Page 1 of Masked Don

CHAPTER 1

STEVIE

Rule one at the Velvet Room: masks stay on.

Rule two: don’t stare at the guns.

Every man in this room has killed someone or paid someone to.

The Velvet Room is neutral ground, the only place in the city where every family can drink under one roof without anyone bleeding on the carpet. The bleeding happens after, in the parking lot, in the river, in the weeks that follow. Nobody’s turf. Nobody’s staff. Nobody’s fault when someone doesn’t make it home.

I keep telling myself it’s one night. Then I’m out. The Velvet Room pays insanely well, enough for a deposit on a new apartment and a chance to start over.

That’s the only reason I’m here.

Tonight, the Velvet Room doesn’t look like a nightclub.

It looks like a sin the rich paid someone to decorate. Black orchids spill from silver urns like flowers left on a grave. Candlelight drips gold across a sea of masks. Feathers. Lacquer. Bone-white porcelain.

A man in a crow mask catches my eye as I pass and smiles like he already knows what I’d cost. The chill goes all the way down my spine and stays there.

Rule three: first names only, and not even real ones. The agency put me down as Bunny, to match the white rabbit mask I would never in a million years have picked for myself.

You don’t see faces. You don’t hear names. You forget everything the second you walk out the door.

Easy.

Except I never forget anything.

Fifteen years of foster homes taught me to read a room before I was old enough to know that’s what I was doing. Waitressing just pays me for it. I can already tell you which man tips and which one grabs.

I can also tell which guest has a gun under his jacket by the way he sits.

Tonight, it’s most of them.

And according to the gold card on every table, tonight is the Black Orchid Auction. Once a year, the families sell what they’re owed. Markers. Favors. Debts from men who can’t pay them back.

I pass a mirrored pillar and catch myself in it.

Black silk. Bare shoulders. Curves the dress has given up trying to contain.

I spent years treating my body like a problem I had to apologize for.

The woman in that mirror isn’t a problem.

She’s a warning.

I lift my chin and keep walking.

I’m loading my tray at the service bar when it starts.

Not a look. A warmth. It slides down the back of my neck and settles low in my belly, slow and deliberate, like a hand that knows exactly where it’s going.

My skin goes tight under the silk. My breath catches for no reason at all. Somewhere under this dress, my body wakes up and starts paying attention before I have any idea to what.

I know the greasy once-over men in this room give the help.

This isn’t that.