Page 16 of Belong to Me
Chapter 6
DAISY
The coffee shop is a few blocks from Keyes, down a side street I’ve never taken, and Blythe walks fast. She doesn’t speak on the walk over. She keeps her bag tight against her side and her eyes forward and her heels hit the pavement in a rhythm that says this is not a social outing and I should not ask questions until we are sitting down with a door between us and the firm.
We sit. She orders for both of us. Two espressos, no food. The shop is small, half-empty, serves its coffee in ceramic cups and doesn’t play music. The table between us is scarred wood and the light coming through the window is grey and honest and I can see every line on Blythe’s face and there are more than I realized.
“Daisy.” She wraps her hands around her cup. Her nails are perfect. Her eyes are not. “I need to tell you something about the firm, and you’re not going to want to hear it, and I need you to let me finish before you respond.”
My espresso is untouched. “Okay.”
She draws a breath. Not for drama. For courage.
“Keyes, Inc. isn’t a law firm. I mean, it is, technically. It files briefs and manages retainers and does everything a law firm does on paper. But that’s the surface. The real business: the reason clients come to Keyes and not to any of the hundred other firms in Monaco is the women.”
I don’t understand. The words hit my ears and my brain receives them and files them under categories I don’t have tabs for yet, and I sit very still and I wait.
“The female lawyers. The paralegals. The associates. Most of them aren’t just providing legal services. They’re—” She stops. Tries again. “The firm’s clients are powerful men. Dangerous men. Underworld money, Bratva connections, cartel adjacent. And the women at Keyes are part of what the firm offers those men. Companionship. Access. Intimacy. Whatever the client wants, within whatever boundaries the woman negotiates.”
The espresso cup is very small in my hands. My hands are very cold.
“It’s not trafficking,” Blythe continues, and her voice is careful now, picking through the words like someone crossing a room full of glass. “The women choose to be there. They’re compensated. Some of them make more in a year than most lawyers make in five. It’s a transaction. Consensual. Regulated by Jezebel herself.”
"Jezebel."
“Jezebel Keyes. The president. Daughter of ex-Bratva. She built the firm on one principle: the men get what they want, the women get what they’re worth, and nobody talks about it outside the building.”
The light through the window hasn’t changed. The coffee shop hasn’t changed. But the room feels different. The air has weight now. My lungs are working harder than they should for a woman sitting in a chair doing nothing.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Blythe sets her cup down. Her eyes come to mine and they are hard and bright and measuring, the same assessing expression she gave me on my first day, and her voice when it comes is stripped of gentleness.
“Because when you started, I assumed you were playing the long game. The innocent act. The colour-coded files and the sensible shoes and the wide eyes. I figured you were smart enough to know what the firm was and savvy enough to pretend you didn’t, because the ones who play innocent get the biggest clients. The biggest clients mean the biggest payouts.”
My throat is closing. “You thought I was—”
“I thought you were reeling in the big fish. Anton Almazov. Biggest account Keyes has ever held. And there you were, with your yellow tabs and your timeline of key dates, and I thought: she’s good. She’s the best I’ve seen.”
The words are the same. The same assessment, the same conclusion, and hearing them from Blythe’s mouth is like being hit from a direction I didn’t know existed.
Blythe leans forward. Her voice drops.
“But I’ve been wrong before. And I’ve been near you for weeks, Daisy. I’ve seen you throw away his coffee. I’ve seen you try to get reassigned. I’ve seen you come back from that dinner white as paper and refuse to tell me why, and I’ve seen you flinch every time Kaye says his name, and I have been inside this firm for years and I know what a woman running a game looks like and you are not running a game.”
She pauses. Her hands are still around the cup. Mine are in my lap, gripping each other.
“You actually didn’t know.”
I can’t speak. My mouth opens and nothing comes out and I close it again and my hands are white and my face, I can feel my face, the colour leaving it in stages, throat first, then cheeks, then forehead, and the coffee shop tilts and I grip the edge of the table.
“Daisy.”
“Kaye,” I manage. One word. It’s all I can get out.
Blythe’s expression changes. Something crosses it that might be pity and might be anger and sits somewhere between both.
“Kaye told Anton you were willing. She told him you understood how things work at Keyes. She implied—no. She didn’t imply. She told him, in the corridor outside the conference room before your first meeting, that you were bright and eager and very willing to make his experience comfortable.”
