that geezer’s countless faults, he has just enough sense not to put a man down on one knee in front of me.
The only thing I have to offer a man in that position is a bullet right between the eyes.
“Love isn’t part of the deal for any of us, Paige,” Nika continues. “Your number came up. That’s it. It’s not personal to him.”
I stretch my lips into the bright, lifeless smile I’ve been wearing for donors all night, every tooth exposed without a trace of warmth behind it.
“Thank you for that fresh perspective Nika. Being reminded me that this antiquated ritual will one day fuck you over too, that lifts my spirits, it really does.”
A little smile breaks through Nika’s pissed-off expression. “Good. Then you’re ready to be on your best behavior when Geno storms up here.”
“Why would Geno storm up here—” Nika points over the balcony, and Kate and I lean out beside her to inspect the damage below. Shit.
“Well, on the bright side, you came really close to hitting the wife of a senator who voted against free school lunch last week.” Kate offers me the second flute of champagne she’s holding.
The senator’s wife stands with one manicured hand pressed to her inflated chest while an attendant collects glittering splinters of glass from the grass around her heels. Geno has taken hold of her elbow and bent close enough to speak privately, his face arranged into soft, paternal concern. When his eyes snap up to mine, though, the indulgent smile disappears. He raises one finger, points directly at me, then toward the staircase leading to the upper terrace.
Stay there.
I lift the fresh champagne in acknowledgment and drain it in one long pull.
“Perfect!” I chuckle, lifting the second empty flute and clinking the rims together in a mock toast. “I wanted a real drink anyway.”
“Paige—”
Before Kate can finish, I flick both glasses backward over my shoulders. Whoopsie!
“Shit!”
One bounces against Kate’s palms before she traps it against her chest. Nika catches the other cleanly by its delicate stem, lifting it in the air like she’s half a second from launching it straight back at me.
Whatever. Hoes mad, I don’t give a fuck. I’m already sauntering through the open French doors and back into the crush of my party.
I push past a local news anchor taking pictures with a skincare influencer, then cut between a washed-up quarterback and the owner of a frozen-yogurt franchise trying to corner a state representative to talk about the existential threat of trans kids in sports. The ballroom is overrun with real-estate developers, charter-school founders, television pastors, and micro-celebrities who donate so they can film TikToks inside Governor Adam Silver’s mansion.
The women float around in liquid silk with smooth, frozen foreheads and the same three noses rotating between them. The men come in varying shades of golf-course orange, stuffed into linen dinner jackets and crocodile loafers. State legislators who spend their weekdays voting against basic human rights crouch in corners to snort coke off their wrinkled fingers, and I swear for a moment I smell the unmistakable aroma of poppers.
Florida’s ruling class. Politically conservative. Cosmetically very liberal.
The room shifts as I move deeper inside, with heads turning and conversations taking a dip before starting up again behind me. Eyes drag down the suit I picked for myself against the advice of Geno’s bitch of a third wife, Cathy.
“Adam doesn't want to draw all the attention to the whole marrying a woman thing,” she’d said, lowering her voice around ‘woman’ like it was a slur. “So we’ll pull your hair into a bun, keep the makeup natural, and kind of butch you up but without going too dyke-y.”
She wanted me in a plain black suit that could disappear behind Caitlin Clark Silver. So naturally I left my hair down and brought rhinestones and cleavage to the party.
A mocha-brown three-piece, every inch drowned in stunning crystal. They pour down the oversized blazer in glittering streams, catching the light whenever I move. And I styled it open over a matching vest cut to my sternum with nothing underneath. The trousers hang loose through my hips and thighs before flaring wide over my Prada loafers, giving the whole thing a low-slung, expensive arrogance.
There’s nothing bridal about it, but so fucking what? There’s nothing sincere about this celebration of love and nobody else seems to care. Plus, if everyone gets to stare at me like I’m some kind of pussy-eating zoo animal, I’ll wear the dyke-y shit I like.
The bar comes into view beyond a final wall of sun-spotted shoulders. The bartender spots me and immediately reaches for the Nonino Riserva, pouring my double before I make it across the room. Good man.
I’m so close to feeling the delicious burn of that first sip when an arm hooks through mine and yanks me sideways.
“Oh, maron’!” I throw my head back in absolute misery, still reaching for the bar as it slides out of range. “My grappa!”
“Nice to see you too,” my complete bitch of a cousin Breanna says, her low voice rough with amusement. Her black suit hangs loose on her lanky frame, one hand tucked casually into a pocket while the other keeps my arm pinned against her side. Narrow tinted glasses sit low on her nose, but I can still see the smug little glint in her eyes.
Then Sue slips into my path, walking backward with a wide, catlike grin spread across her face. To anyone watching, this must look like ordinary familial affection rather than Geno’s daughters actively kidnapping me less than ten feet from my liquid salvation.
Ordinarily, Sue and Breanna are two of my favorite family members. Tonight, apparently, they want to make an enemy out of me.
“Let me go to the bar.”
“No.” Sue shakes her head, her bright smile never slipping.
“Non mi restano forse che pochi giorni da donna libera?” I hurl the half-remembered words of Job at the two remorseless women. “Allora lasciatemi in pace. Fatemi godere almeno un momento di serenità prima che me ne vada per non tornare più, nella terra delle tenebre e dell’ombra della morte.”
Of anyone in this godforsaken room, they should understand how I feel.
Sue had been bartered off to Martin Rapinoe, an oil heir with the social instincts of a damp napkin and a talent for losing money. He cheated constantly, obviously, and with women who always seemed desperate to tell the world. Family dinners with him are always an opportunity to witness all the inventive ways a grown ass man can humiliate his wife.
Breanna had gotten marginally luckier, in my opinion, because at least Sabrina isn’t a heterosexual man. That being said, Sabrina is a raging cunt. Her bad attitude is mostly warranted, considering she was forced into the marriage after Geno caught her father on a wiretap begging college football players for their used socks, but watching Bree take the brunt of her resentment gets old.
“Paige, don’t torture those of us who have successfully repressed our Catholic school years by flaunting that freaky photographic memory of yours.” Sue sighs, steering us out of the ballroom and into the foyer.
I shoot her a wicked grin. “Speak for yourself. An all-girls school was hardly torture for a lesbian who never bought into all that ‘God hates fags’ bullshit.” In fact, every time one of my classmates dragged me into an empty stairwell, I felt downright grateful to whatever God had made me.
Breanna snickers against my shoulder. “Yeah, Saint Mary’s wasn’t all bad.”
I thump the back of my hand against her chest. “I’d happily trade a little fire and brimstone for the single night I had with the girls’ volleyball team after they won state.”
A wistful sigh slips out of me as my thoughts drift toward one outside hitter in particular.
Then Breanna flicks me hard in the forehead. It hurts like hell, but my startled, “Ow, bitch—” gets swallowed by Sue’s sharp laugh and the reluctant groan of a massive wooden door being forced open. Bree keeps my arm trapped against her side and marches me through before I can twist free, then throws her weight backward to drag the door shut behind us.
“We got handed fucked-up situations, baby.” She gestures to herself and Sue. “You’re making your shit worse all on your own, haicapid?”
The party music has become a muffled pulse inside the walls. The cold fluorescent lights overhead flicker once, bleaching the color from our clothes and making the three of us look yellow and sickly. We’re crammed into a narrow service hall lined with folded banquet tables, stacked silver catering carts, crates of clean glassware, and a row of sweating champagne buckets waiting to be dragged back into the party.
“If you brought me back here to deliver me to Geno, just know I’m actually in the mood for a fistfight.”
“Can you relax?” Breanna folds one ankle over the other, then lowers her tinted glasses enough to look at me over the frames. Her eyes move slowly over my face. “You seem so tense.”
“Arranged marriage does that to a person.”
“So we’ve heard,” Sue quips, looking me over slowly, taking in the crystals, the bare chest, the aggressive disobedience. Approval curls one corner of her wide grin.
Then she reaches inside her jacket.
My shoulders tense. Sue, the rat bastard, catches it and makes a whole production of digging through her jacket just to fuck with me. Finally, she pulls out a tiny plastic bag pinched between two fingers.
“Oh, you’re my favorite cousin.” I let out a sigh of relief and step toward her. “Have I told you that lately?”
Breanna folds her arms. “You only say that when she has cocaine.”
“Then maybe she should have cocaine more often.”
Sue lifts the bag out of reach when I grab for it. “Nuh-uh, Paigey. Not so fast.”
For a second I’m frozen, all of that brief humor draining from my face. I’m not in a space to be rage-baited by a woman in her fifties. I don’t care what eating off lead-painted plates did to her brain. I will put this bitch through a catering cart.
“Ma che cozz’u fai? You seriously trying to piss me off right now?”
Sue gives the bag one small shake. The powder jumps inside.
“One line. Then vangopp and take the family picture without making Geno stroke out.”
“One line?” I glance between them. “What am I, thirteen? You two gonna put training wheels on my Porsche next?”
“You don’t need more than one,” Breanna says firmly before turning to her sister. “Susannah, don’t even think about giving in to that umbriago little shiteater. She can barely stand up straight as it is.”
“I promise I’m nowhere near drunk enough to stomach this party.”
Sue’s thumb taps once against the little bag. Her patience running thin does not feel like a winning equation for me to get my three lines of sweet, sweet snow.
“Paige. Be reasonable.”
“Two is only one more than one, Sue-Sue.” I speak very slowly, to help my aged cousin keep up with my advanced use of arithmetic.
Breanna pushes away from the door, putting herself close enough to intervene if I decide to climb Sue for it. The catering cart beside her rattles when her hip bumps the handle.
“One,” Sue repeats. She holds the bag level with her shoulder, safely outside my reach. Beneath the fluorescent lights, the powder gathered in the corner looks almost blue.
“Fine.” I lift my hands. “Let’s compromise. One really fat line.”
Sue draws a slow breath through her nose.
The heavy door swings inward behind Breanna. Sue’s hand disappears into her jacket. Breanna turns sharply, blocking the trespasser’s view with her body while I step back from both of them and try to look like we were doing anything other than negotiating my cocaine rations in the service hall.
Cathy stands in the doorway, seafoam silk pulled taut across her visible ribs and sapphire cuffs stacked over both Pilates-thin wrists. Her gaze moves over the folded tables and crates of glassware, pauses on Sue’s hand buried inside her jacket, then settles on me.
“There you are.”
“Unfortunately.”
Her face already has limited range after her latest visit to Dr. Miami, so the smile she forces across her half-frozen lips lands somewhere between gracious hostess and medical malpractice.
“You were asked to wait upstairs.”
I glance around the service hall—the stacked tables, the catering carts, Sue’s hand still buried suspiciously inside her jacket—then look back at Cathy.
“And yet.”
Cathy has spent two years laboring this engagement into existence. Luncheons with the Silver family. Campaign checks. Private dinners where Caitlin somehow lands in the chair beside mine every single time. Scheduling meetings with Adam and Geno to discuss my marriage to Caitlin and our future joint club venture in the same breath. Cathy picked the flowers, approved the menu, corrected the invitations, and probably decided which side of Caitlin I’m supposed to stand on so our photographs poll well with suburban women who dream of being fucked to their first partnered orgasm by a butch lesbian.
Tonight is her masterpiece.
And I’m hiding in a service hall on the verge of snorting three lines of coke from her stepdaughter.
“Adam and Caitlin are waiting with the photographer,” she says.
I jerk my chin toward the ballroom. “Can’t your people edit me in next to my fiancée later? You’re not short on money. Fix it in post.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“And I’m not laughing.”
Cathy draws breath to answer, but stops when Geno appears behind her.
He stands in the doorway without speaking. His gaze passes over Breanna, then Sue, pausing on the hand she still has buried inside her jacket. Sue slowly pulls it free, empty. Nobody moves.
Geno raises both hands at me, his whole face asking what the fuck I think I’m doing.
“We got a photographer upstairs waitin’ to take your fucking picture.”
At this point, I’m done caring whether I piss the old man off. I’m pissed too, so I meet his stiff irritation with a smart mouth.
“I heard your wife the first time.”
“Then why have I been running around this party looking for your ass?”
Cathy glances past him into the corridor, checking for staff or wandering guests, then reaches for the door. Geno steps inside before she can close it gently and slams the heavy wood behind him. The impact travels through the floor beneath my feet.
“Oh, I can tell you why. Because you’re a spoiled little disgraziat’ who’s suddenly decided she’s bigger than decades of family tradition.”
His voice fills the narrow service hall, too large for the low ceiling and bare walls. Sue shifts closer to him, one hand moving to pull back on his shoulder, but he knocks it away without even glancing in her direction.
“Everybody else shuts their mouth and does their duty. Your mother did. Your cousins did. Your sister did. But you and that smart fucking mouth I was merciful enough not to make Diana beat out of you, somehow got you thinking this family works for you. Haicapid? Am I on to something or what?!”
Heat rushes up my neck and burns beneath my collar. The last thing I’m giving him is a flinch.
Cathy moves away from the door and stations herself near the corner, arms folded tightly beneath her chest. Her eyes keep darting between Geno and the hallway beyond the wall, listening for footsteps.
His palm comes down hard against the bar cart beside him.
Metal scrapes across the tile. The stacked glassware jumps inside its crates, chiming against itself in a frantic outburst. Breanna jerks forward and catches the cart before it can roll into the wall.
“You think tonight is hell?” he shouts. “You won’t survive what I put you through if you fuck this deal up for me.”
He closes the distance between us. The sharp bite of his cologne makes my nose wrinkle, the stale cigar smoke buried underneath irritating my senses.
“You got three siblings, right?”
I stare back at him.
His eyes sharpen. “Oh, now you don’t wanna talk? Now your smart ass got nothing to fucking say? Do you have three fucking siblings or not?”
My mouth has gone dry. I force my tongue loose from the roof of it.
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Oh, I know.” His voice drops so low I have to lean into his space to hear him. “Of course I fucking know. I’m the one who paid for the goddamn IVF so my carpet-munching sister could have test-tube babies of her own.”
Breanna inhales sharply through her nose. Her grip tightens around the cart’s brass handle until her knuckles pale. Sue reaches for Geno again, this time catching the sleeve of his jacket near the elbow. He tears his arm free.
My stomach twists. Champagne and liquor rise hot into the back of my throat, and I swallow hard against it. Geno sees the first crack in me and holds there, like a shark scenting blood in the water.
He goes for the kill.
“And just as easily as I coughed up those thousands, I can hand a crackhead two fucking bucks and tell him to put a bullet in Kate’s head.”
The hall goes dead quiet.
“Then we’ll see how funny you think it is to fuck around with one of the best deals this family has ever had the chance to close.”
Geno steps back into the doorway and smooths the front of his jacket. “’Iamo.” There is absolutely no room for argument in his voice.
“Family photograph—Now.”
By the time I pull up to the Birdcage, Sue’s seedy little kingdom, a night back at work is sounding pretty fucking good.
It’s just after midnight, and the place is deep into its second wind. Purple light bleeds over the low ceiling, the electric blue booths, the chrome poles, and the bodies packed shoulder to shoulder around each stage. Every breath tastes like cold beer, old cigarette smoke, vanilla body oil, and the sharp lemon disinfectant somebody keeps pouring over the same sticky patch of vinyl flooring.
Calling the Birdcage a strip club is technically accurate in the same way calling Miami a beach town is technically accurate. There are dancers everywhere—onstage, upside down, folding themselves around poles beneath spotlights that catch every fleck of glitter on their skin. Offstage, they slip between tables in rhinestone bikinis and platform heels, balancing champagne buckets against their hips or leaning close to men too distracted or drunk to understand a word they’re saying. But Sue has never believed in taking one stream of vice when she can divert the whole fucking river.
A glowing sportsbook stretches across the wall beyond the main bar. The kitchen serves steaks, wings, fried seafood, and Sunday gravy until sunrise. Private card rooms run behind an unmarked entrance in the back, where men with more cash than judgment can lose a month’s salary behind closed doors.
A person can come into the Birdcage, eat dinner, bet on a fight, lose ten grand at baccarat, then buy a dance to soothe the sting, all in a single debauched night.
Money flies through the room like confetti, sticking to oiled thighs before fluttering down over the stages.
People start calling our names before we make it ten feet through the door.
Sue gets grabbed first by a broad old paesan’ with a cigar tucked behind one ear and a gold cross buried in his silver chest hair. He kisses both her cheeks, holds her at arm’s length like he hasn’t seen her in decades, then finally lets go so two made men posted near the bar can drag her into another round of clasped hands, back slaps, and murmured questions about point spreads and outstanding markers.
That’s what happens when the underboss owns the building, the book, and a healthy percentage of the people inside both.
Kate disappears into a knot of younger associates who immediately start pressing drinks into her greedy hands.
I’m stopped by Vinny, a family friend who used to let me steer his gorgeous banana-yellow Cadillac around empty parking lots when I was seven. I couldn’t see over the wheel and reach the pedals at the same time, but I memorized every detail of that beauty: the cream leather bench seat, the hood stretching toward the horizon, and the way that enormous V8 made the whole car shudder before settling into a low, velvety rumble.
“Ue, guaglio’! Look at you!” He grips the back of my neck and briefly presses his forehead to mine. “Big fucking night for you pretty boy!”
“Vin, please don’t start.”
His shoulders bounce with a wheezing laugh. Then he fishes his keys from his pocket and jingles them beside my ear.
I catch his wrist. “You brought the Caddy?”
“Of course.”
“My favorite girl?”
He squints at me. “You think I’m made of money or something? How many fucking Cadillacs do you think I own?”
“Did you ever fix that vacuum leak, or are you still pretending the idle’s supposed to hunt like that?”
His whole face lights up. He turns toward the men at his table and gestures at me, “Listen to this one. Got engaged tonight, and she’s worried about my carburetor.”
“Yeah, yeah. Where is she?”
“Side lot. Parked her myself this time.” He jerks his chin toward the entrance. “Took one look at those acne-covered little bastards working valet and kept my keys.”
“Good man.” My attention drifts toward the doors, picturing that yellow hood gleaming beneath the security lights. “Should’ve waited and let me park her. Would’ve been the highlight of my night.”
Vinny throws an arm around my shoulders and drags me against his side. “Well I asked for you specifically, but somebody was too busy smooching on her future ball and chain.”
My face pinches. “Maron’, Vin. Don’t make business sound like pleasure.”
His laugh rattles against me as I slip out from under his arm and dap up the men crowded around the table, knocking knuckles and taking the usual abuse about how long it’s been since I came by. One of the bartenders raises the bottle of Nonino Riserva when she spots me, checking whether I want my usual.
When I throw the dry liquor back, I take a moment to look around and really acknowledge the ambiance of the place.
The carpet has patterns obviously designed to hide bodily fluids. Half the lights haven’t matched since before the Clinton administration. The women’s bathroom has a broken stall door Sue keeps swearing she’ll replace, and one corner booth still carries a dark burn from the time Bree dropped her cigar during a fight.
A gavone near the main stage has a basket of wings balanced on his stomach while a dancer grinds in his lap. Some try-hard uncle in a white linen suit peels bills from a roll thicker than my wrist, hoping to impress the women perched beside him.
Damn, this shit is lowkey ugly as hell.
“You’re wound up all tight,” Sue says over the music, interrupting my internal critique of her primary legitimate business venture. She slings an arm around my shoulders, like she didn’t just watch her daddy rip me a new one before parading me in front of his red-pill fanboys. “Want something to take the edge off?” I cut her a look. “Veni ca. Let’s go upstairs. Breanna has to finish her daily check-in with Sab before she can come talk business, so we’ve got time to kill.”
“Her what?”
Sue keeps her arm around me as we work our way deeper into the club.
“Sab makes her walk through the whole house on FaceTime when she’s out of town,” she says. “Every room. Then she has to see what Bree’s wearing. Then they share screens so she can check who Breanna’s been texting. She’ll probably show her what she ate for dinner too.”
“Still no red meat?”
“Not if Breanna wants to keep her wife happy.”
Jesus Christ.
“Please, no more wife talk. That shit is so fucking depressing.”
“If you think wife talk is bad, you’d hate to hear husband talk.”
“Sue, I do hate to hear your husband talk.”
A laugh punches out of her as she pulls me through another cloud of perfume and body heat. A red-headed dancer brushes past us in a crystal thong and thigh-high boots, her deep brown skin gleaming beneath the lights. She taps two fingers against Sue’s cheek on her way by. Sue catches her hand, kisses the back of it, and tells her she looked good up there.
“Deadbeat husbands have their perks.” Sue grins with a sly wink, watching the dancer walk away. What a dog. I fucking love her.
With her eyes still shining, she tips her chin toward the main stage. “Look who’s enjoying herself tonight.”
Kate has planted herself at the brass rail with both elbows propped on it, staring unabashedly up at a dancer winding one long leg around the pole. A fistful of singles hangs forgotten from her hand while the woman lowers herself into a split directly in front of her.
“Caterina, numu fai shcumbari.” I tell my horny sister to stop embarrassing me. She spares me half a glance before sliding her eyes back to the stage again.
Sue squeezes my shoulder. “Leave her alone.”
“She’s drooling.”
“She’s surrounded by beautiful naked women—”
“Beautiful or not, there is such a thing as too obvious,” I grumble, watching Kate scramble sideways along the rail to keep following the dancer when she crawls away, knocking over some man’s beer in the process. “Christ, she’s got no swag.”
“That seems to be a family trait.”
“Chiudere il becco.”
Kate finally tears herself away when we pass the end of the stage. She tucks the forgotten bills into the dancer’s garter, which earns her a smile and a finger dragged beneath her chin. She hurries after us with her cheeks warm and her eyes lit up.
“You hired new girls?” she asks, breathless.
Sue nods toward the stage. “Four this week.”
Kate starts walking with us. “You gonna introduce us?”
“Later.”
“To all four?”
A dancer squeezes past carrying a chilled bottle of Grey Goose with sparklers strapped to the neck. Kate nearly walks into a table watching her go. Sue catches her by the front of her jacket and yanks her back upright.
“Enough, ghiacchieron’. Quit pestering me and go meet them yourself.”
Kate peels away immediately, work talk forgotten before Sue even finishes the sentence. Within seconds she’s swallowed by the crowd again, heading straight toward the dressing-room side of the club like she’s been given a personal mission from God.
The staircase behind the staff door is steep and narrow, its red carpet worn dark through the middle from years of heels dragging up and down it. The music follows us into the stairwell, bass beating through the walls hard enough to make the framed photographs on the landing tremble.
Sue’s office sits above the main floor behind a steel door with three separate locks. She gets through them without taking her arm off me, nudges the door open with her shoulder, then finally lets me go.
The room is ten degrees colder than the club and smells faintly of cigarettes despite the NO SMOKING sign screwed into the wall. Four security monitors glow above a desk crowded with cash envelopes, liquor invoices, betting slips, and an adding machine old enough to have survived at least one federal raid. Two leather chairs sit across from the desk, both cracked along the arms. A safe takes up most of the far wall.
I drop into the nearest chair.
Sue locks the door behind us.
“Aunda?”
“Hello to you too.”
“You pulled me away from my grappa and forced me to deal with your mean-ass daddy practically sober. I require compensation.”
Sue pulls the little bag from her jacket and takes a rectangular mirror from the desk drawer.
“Enough with the edging. Put her down.”
She lays the mirror on the desk, empties a small mound of white powder onto the glass, then uses the edge of a black credit card to chop it fine. I lean forward, elbows planted on my knees, watching her drag it into a line.
Sue catches me moving closer and presses two fingers against my forehead.
“Wait.”
“I am waiting.”
“You’re hovering.”
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re acting like a fiend.”
The office door rattles beneath a quick series of knocks. Sue sweeps the powder back into a loose pile before checking the monitor beside the door. Breanna stands in the hall with one hand on her hip and her phone still pressed against her ear. Sue buzzes her in.
“I’m inside,” Breanna says into the phone as she steps past us. “Yes. Sue’s office.”
She pauses, listening. “No dancers.” Another pause. “I did not eat steak.” Her eyes close. “I sent you a picture of my plate, Sabrina.”
Sue bites the inside of her cheek.
Breanna points at her in warning.
“Yup, see you at home.” She ends the call and stares down at the phone until the screen goes black. “Not one fucking word.”
Then Breanna drops into the other leather chair and looks at the powder on the mirror, throwing her arms up in exaggerated offense.
“You started without me?”
“You were on parole,” I say.
“Shut the fuck up.”
Sue divides the powder, pushes the longer line toward me, then moves around the desk and opens a ledger.
“Nika’s shipment got moved up three days,” she says. “Payment has to clear before it lands.”
Breanna lowers her glasses. “How short are we?” Sue turns the ledger around and taps the figure at the bottom.
I bend over the mirror, close one nostril, and pull the line hard through the other. The burn hits immediately. It claws up the back of my nose and drains bitterly down my throat. I sit up sniffling, press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, and study the numbers while Sue runs through what is coming in and what still has to go out.
“Hold the two largest gambling payouts until Monday and move the rest through the kitchen accounts,” I say. “It’ll clear.”
Breanna checks the total herself before giving Sue a small nod. “Do it.”
Sue marks the adjustment in the ledger.
As she moves on to the rest of the week, the pressure behind my eyes begins to fade. My shoulders drop, and the suit stops feeling like it’s been sewn into my skin. The room comes into sharp focus: the figures in the ledger, the hum of the security monitors, the slow drip of the coffee pot Bree flicked on just a moment ago.
I sniff again and wipe beneath my nose with the side of my thumb. I shrug out of my blazer and throw it over the back of the chair, exposing the plunging vest and my bare skin underneath.
Sue glances up.
“Feeling better?”
I sink deeper into the leather. “Just keep talking.”
She closes Nika’s account and pulls a thinner folder from beneath the ledger.
“What’s the update with Silver?”
“Since we’ve publicly acknowledged the engagement, Adam’s people cleared the final operating approvals this afternoon.”
The Dovetail Lounge is officially moving forward. An invitation-only gentlemen’s club with live burlesque, discreet entrances, and a membership list full of men whose reputations cannot afford them being photographed inside an ordinary strip joint. Powerful men passing through Miami will be able to drink, entertain clients, and indulge themselves without worrying about paparazzi, tourists, or anyone’s wife wandering in through the front door.
Adam provides the clientele. Geno provides the money and the building: an old downtown bank with carved limestone, fluted columns, and gilded trim, its inherited grandeur meant to lend a brand-new operation the legitimacy of something aged.
My team spent the last year carefully gutting the place without disturbing any of its historical details. We opened the walls and ran shielded cabling, fiber, and dedicated power through the old service cavities. Pinhole cameras disappeared into carved rosettes, light fixtures, and decorative grilles. Microphones were set into ceiling medallions and beneath the bars in every private room, positioned to isolate individual conversations beneath the music. We installed additional cameras at every entrance, hallway junction, stairwell, and service door, then sealed everything back up so cleanly that even the most exacting preservation conservator wouldn’t be able to tell where the original building ended and our work began.
Every private room feeds into a closed internal network housed inside the old bank vault. The recordings, membership files, reservations, entry logs, and staff reports are all stored locally on servers with no direct connection to the outside world.
It is, objectively, the most complicated thing I have ever built.
Most of Dovetail’s employees will have no idea any of it exists. As far as they know, they work at an invitation-only burlesque and gentlemen’s club where powerful men can disappear for a few hours without cameras, tourists, or their wives finding them.
Only six people on the floor will be working directly for us: one bartender, two dancers, the madam, a cocktail waitress, and one of the maids. All affiliated with the family.
Breanna finishes scanning the plans, folds them neatly against her knee, and lets out a low whistle. “This is a major operation, Paigey. A lot of responsibility. A lot to prove.”
A laugh catches somewhere ugly in my throat. “We both know he didn’t give it to me so I could prove I’m responsible.”
Breanna’s mouth tightens into a hard line. “Okay, he doesn’t trust you. But he trusts your work, and that means something.”
“Yeah it means he thinks I need a goddamn leash.” I snatch the folder from her and slap it onto the desk. “Something to keep my hands busy and my anxiety high enough that I don’t have time to do anything he hasn’t approved.”
Sue leans against the desk, completely unmoved by my outburst. “Well, maybe don’t get caught boosting cars and you won’t get saddled with the hard assignments.” She taps one finger against her temple like she’s just passed down centuries of ancestral wisdom. “Non puoi avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca, Paige.”
Meaning, you cannot have a full wine barrel, and a drunk wife.
I want to laugh it off. Call her an ancient bitch, make some crack about the proverb, and pretend none of this matters. Sue isn’t trying to hurt me. She thinks she’s giving me shit over one reckless job gone wrong.
She has no idea what that botched job cost me.
I make the family more money now than I ever did boosting cars, but money was never the fucking point. The point was that I loved that shit. Finding the weaknesses in a security system, slipping past the immobilizer, hearing the engine turn over beneath my hands. The real thrill was gliding through every layer of protection some smug rich asshole had paid for, settling into the driver’s seat, and making his precious girl purr for me instead. Then I’d take her for a proper joyride before we stripped out anything traceable and sealed her inside a container bound for the Dominican Republic to be sold.
And it wasn’t some phase I picked up because I wanted to feel dangerous. I’ve been taking shit apart and breaking it down since before I could read. Hell, I only learned to fucking read because manuals meant I could dismantle more complicated things and put them back together in cooler ways. I souped up Cam’s Barbie Jeep when I was six, gutted my first desktop before I turned eight, and stole my first car at twelve.
That’s the part none of them understand. I kept this piece of myself alive through every criticism, every sideways look when I started talking about an engine component nobody cared about or some new feature I’d built into my PC. I kept at it until it carried me all the way to a PhD in computer engineering, with a focus on embedded systems and automotive cybersecurity. I built something that belonged entirely to me.
Now the Dovetail, a wife I don’t want, and a place in this family I never asked for have claimed every hour that used to be mine. And everyone keeps looking at me like I’m some petulant child throwing a tantrum over a confiscated toy while I’m standing right in front of them, just fucking drowning.
Yeah, I’m done for tonight. I have officially exhausted my patience for self-righteous lectures from this family.
“And, on that uplifting note, I’m going to find my kid sister and get the fuck out of here.”
I shove to my feet and snatch my blazer from the chair. The crystals snag in my hair as I pull it on, forcing me to wrench a long blonde strand free with a muttered curse.
Breanna watches me struggle. “Paige, when was the last time you slept?”
“Don’t.” I smooth the abused strand over my shoulder. “Don’t start acting nurturing now that you can tell you’ve pissed me off.”
Her expression softens anyway. “When was the last time you ate something that wasn’t cocaine or grappa?”
“I had an olive downstairs.”
Sue’s eyebrows climb. “Oh, she’s thriving, B.”
“Can you two not do this right now?”
Breanna studies me for another second. “When was the last time you got laid?”
My hands stop halfway through straightening my lapels.
Sue makes a low sound of discovery. “Oh-ho. No, Paigey.”
“It hasn’t been that long.”
“Before the engagement?” Breanna’s hand rises to cover her mouth.
I turn toward the door.
Sue gasps and follows. “Bree, it was absolutely before the engagement.”
“Mind your business.”
I yank the first lock open.
“Wait,” Sue says, crowding beside me. “There’s a dancer working tonight—”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“You’re trying to pimp out one of your employees.”
She recoils. “I was going to offer an introduction.”
“For what?”
Sue stares at me. “Sex, Paige.”
Right.
The second lock sticks. I wrench it harder.
“She’s gorgeous,” Sue continues. “And it’s her last night.”
“If it's her last night I'm sure she has better things to do than be a farewell present for her Boss' cousin.”
Breanna reaches past me and turns the third lock when my fingers slip. “Nobody’s asking you to marry her. Just talk to the girl.”
“I’m already marrying someone, remember?”
They both go quiet. Then Sue frowns. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
I pull the door open, and music floods into the office. “I’d rather rub myself raw every night than invite mistress drama into my life right now.”
And trust, I do rub myself raw every night. My annoying cousins aren’t wrong about me being touch-starved. Between work and being a raging bitch about the engagement, I’ve let one of my major food groups disappear from my diet entirely: pretty girls.
But after tonight, risking Geno’s temper for some pussy is a nonstarter. If he’ll threaten to put a bullet in Kate over me delaying one stupid photo for People magazine, I don’t even want to imagine what he’d do after some pap caught a beautiful dancer leaving my apartment at an indecent hour looking thoroughly fucked. So celibacy it is.
Breanna follows me into the hall. “Paige, these marriages are business arrangements. You’re still allowed to be a person. You barely let anyone touch you.”
“I don’t like people touching me.”
“You like women touching you.”
So fucking much.
“Selectively,” I lie.
“Then, for the love of God, select one.”
They follow me down the stairs, still determined to sell me on this woman.
“She’s exactly Paigey’s type,” Sue tells Breanna.
“I don’t have a type,”
“Lightskin girl. Beautiful face. Fat ass. Looks kinda mean. Abs.”
Abs? Cazzo, my ears perk up like some pavlovian dog in reaction to the word. It takes every ounce of self-control I have not to build the rest of her in my head. Because abs probably mean defined shoulders. A strong back. Thick thighs clamped around my hips while I sink my fingers into them. The sweet pressure of her adductors wrapped around my head, flexing hard before slowly going slack as I work her over with my tongue.
Breanna lights up. “That is one hundred percent her type!”
“That could be literally anyone’s type,” I snap.
We push through the staff door into a club packed nearly wall to wall. Sue catches my sleeve before I can disappear into the chaos. “Just meet her.”
“No.”
“One dance.”
“No.”
“You don’t even have to speak!”
“That is the first appealing thing you’ve said.” I wrench my sleeve free and scan the room for Kate.
I spot the little towhead sprawled in the booth beside my boy Vin with a dancer settled comfortably in her lap. Kate catches my eye and waves so enthusiastically she nearly sloshes her drink down the woman’s back. Her cheeks are flushed, her smile loose and stupid. Great. My ride home is completely fucking gone.
Before I can start fighting my way over to collect her, the main stage goes dark.
Then pink light blooms through the room.
It spills across the low ceiling and packed booths, turning the smoke above the crowd the color of cotton candy. Conversations break off. Chairs scrape closer. People clog the aisles trying to get a better view, and the customers already gathered around the stage press tight against the rail.
The announcer’s voice pours from the speakers, deep and theatrical.
“Okay, folks, it’s what you’ve all been waiting for. For her final dance here on the Birdcage stage, please welcome our girl…”
Sue grabs my forearm.
“…Bambi!”
The curtain parts.
She stands with her back to the audience, one hand resting high against the pole.
Her champagne-blonde hair is pinned high in a messy updo, baring the elegant length of her neck and the deep line down her spine.
God, I want to measure it in kisses.
Press ten slow ones down the slope of her throat, lose count, then start again and again.
Muscle cuts softly across her shoulders and down either side of her back, her raised arm pulling that tricep taut beneath the skin. The narrow, crystal-studded bandeau leaves practically all of her exposed, nothing but a strip of brilliant bubblegum pink fastened between her shoulder blades with silver rings and dangling cords. So much tawny skin laid bare, glowing gold in the light.
Below it, her waist pulls in so sharply that the heavy curve of her hips looks downright pornographic. Then the bass drops, and fuck me, she starts moving. Her bubble butt jiggles beneath the matching micro-skirt sitting low and tight across her hips, every hot-pink crystal catching the light in time with the beat. She circles slowly, grinding against nothing as the fabric stretches taut over her generous curves.
Her hand slides down the pole as she lets her body bend forward. The muscles along her back flex. The skirt crawls impossibly higher until a pair of plain white panties appears beneath all that shimmering pink.
My body sways forward before I can stop it, every filthy instinct in me suddenly desperate to press my face into the wet cleft tucked just beneath that thin cotton.
She snaps upright, breaking the trance. Cazzo. I haven’t even seen the broad’s face, and I’m already thinking like some horny teenager with no fucking home training.
I need to get the fuck out of here. I don’t know what possessed this woman to call herself Bambi, but she is clearly a sports car barreling down the highway and I’m the dumb little prey animal frozen in her headlights.
I make it exactly one step before the crowd erupts behind me.
Against my better judgment, I look back.
Bambi has one hand buried in her updo. She slowly draws out the clip, and thick blonde waves spill over her bare shoulders and down her back, creamy beneath the pink lights. One shake sends them sweeping across the narrowest part of her waist before they bounce against the curve of that sweet ass.
My fingers twitch at my side.
I want her hair wound tight around my fist. I want to pull until her head falls back and her mouth opens around a broken cry. I want to suck a bruise right over her fluttering pulse while she begs Daddy to give her more.
I squeeze my eyes shut, desperate to put something between me and that vision onstage. I drag both hands over my face, smooth the wrinkle between my eyebrows, and take one deep, centering breath.
Okay. I’m leaving.
I turn away from the stage and walk straight into Sue. She plants both hands against my shoulders. “Where do you think you’re going? The dance just started!”
“I’ve seen more than enough.”
Breanna pulls up at Sue’s side, openly entertained by whatever she sees on my face. “You were completely entranced watching her ass shake and now that things are about to get good you want to head home?”
“God forbid I appreciate the athleticism of this line of work.”
Sue tries to turn me back toward the stage. I lock my knees and refuse to budge.
“One little dance isn’t going to kill you.”
“With the week I’m having, I’m not willing to test that theory.”
Kate stumbles into our circle with one arm raised over her head, protecting her drink from the shifting crowd. “There you are!” She throws her free arm around my waist and nearly takes us both down. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“You’ve been sitting like ten feet away. You literally just waved at me.”
“Paigey, were you looking for me too?” She beams, her eyes glassy with delight.
“Yes, so I can drag your drunk ass home.”
Kate blinks at me, then back at the stage. Her mouth falls open.
“Oh my God.”
She points between Bambi and me with such vigor that liquor sloshes over the rim of her glass and splatters across Sue’s shoe. Which that harpy deserves. I smile.
“You guys match!”
Sue looks down at the crystals scattered over my suit, then toward the fuchsia-pink stones flashing across Bambi’s body. Her face splits into a grin.
“Holy shit. You do.”
“We do not.”
Breanna adjusts her glasses and studies us with the grave concentration of someone comparing fabric swatches. “You kind of do.”
Kate presses her cheek against my shoulder, gazing dreamily toward the stage. “You’re both so sparkly. You have to talk to her.”
Sue pats her cheek. “See? Even the baby knows it’s fate.”
“Bro, actually fuck off.”
Kate recoils against me, scandalized. “Paige! Don’t say that to fate.”
She twists around in my grip to look at the stage again, then jolts with a delighted gasp, “She’s looking over here!”
Sue cranes her neck. “Ooooh, Paigey. Your little crush is looking at you.”
“She is not my crush.”
Breanna lifts her fingers in an exaggerated wave. “Go ahead. Say hi.”
I smack her hand down. “Could both of you grow the fuck up?”
“Don’t be shy,” Sue coos. “Maybe she thinks you’re pretty too.”
“Paige and Bambi, sitting in a tree,” Kate sings, way too fucking loudly.
“Should I DoorDash you a strap, or did you come prepared?” Bree pulls her phone out and starts typing furiously.
Yo, what the fuck!?
“Are you not hearing me?” The music swallows my voice beyond our little circle, but I’m close enough to make all three of them recoil. “I don’t give a single solitary fuck about some pretty dancer just because she has a fat fucking ass.”
Breanna jumps up a little in excitement, laughing in my face. “Well that's too damn bad Paigey, 'cuz she’s coming this way,”
My stomach drops. Haven’t I suffered enough tonight? I turn.
FUCK.
True to her word, Bambi is stepping down from the stage—and holy hell.
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi.
The crowd automatically breaks open for her. Men pull their knees in. Women shift their chairs out of her path. She passes through them without so much as a grateful acknowledgment, as though this is nature and these strangers simply understand their place in it.
I was raised to assess people quickly. Bambi should be an easy read. Full cherubic cheeks warmed with rosy blush. Pink-champagne shimmer swept across her lids and bright at the inner corners. A bouncy blonde blowout tumbling around her shoulders. Every detail casts her as something vulnerable or delicate, meant to be handled with extreme care.
But her eyes tell me not to be a fucking idiot.
Her massive amber-brown doe eyes are weapons of mass destruction, made in a lab to get whatever they want with one slow bat of those heavy lashes and a well-timed, wide-eyed plea.
She might want me to think she's an innocent little deer, all tender and soft, but I know a mountain lion when I see one. There’s hunger crouched beneath that pretty face, and the calm attention of an apex predator assessing me right back.
She keeps coming, unhurried, tracking every shift in my expression with a cat’s patience.
The closer she gets, the harder it becomes not to stare at her mouth. Glossy and plush, set in a bratty pout. I want to hold her firmly by the jaw and tell her to be a good girl. No sulking in public. Not where every other bastard in the room can see how deliciously petulant that whiny little face gets for me.
I turn sharply into our little huddle. “Everybody shut the fuck up,” I bark over their teasing, with my goddamn heart pounding against my ribs. “I swear to all that is holy, I will put a bullet in anyone who tries to embarrass me.”
A fingertip lightly taps my shoulder.
I turn around.
She is standing directly in front of me.
Up close, I can see that her top is struggling to do its job of containing her perfect body. The full tops of her tits swell above it, bubblegum crystals scattering pink light over skin with the lush give of overripe fruit. I wonder how she might bruise beneath my fingertips if I held her too tight. Would she drip down my wrist like softened peach?
Her gaze drops.
She takes me in slowly, beginning at the crystals scattered over my vest and tracing their shine down my bare chest. Her eyes linger on the matching stones, then travel over my belt, my trousers, the spread of my stance before climbing back to my face.
She looks directly at me when she speaks. Her voice catches me off guard, soft and sweet but deeper than I expected, warm as sunlit honey with the low velvet hum of a big cat’s purr.
“Sue, you know I hate interruptions when I’m onstage. Your little huddle is getting loud enough to steal my crowd.”
Sue lifts both hands, grinning without a trace of shame. “My apologies, sweetheart. We're having a bit of a team meeting.”
Bambi raises one skeptical eyebrow, her eyes still fixed on me. I should probably say something, but all of my concentration is going towards not drooling onto her pretty white toes.
“A team meeting?” She stomps her platform on the ground to punctuate her ire.
Breanna leans in beside me, smarmy ass smirk in place. “Sugar, I swear nobody was looking at us until you walked over.”
That finally pulls Bambi’s attention away. She glances at Breanna and giggles with a bright smile.
The sound runs straight through me. Her smile is devastating. The giggle is devastating. The fact that she’s giving either of them to anybody who isn’t me immediately pisses me off.
Don’t look at those bozos. Look at me.
“We won’t cause any more issues,” I say gruffly, drawing her eyes back where they belong. “We’re heading out.”
Her expression tightens like she’s trying to look irritated, but something softer keeps betraying her at the corners of her mouth. Amusement, maybe. God, I cannot get a clean read on this woman.
She shakes her head, and her perfume lifts between us: orange blossom, vanilla, burnt sugar, something warm and musky underneath that makes my mouth water.
“Nuh-uh,” she says. “You’re trouble and I need you right where I can keep an eye on you.”
She slips two fingers into my belt and gives my buckle a sharp tug.
“Come here.”