Page 114 of What We Bury

The building is quiet as I head inside through the staff entrance. It’s still early enough that the club is just starting to fill upstairs. I take the rear stairs instead of the elevator, listening for movement in the staff corridors. Just my boots on plush carpet and the faint hum of the building’s bones.

Even the staff areas of Unholy Desires are excessively luxurious. The corridor is paneled in the same dark walnut as the front of house, oil-rubbed to that piano-lid finish Lilith insists on. The carpet is wool, charcoal gray, thick enough you can barely hear your own footsteps. Brass sconces line the walls—old-timey bulbs that flicker like candles when you stand still long enough—spaced at intervals that make it feel less like a hallway and more like a slow procession. Every door framehas the same brass numbering, hand-stamped, no two quite identical.

Lilith built this place for the people who come here, but she built the back of it for us with the same care, because she considers the people she employs as artisans. The bartenders are mixologists. The kink instructors are sensual artists. The security is ex-special forces. Everyone who works here is the best at what they do, and we’re paid for our expertise. Generously.

There’s a small kitchenette at the end of the corridor with a real espresso machine, a pastry case refilled twice a day, fresh fruit in a marble bowl. A quiet room next door for staff who need to step out of a scene. A medic on call. Even a damned massage therapist for anyone feeling tight.

Most clubs would call this excessive. Lilith knows it’s how you buy loyalty. Every employee signs an NDA when they start, but one whisper here could sink not just the club but financial markets. The dancers and dommes know which hedge fund manager can’t get hard without being slapped. The bartenders know which politician has a side piece. Security knows the sexual preferences of every person who walks through the doors.

Membership is invite-only. The location moves every twelve months and nobody outside the books knows where Lilith will surface next—last year it was a converted cathedral in New Orleans; the year before, a private island off the Carolinas. Clients pay her a fortune for anonymity, for the one thing their money can’t buy them—privacy. The anonymity holds because the staff have no reason to spill. We’re paid like surgeons, treated like artisans, and we know exactly what we’d be giving up.

Loyalty isn’t a virtue here. It’s the product.

It’s also why I’ve stuck with Odin for eight years. I started when he was still moving cities with Lilith, traveling with the operation—twelve months in one city, twelve in the next. Igrew up in Hunter Harbor, so when the Hangmen formed, I planted here and stayed. Odin owns half the town quietly, and there’s always something needing to be watched—a warehouse, a property, a client who needs an extra set of eyes on a meeting. When Unholy Desires is in town I work the floor. When it moves on, I rotate through Odin’s other holdings.

I like the variety.

In the locker room I drop my bag on the bench. Pull the gun from the holster at the small of my back, check the slide, store it in my personal safe. I hate that Lilith won’t let me carry on the floor. But, as she points out, these rich pricks might lose their shit if I pulled a weapon on one of them. The last thing any of us needs is a lawsuit.

I head to the staff showers. Keep it short. Cold. The water drums against my skull and I try to clear my head, but the evening clings to me—her hand around my two fingers, the way she pulled.Come up. I’ll make tea. Maybe I’ll ask you to help me get undressed.The shape of her words still in my chest. Her hand on the door handle, the smell of garlic from inside, Milo’s grin like a wrecking ball through the only thing I wanted?—

I shut the water off.

Get dressed. The uniform’s the same for all of us—tailored black pants, black dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearm, black tie, dress shoes, matte black mask. The entire ensemble is provided by Lilith and has a designer name on the label I occasionally see mentioned on red carpets.

I eat standing up in the kitchenette. Protein bar, black coffee, a handful of almonds from a jar on the counter. My shift starts in fifteen, enough time to empty my brain and arrive on the floor as the version of myself that functions. Quiet. Watchful. Contained.

The version that doesn’t think about cherry pie, back-alley voyeurism, and a girl who wanted me to stay.

THIRTY-ONE

MILO

“Come on, kitten. You can say it. I’m ready. I won’t even choke on my food this time.”

Sage’s apartment smells like garlic and wine and the slow-spreading silence of a woman about to say something she can’t unsay.

She’s been quiet for nearly a minute. Long enough that a lesser man would fill it. I’m not a lesser man. I’m a verypatientman, which sounds the same on the outside and works ten times harder on the inside, and I will sit here until the heat death of the universe if it means she finishes the sentence she trailed off on.

Across the table, she’s pushing pasta around her plate without eating it. Then she takes a breath and lets her words out in a rush. “I-can’t-stop-thinking-what-it-would-be-like-having-sex-with-all-five-of-you-at-the-same-time.”

For once in my deeply unserious life, I have absolutely no joke.

I just stare at her.

Sage goes red instantly, like she wants to snatch the words back out of the air and stuff them down the sink disposal. Her hand flies to her wineglass. “Forget I said that.”

“Nope.”

“Milo—”

“Absolutely the fuck not.” I sit back slowly, very carefully, like one wrong move might spook her into sprinting for the bathroom and locking the door. “You don’t get to say the hottest thing anyone has ever said to me in this deeply romantic pasta setting and then ask for a factory reset.”

She groans and covers her face with both hands. “Oh my god.”

I grin despite the crackle of heat crawling up my spine. “No, no. Stay with me. Let’s honor the moment. Maybe put it in a scrapbook.”

“I hate you.”