Page 147 of Arrow

Isadora shook her head, a slow benediction of the impossibly lost. “Jesus Christ, you’ve got a death wish, girl. You’re the most beautiful kind of drama, but even you can’t fuck two families out of war.”

She sidled up to light a joint off the same match, her nails clicking the lighter with the addict’s defiance she hid from the girls. I liked the way Isadora moved, like she knew how to walk through the crossfire and still keep the smoke out of her eyes. She leaned in, her mouth close enough to stain my ear with words meant for just us.

“Romanovs don’t forgive easily. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I flicked ash into the cup by my thigh. “I’m not married to him, yet. He gets no say in what I do in my free time, especially after tonight.”

Isadora grinned before walking out. “Oh, sweet girl, to be as naïve as you.”

Harley peeled her fishnets halfway to her knees and nuzzled her cheek to my bare shoulder. “You like him. Like, stalker-level like.”

“Oh, fuck off.” But it was a lie, and the ease of it soothed something in both of us. She patted my thigh and nodded down, right at the restless geometry of my wrists, still mapped with a haze of last night’s bruising.

“They always mark you up this good, or just the psychos?”

I splayed my hands, admiring. “Only the ones worth destroying after.”

The club filtered our tips that night—not fair, but we made up for it in shots of mezcal smuggled in a Gatorade bottle taped beneath the bar. Harley drank from the bottle, never breaking eye contact, and wiped her mouth with her thumb, then dragged it down my ribs with a lazy precision that was equal parts possessive and cruel.

“Tell the truth,” she said, voice velveted by the liquor. “You like the risk—knowing he’s watching. Knowing the Virelli girl might finally get what’s coming with one wrong night.”

“I like the show.” I licked the sweat from my top lip, then shot a glance at her wrist, veiled with black silk ribbon and a tattoo I couldn’t parse in the half-dark. “You plan to start trouble, or just collect it like everyone else here?”

Harley shrugged, pressing the cold bottle to my inner thigh, and watched me flinch. “Trouble’s only fun if you can finish it. Most people just want to get close enough to taste the risk, then they run right back to safety.”

She nuzzled the bottle against my skin a heartbeat longer than a joke would last. I didn’t move away.

31

THIRTY-ONE

HARLOWE

2:30 a.m. I wondered if some snitch had already forwarded him a shaky cell phone video of Harley’s knuckles making love to my insides. The thought prickled my skin in a way I couldn’t describe.

Was it fear, or just another kink in the spool of my addiction to him?

Harley massaged the last clots of glitter from her thigh. She caught me staring and grinned, tongue slithering over raw lips. “We doing this again, or were you just marking territory for the fiancé?”

I tried to laugh, but it snagged in my throat. “The fiancé wants a show. He’ll get one.”

She flicked her eyes up, weighing me. “We could stay here—get the velvet room and play with the toys no one’s brave enough to ask for.” She traced the ribbon at her wrist—a nervous tic, maybe, something encoded in the way her eyes flickered from my face to the cage and back.

I took the dare, let the hunger answer for me.

“After closing,” I said. “No voyeurs, just you and me.”

She smiled.

We lingered backstage while the club thinned out. They’d all seen what happened out there and were cautious to approach, as if the aftermath of two girls grinding each other open was a force field. Harley and I didn’t so much as touch, outside of the brush of calves and elbows on the couch, but the air between us crackled with the whiskey-laced anticipation of another round, one that would be private and absolute.

At three-thirty, Harley gripped my wrist and led me through the bowels of the club, down a scuffed corridor to a door marked only with black tape. The velvet room. The air inside was a degree warmer, the scent of latex and leather more honest here, the ceiling haloed with a thousand points of blue LED and dust. Lined along one wall were restraints that were chrome, and padded, the kind you could wear for hours.

Harley wasted no time. She sat me on a chaise, straddled my lap, and peeled the mesh and latex from her hips, exposing a flash of inked thigh and the hungry seam of her cunt, wet and glinting in the starlight LEDs. The first thing she did was bite my shoulder hard—so hard I yelped, the sound sealed in the velvet. She pressed me to the chaise, naked hips bracketed over mine, and grabbed my wrists, pinning them above my head with a single, sinewy fist.

“Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done,” she said.

I shivered. I wanted to lie, but the taste of the club and Harley’s fingers sliding up and down through my slit made me reckless.