Sweeter Than Sin Read online

  “Distracted by what?” Distracted by the car accident I planted on the corner. “What’s more important than doing your fucking job?”

  “A traffic accident. We’ve got people looking for her already.”

  “My clients are impatient.” This gets me mild approval from Xavier Morris. “They are being deprived of their purchases.” I am being deprived of Brigit. I let go of James’s jacket and push him a step back. “Fix this. Now.”

  “Do you want us to clear the building?”

  “No,” I keep my voice low and deadly. Nothing will disrupt the dancing or the drinking or the dinners. “Leave them, and get my property back under this roof.” I wait until James has retreated into the crowd, and then I rearrange my face into a less-bothered expression. As if I do not particularly care that Brigit was kidnapped. As if the money changing hands tonight is all that matters to me. On any other night, that would be true. Xavier lifts his chin. “You have people on this?”

  “I have people on it now.” The air between us shifts. For all the power Xavier thinks he has, I have more. I make a show of bribing him, of putting money in his pockets, but it’s not me who needs him to live. He needs me. “I thought your building was better secured than this.”

  I pat him on the shoulder. “And I thought your men would make this place untouchable.”

  He curses. “They were supposed to.” A glint in his eye, a flash of worry. “I’m not leaving until this is resolved.”

  “Of course not.” I let out a breath. “You’ll have to accept my apology for the inconvenience.” He doesn’t trust this. He shouldn’t. But he nods anyway. “In the meantime, I have a diversion.”

  Ah—there she is. Reya, with her hand on Savannah’s wrist, coming in from one of the side entrances. I see the moment when Savannah realizes what’s happening, see her eyes go wide and the way she tries to take a step back. And then the whispered conversation. Reya’s lips form the words if you want to stay.

  Savannah blinks, tears in her eyes, and then they’re gone. She’s learned at least one lesson in her time here. This will be the rest of her punishment for what she did to Brigit. This way, I can keep an eye on her while the delicate part of my plans for the evening take place. Really, Xavier Morris will be keeping an eye on her. She won’t be able to escape him. There is no refusing him this time. Reya brings her in close. He turns to see her at the last moment. It’s not what he wanted. He wanted Brigit.

  But he’ll take Savannah.

  Olympus’s Judas whore puts on a shy smile, waving her fingers at Morris, stealing a glance at me. She’ll get a bonus for this. I confirm it with a shallow nod. “Would you like to go somewhere quieter?” Savannah offers her hand to Xavier, and he takes it. The man throws one more look over his shoulder as they leave, his phone already pressed to his ear.

  I drop back into my chair and stare out over the party. Reya sits primly in the second one, the one where Persephone sat the night she came to visit me.

  The night I brought her to visit me.

  It doesn’t matter.

  “We’ve cleared the hallway, yes?”

  “Of course we have. And there are men stationed at either side now, and below the windows.”

  “Savannah?”

  “She didn’t play a part. She tried to give Brigit something to relax her, but that was all she did. No contact with the kidnappers.”

  Good. That means my constant surveillance hasn’t failed. No rumors got out about anything but the auction. The auction was meant to be a semi-public event.

  “Any signs of Lowell?” John Lowell, Brigit’s uncle and fiancé, was supposed to be at the event tonight. Coming to purchase her from me was the most obvious move for him, and it was Plan A. I said enough about her to enrage him, to draw him out, to force an argument. He didn’t take the bait.

  Reya sweeps her eyes across the room. “No.”

  So he didn’t take the bait because he’s not here.

  An old fear crawls down to the base of my spine and takes root. Here, in this ballroom where everything is luxe and clean and expensive, it’s the easiest for that fear to return. In a way, I am still standing in the middle of the room, listening to people sing happy birthday and feeling the very last of my humanity bleed out. The fact that John Lowell did not attend tonight isn’t an omen. It’s just one of the many turns this evening could have taken.

  “When will we have confirmation?”

  Reya consults the slim watch she wears on her wrist. “Forty-five minutes.”

  Hearing her say it is like being hit by a tsunami when one is expecting a dry day in the desert. I choke on it, my body reacting. Heart seizing up. I laugh through a sputtering cough. Reya gives me a sidelong glance. “People are looking at you.”

  I grin at her, eyes damp from the coughing. “Don’t you ever breathe wrong?” Don’t you ever stop breathing? “Stay with me.”

  I want to run out into the street to the agreed-upon safe house, where I will be able to retrieve Brigit in a few days. There will be no missing persons report filed with the police. There will only be increased vigilance, since her uncle is still waiting to make his move. All I need is to know that she’s there, and then we can get on with our lives.

  Rumors about her kidnapping are already spreading. People give me concerned looks, their brows furrowing, the corners of their mouths turning down. But they don’t ask. In this business, it’s better not to know. Knowing things can make you an accessory. I am not known for turning people into accessories. I’m known for discretion. Their faces relax when I turn the conversation to the newer girls, to the properties for sale nearby, to the music. I dance with one woman who’s here because she’s the mayor’s mistress. He has his fun upstairs while she deals with the men downstairs. She laughs and laughs, telling me secrets because she can’t help herself.

  Every minute is a shallow cut. By the end of this I’ll be a bloody mess, and I planned this.

  The mayor’s wife shows no evidence that Demeter has gotten to her, or that there was talk of a disruption tonight. I’ve kept it contained. It will be fucking fine.

  “May I cut in?”

  It’s Reya, cutting in on the mayor’s mistress some indeterminate time later, so I press a kiss to her knuckles and wink at her. “Business to discuss,” I say. She blushes and heads back to her table, and Reya steps in. I have never seen her look so careful in all the time she’s been here. I’ve seen her lots of other ways. Never like this.

  This is not a shallow cut. It’s a bold slice, slipped through the ribs with enough force to stop my heart. “Zeus,” she says. I take her around the outer edge of the dance floor, people’s faces melting into one another. I taught her how to dance shortly after she first arrived. It made her a sought-after escort for men who like to have dates around the city, not just at the whorehouse. There’s an element of tension here. Not her usual games. Reya will flirt with me whenever it suits her, whenever there’s a performance to be put on, but there is no flirtation in her eyes.

  “Is there some sort of delay?”

  Let it be just a delay.

  “No.”

  On the next turn I catch sight of James at one of the exits, framed by the door. His face is drained of color. A laugh tears its way out of me. “Tell me, Reya.”

  “There were others outside.” Her voice is so even, as if she knows this is a killing blow. I can still feel the press of the carpet in that room against my knees. I can still feel the absence of Katie’s heartbeat under my fingertips. “They knew to follow the van. We lost two of our men. The last one is in the emergency room with four stab wounds. We were his first call.”

  My hands tighten around her back, and now it’s Reya who has to pretend to be leading. I’ve lost the thread of the dance. Of everything. My heart is outside my body. A heart can’t work outside a body. That’s a fact of life. It’s fitting that I should die here, in this place. I’ve already died once. Of course it would happen again.

  I am not looking at
her when I manage to speak again. “Is she alive.”

  “As far as we know.”

  It’s not enough to force a real breath into my lungs. “What the fuck happened?” I sound so normal. So calm. I steer us toward the other side of the dance floor. Plan. Get out. Find her. Tear down the city until I find her.

  Reya pulls me off to the side, both hands on the front of my jacket. She has done this a thousand times, for this reason or that, and even in this horrified haze I’m impressed with her. “You can’t leave. I can see you trying to leave.”

  It’s only in this moment that I realize the facade has slipped. That my face is hot, that everything about me is tense. This is the kind of display I never put on at the whorehouse. Fucking. Never. But I can’t stop. I also can’t breathe. “I own the city. I believe I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.”

  She gives the jacket a shake. It’s a sign that I’m not myself. Normally Reya would have no effect, but she manages to move me a few inches. “If you go out there now, everyone will know. It will cause more unrest in the city. It will put all the girls at risk. All of us. You can’t go after her.”

  The connections between the people in this room and the people outside are an enormous, glittering web. I’m in the middle. I’m always in the middle. What happens when the center doesn’t hold? The rest collapses.

  “Then. What.”

  “James. In a room. You can’t do this yourself.”

  “The fuck I can’t.”

  “You can’t,” she insists. “Look.”

  So I do. I look at all the people I’ve gathered here tonight, drinking and dancing and selling themselves and being bought. The moment they know there’s a disruption, that my hands are not on the wheel, is the moment that this place descends into chaos.

  The women would be on their own.

  “Get everyone we need.” Reya lets go of my jacket and turns away. I catch her by the wrist. If anyone is watching, they’ll think we’re about to begin dancing again. I can’t breathe. “You—”

  “I know,” she says. “Keep it quiet.”

  “Hurry,” I tell her. “Hurry.”

  2

  Zeus

  The meeting room is off the main ballroom.

  It was specifically designed for this purpose.

  The last time I used it, it was to plan a brotherly assault on Hades’ mountain while business transactions continued outside the door. James has someone standing outside, but even if a client wandered in, they wouldn’t find anything that suggests sensitive information. They’d find a smaller version of my lounge. Reya brings in drinks and replaces them periodically to maintain the illusion that I’m having a private gathering and not fucking dying on the inside.

  James puts a tablet in front of me first thing so I can watch in crystal clear detail as one of the tires blows out on the front of the van. This wouldn’t be a problem in isolation, obviously, but it wasn’t in isolation.

  The people shooting the guns don’t look trained. They look lucky. My guess is that if Brigit’s uncle is behind this—and I am certain he is—that he’s reached down to the dregs of society, who are unlikely to have papers or people to care about them. This was a quick score for the evening. Cash in their pockets. Guns in their hands. No long-term agreement.

  I watch my third man escape.

  I watch Brigit get taken out of the van and shoved into the back of a sedan that is the very picture of nondescript.

  I’m watching the end of my world.

  “License plate?”

  “I have contacts on it now,” James tells me. “They’re outside city limits.”

  “Going what direction?”

  “North.”

  “Fuck.” The room rocks under my chair, but I will die before I let on that panic has already overflowed its boundaries. I shove it back down with a few well-placed blows to the head. This is a lost asset, nothing more. “I want other updates.”

  There are three men and two women in the room with me. And Reya, who is my shadow, hugging the wall in her evening gown and watching everything. Hearing everything. A slim notebook rests in the crook of one of her elbows, and every now and again she writes something down.

  She is the only person who knows that notetaking is the first skill to desert me in times of stress.

  “The rest of the city,” I say, and they seem like they all breathe at the same time, settling back into their places, faces lit up by screens. “What do we know?”

  If I’m wrong, if it’s not the uncle, then it could be someone else. There are plenty of people in the city who resent what I’ve done, and what I continue to do. Very few of them are reckless enough to attack me directly in this way.

  “There’s nothing on the police channels,” offers James. “No connection to the police.”

  “That would be an extraordinary leap for him.” I lean back in my chair and try to look relaxed. Who knows if they buy it. “We took all the usual precautions.”

  A dark look from James at this. I took more than the usual precautions. I didn’t tell him the full plan until half an hour before the party started. There’s no possible way that one of my people leaked this. They couldn’t have. No one knew.

  “We need to discuss the judge,” James says, folding his hands over his tablet. “I think there’s an argument to be made in favor of...an indirect response.”

  “What the fuck would that mean?” If the judge has taken something that belongs to me, then there is no such thing as an indirect response. I take it back, or I kill him, or both. “You want to set up a meeting for Monday morning and negotiate?”

  “No.” He flips the tablet around and shows me the guest list for the evening. My mind automatically sorts them, lighting up the connections between each name in black and white.

  Owning a whorehouse is mostly bookkeeping. And the majority of that bookkeeping—unwitnessed by almost everyone—involves keeping meticulous track of the politics in the city. All of them. The gangs that war with each other. The businessmen in blood feuds. Secrets. Affairs. Those pieces of information flow into the building but most of them never resurface.

  Except for my purposes.

  I ignored John Lowell before, back when I got the police report, because I didn’t think there was any preemptive action to be taken. To refuse him entry would have been to advertise Brigit’s presence here.

  She asked me not to let him in.

  I rub absently at my breastbone while I look at the list. The pieces won’t fit together, not the way they usually do. And every second that ticks by is another second she gets farther away from me.

  From safety. The safety of the whorehouse, which is all I can offer her.

  Reya steps up to my side and looks down at the tablet with me. “There will be repercussions for the girls,” she says softly.

  I see it then.

  The bloc of men who have come to the whorehouse tonight. They all, in one way or another, have connections to John Lowell. Some of them are in the middle of complicated legal proceedings. Some of them are in other organizations with him.

  And some of them have daughters.

  Daughters who have found themselves in trouble with the law. Reya taps on four different names on the list. Then she puts her notebook down next to the tablet and opens it to a page filled with her neat writing.

  She went through the police report, and then she went looking for more.

  And fuck, did she find it.

  Brigit isn’t the only one who’s caught up in some kind of unsavory transaction with this man, which doesn’t altogether surprise me. He let me walk out of his courtroom with a slap on the wrist after Hades decided to antagonize me. Money speaks to him, but not as much as power does.

  And John Lowell’s favorite power to have is over younger women.

  So.

  To attack him without killing him will have consequences for some of my clients. To start a physical war with John Lowell would do the same. It would upset the balance of the city, whic
h is already teetering under its bouts of random violence. The incidents have been piling up around the whorehouse for weeks.

  Since the day Demeter paid me a visit.

  “Have we managed to locate my sister?”

  “No,” James says.

  Not the answer I was hoping for. But there are people who want Brigit more than she does. One person. Brigit’s uncle. John Lowell. A thorn in my side, now an infected wound.

  “Are our teams in place along the perimeter?”

  I have people all over the city. All fucking over. Somehow John Lowell has managed to thread the needle and get Brigit out of the city. That doesn’t mean the consequences can’t begin here. In fact, they have to begin here, as a distraction.

  “Let’s make things interesting for the chief of police—an hour or two, and then I want it quiet.” One of the men gets up without another word and goes to do my bidding. I won’t know exactly what he puts into motion but this is also by design. The news will come back to me. It always does. And I will keep my deniability of power in place, like I always do. “And make trouble in the southeast district.”

  In the southeast, by the river, two rival cartels occupy their time with garden variety human trafficking. Our roles don’t often intersect, but when they do, it’s because they’ve taken an interest in one of the women who works for me. On occasion, one of them will get reckless enough to try and take one.

  Cover. It’s cover. If I’m retaliating against everyone, he’ll think I don’t know that he’s behind this.

  He’ll think I don’t know he has her.

  And I do know. Even without proof, I know.

  The night drags on and on and on. The party continues. There is no closing time at the whorehouse, only ebbs and flows, men coming and going. They don’t want to seem to leave tonight. On any other night, I would consider this a success. The longer they stay, the more money they spend. The more secrets they reveal.