1. ANGEL

🌸VIOLET🌸

My phone had been sitting face up on the dressing table for twenty minutes and I still hadn't opened the message from the loan office, because I already knew what it said and I wasn't ready to read the number they had typed out this time.

Marisol grabbed my wrist as she passed behind me, pulling one of the pins in my wig straight before I even noticed it had slipped. "You're up in ten. Stop staring at that thing and let me finish your mask."

I turned my phone face down on the table and let her work, her fingers were quick and practiced against the back of my head as she tied the silver mask into place. My palm ached where I had bitten down on it earlier, hard enough to leave two crescents of teeth marks in the skin, and I curled my fingers into a loose fist so she wouldn't see it in the mirror.

"Table six wants a private room," she said, straightening the strap behind my ear. "Already paid for the hour, no questions asked."

"Who is he?"

"I don’t know his name. I know he hasn't touched his drink since he sat down and every girl on the floor has tried to get a look at him and failed." She stepped back and studied me in the mirror. "Good luck in there."

I found him through the gap in the curtain before I walked out. He sat alone in the corner booth with one arm stretched along the back of the seat, watching the stage with a stillness that unsettled me more than the usual staring did. I had danced in front of hundreds of men by then. None of them had ever made my stomach fold in on itself just from the way he looked at the room, like he was deciding whether any of it was worth his time.

The private room felt smaller once I stepped inside it, though nothing about it had changed since the last man I'd danced for in there. Or maybe it only felt that way because he took up so much space in it without moving.

"What's your name?" he asked, before I had even climbed onto the platform.

"Angel." I replied.

Right. I'm Angel here. Not Violet.

"It suits you." His eyes stayed on my face, the only part of me the mask let him see. "You look like a blue eyed angel."

He didn't say anything after that and I appreciated it because I didn’t want to have any more conversations. I was here to dance and get paid. That was all.

I started the song because standing there under his eyes without moving felt worse than dancing for him. My sister's hospital bill was due in nine days and my mother's medication came out of whatever I made this week, and none of that belonged in this room with me.

The slow, heavy beat dropped, and my body answered before my mind could fight it.

I held his eyes as I hooked my thumbs under the straps of my gown, rolling my shoulders in a slow rhythm while my hips followed the beat and that made the fabric slide down my skin like it was melting off me. The gown pooled at my feet, leaving me in nothing but sheer black lingerie.

His jaw flexed.

A muscle ticked beneath the sharp line of it before disappearing again.

My tits swayed heavily with every beat as I bit my lower lip seductively, palming one full breast right in his face. My eyes locked on his the whole time, daring him to break.

The choreography carried me forward. I stepped between his legs, rested my hands lightly on his shoulders for balance, and lowered myself onto his thighs as though I’d done it a hundred times before.

He remained perfectly still. The scent of expensive cedar, whiskey, and leather drifted toward me. His breathing never changed.

Mine almost did

I threw my head back as the chorus hit. My hips rolled deep and nasty with the beat, grinding and riding him.

The room disappeared. There was only the music… and a man who refused to look anywhere but my eyes.

I stood up on shaky legs as the beat slowed again, turned my back to him, and bent deep at the waist in a perfect arch, my legs straight, ass high and spread, back dipped low. I twerked to the rhythm, cheeks clapping,my hips popped and rolled with every thump of the bass.

I kept waiting for his hand to land on my waist.

It never did.

The longer he kept his distance, the more exposed I felt.

Then I spun to face him again. His stare felt heavier now. It settled over my skin like a hand that never actually touched me. I dropped to my knees and crawled forward on all fours, my ass swaying seductively with the music, until I was between his spread thighs.

His thumb dragged once across his lower lip slowly. Like he was trying to stop himself from saying something.

Or touching me.

I took his middle finger, brought it to my mouth, and slid my wet tongue out, licking slowly and obscenely up the length like it was his cock, swirling around the tip, sucking it deeper while I rolled my head back. My hair cascaded down my back as I moaned around his finger, hips still subtly grinding the air to the fading beat.

Every other man stared at my body as I moved. He kept looking at my eyes.

I couldn't remember the last time he'd blinked.

When the song ended I stood there because I didn't know what came next, since usually there was some kind of exchange after this and his hands hadn't moved toward his jacket yet.

"You count," he said.

My whole body went warm with something close to shame. "What?"

"Your lips. You count the whole time instead of feeling the music."

"That's how you stay on beat."

"That's how you get through something you don't want to be doing." He stood then, unfolding to a height that made the room feel even smaller, and pulled a stack of bills from inside his jacket, setting it on the table without looking at it once. "Am I wrong?"

I didn't answer him. I picked up the money after the door shut behind him and my hands shook so badly I dropped half of it on the floor and had to gather it back up bill by bill, my throat tight with something I didn't have a name for yet.

I never learned who he was. For two days I told myself it didn't matter, that men who tipped like that walked into places like the club and disappeared just as fast, and I almost believed it every time I caught myself thinking about the way he'd said you count instead of touching me like most men would.

Irritation rose in my throat like bile.

Stop it Violet!

My mother knocked on my bedroom door the night before the dinner, holding a dress across both arms.

"Wear this tomorrow," she said. "We're having dinner at Marcus's house. His son will be there too."

"Why does his son need to see me in a dress?"

I had no intention of pleasing anyone. I certainly didn’t care about making a good first impression.

"Because in a few months that family becomes our family, and I need you to be kind tomorrow. Please." Her hands tightened around the hanger and I recognized the look on her face, the same one she wore every time she had to ask me for something she already felt guilty about asking.

"I'll be kind," I told her, and took the dress, because she had spent four years working herself sick to keep the three of us afloat, and one dinner was a small thing to give back for that.

The Knight estate had a driveway longer than the street I grew up on. A staff member opened the front door before we even reached it, and my mother's hand found mine and squeezed once, hard, like she needed to steady herself as much as she needed to steady me.

Alpha Marcus Knight met us in the front hall himself, warmer than I expected from a man with that much power, his hand resting briefly on my mother's shoulder before he turned to look at me.

"Violet. I've heard wonderful things about you." His eyes crinkled when he smiled. "My son should be down shortly. He's been at the training grounds most of the day."

"Xavier keeps a strict schedule with his warriors," my mother said, already familiar enough with this house to explain its habits to me.

The name meant nothing to me. I sat down at the table across from an empty chair and folded the napkin in my lap over and over, and my mother kept glancing at me with a hope in her face I hadn't seen since before my sister got sick, and I told myself I could sit through one dinner for that look.

Footsteps came down the stairs, unhurried, and my stomach dropped before I understood why, my hands going still around the napkin.

"Sorry I'm late," a deep voice said from the doorway, and every muscle in my body locked at once.

I knew that voice. I had heard it three nights ago in a private room with the lights turned low, asking me if he was wrong about something I hadn't wanted to admit to.

I made myself look up anyway.

He stood in the doorway with one hand braced against the frame, and his eyes found mine and stopped there, and I watched something behind them shift, slow and certain, the same way it had shifted the moment he told me I counted instead of feeling the music.

"Xavier," his father said, "come meet Elena's daughter. Violet."

He didn't look away from me long enough to answer him.

"Violet," he repeated, the way he had repeated Angel three nights before, testing whether it fit me any better, and my mother reached for her water glass without noticing a single thing wrong. I sat there gripping the napkin under the table because it was the only part of me he couldn't see shaking.