Page 145 of Arrow

“My fiancé?”

“He is co-owner of La Lune Noir, and a walking grenade when it comes to anyone looking at you for longer than two seconds.” Isadora patted my arm and squeezed. “I’m sorry. I tried to impress upon him that Zeph is the safest switch in the city, but Mr. Romanov was insistent.”

I rolled my eyes.

We weren’t married, and if he thought he could run around town and fuck blonde heiresses, but tell me who I could and could not fuck in this arranged marriage, he had another thing coming. I smiled at Isadora and all but stomped to my dressing room, pissed, and put on a pink see-through baby doll, with a matching pink thong. If my fiancé thought he could humiliate me, then he was about to witness, up close and personal, what uncontrollable really fucking looked like.

I left my hair up, in a tangle of violet and black, no time or fucks to give it a proper brush. The hallway outside was filled with new faces and old men, all acting like I was meant to walk among them in strings and smoke. I ignored them, swayinh my hips for maximum effect and dared any of them to so much as flinch.

They all looked.

Some pretended not to.

One older man in a pinstripe suit watched the length of my legs and then up to the pulse in my throat, his stare polite but invasive. I caught it, held it, and let him have it back with a smile.

Walking past the velvet-rope holding cell, three trust-fund boys in pastel dress shirts gawked at me like I was an OnlyFans thumbnail. I bared my teeth in a straight-up animalistic smile.

One flinched, the other two just swallowed and blushed.

I wondered, lazily, which of them would try to buy me a drink later. Which would get as far as the dressing room before security handed them back with their balls still attached.

Backstage was a hush of voices. Zephyr was preoccupied with his new sub, so I looked around for someone to play with. I saw a girl in a mesh thong and a haze of body glitter, prepping on her phone between sets. She had immaculate cheekbones, and an attitude so pointed it could pierce drywall.

We’d never talked outside of the club, and after-hours cigarettes on the fire escape, but the way she looked at me when I was falling apart on stage said she was game enough to try anything, especially with me.

I lingered at the coolant vent, letting the wind-up toy nerves settle. “Are you working the main room tonight?” I asked, voice pitched casually.

She blinked, amused, then set her phone face down. “They put me in the cage.”

“What’s your name again?” I asked, and she grinned.

“Harley. You?”

“Echo.” I smiled.

She grinned wider. “I know. I’ve watched you on stage before with Zephyr. You’re hot.”

“Thanks. Want to share the cage tonight?”

There was a flash of excitement in her eyes. “I fucking thought you’d never ask.”

We spent the next ten minutes doing our makeup. Harley painted my lids with a churning smoke and edged my lashes with diamond dust.

Every once in a while, her fingers grazed the bite on my neck, and her eyes softened as she said, “He did that to you? Damn, girl.”

I licked a thumb and smudged the glitter on her cheek.

The club melted from a riot to a single thrum when the lights went cold blue, and the DJ dropped a beat that dripped sex and violence in equal measure. Zephyr handled the suspension silks, gliding up and down with his usual plastic smile, but Harley and I owned the cage—me in my glass platform heels, her in latex and mesh, both of us strobing under the lazy orbit of a spotlight.

Wrapping a hand in her hair, I dragged her off-balance to exaggerate the arched sprawl over my lap.

When the crowd started to howl, Harley looked at me sideways and whispered, “You want to improvise?”

“Always.”

She kissed me, and the whole floor pivoted our direction—the kind of snap that turns a dozen Wall Street creeps to rubberneck at once. I kissed her back, harder, then licked her collarbone and left a lipstick stain at the hollow of her throat. She pawed at my ass, half-dragging, half-lifting me onto her thighs, and I straddled her, letting the dancers on the upper balconies catch the silhouette of my legs splayed wide across her waist.

Harley ran a palm up the inside of my thigh, tracing the edge of my thong. A few hands in the crowd rose—hesitant, worshipping, some even clapping, like the scene at the cage was a gift. I let her, then flicked my hair up and let her fingers slip into my thong and touch the slickness there.