Page 11 of Ruthless Daddy
I stepped to the rope. I did not stop at the back of the line. Someone behind me said something to a friend that I did not quite catch.
I leaned across the rope toward him. Not close enough to be touched. Close enough that he could hear me at a volume the people in line could not.
I had thirty seconds. I had less than that. I had whatever this man’s tolerance was for one sentence.
“I’m being followed,” I said.
It came out steadier than I expected.
I kept going.
“Brown coat. Dark hair. Half a block back. I’ll pay whatever the cover is. Please.”
I did not say more than that. More than that was begging, and begging would have told him a different story than the one I needed him to hear, the story of a drunk girl avoiding an ex, or a woman in a domestic situation she had walked into of her own volition. I needed him to hear it as what it was, which was something else.
I held his eyes.
He looked past me.
He did it without moving his head. Just the eyes, the slow scan continuing the way it had been continuing, only now it picked up the half a block behind me with a slightly longer pause than it had on the previous pass. I did not turn. I could not turn. Turning was what amateurs did. I held his eyes when they came back to mine, which they did after maybe two seconds.
His face did something I had not been prepared for.
It softened.
He lifted the rope.
He did not say anything that the people in line could parse as a decision. He just lifted the rope and tilted his head, very slightly, toward the door.
“Inside, miss,” he said. Quiet. “Straight to the bar. Tell them Mick sent you.”
The man at the front of the line said something with the word “what” in it. Mick did not look at him. Mick did not break eye contact with me. The younger bouncer registered the handoff and went still in the way a well-trained dog went still when its handler had taken over the situation.
“Thank you,” I said.
I stepped through the rope.
He let it drop behind me.
“Go on, now,” he said, quieter still, almost to himself. “We’ve got it.”
I walked the six steps to the door. The door was opened from the inside by another man whose face I did not have the bandwidth to register. The noise hit me like water—bass first, in the chest, then the higher layers of it, glassware and laughter and a voice over a speaker laughing at something, and the smell, cologne and bourbon and something darker underneath that I could not place. Warm air. So much warm air. The kind of warmth that hit you when you came in out of the cold of a Chicago February and made your eyes water for the first ten seconds whether you wanted them to or not.
I stepped inside.
The door closed behind me.
Chapter 3
Pietro
ThebottleMarcoopenedat six was now half gone. He’d set me up in the raised corner booth like it was a safe zone—soft seats, good sightlines, wall at my back, a glass in my hand that refilled itself every time I looked away.
The club was heavy with guests. Main floor was packed with the right kind of crowd: too rich, too desperate, too pretty, and every last one of them pretending it was for fun. Nero liked its guests performative. Dress codes were pointless. Nobody followed them. You could show up in a t-shirt if it cost more than the doorman’s rent. You could show up in nothing but skin and hunger.
Nothing quite like this place in Sicily—for better or worse.
The lights were down to red and nothing else. Bass like a punch in the chest, nothing above one-twenty hertz, the kind of pressure that rattled the booths and made the glasses crawl on the table if you left them alone.
