Chapter 8

Cecilia's POV

For the clothes, I went with the most aggressively shapeless combination I owned: baggy black trousers with a drawstring waist, a white button-up shirt two sizes too big that I tucked in wrong on purpose and left with the collar slightly crooked, and the flattest shoes in my closet.

The whole look said: do not look at me, I am not interesting, I am practically a piece of furniture that has learned to carry a bottle tray.

I locked my apartment door, pulled my coat tight against the cold, and told myself it was going to be a quiet night.

The first two hours of my shift were almost peaceful, which in the Golden Chalice basically meant nothing caught fire. Normal. Manageable.

Then the energy in the room changed.

I noticed it first in the other girls, the way they straightened up and started gravitating toward the east corridor, bottle trays in hand, faces arranged into their most profitable expressions.

Someone near the bar said something I didn't catch, and then the word moved through the floor like a current.

"Highroller. VIP East Wing. Go now."

My mind flicked to every tip I'd scraped together tonight.

I thought about that ten-million-dollar target.

Then I grabbed a fresh bottle of Cristal champagne, squared my shoulders, and headed toward the noise.

The VIP lounge at the end of the east hall felt sealed off from the rest of the club, like stepping behind an invisible barrier.

Dark polished wood paneling covered the walls, soaked in soft, honey-amber lighting that muted all the harsh neon noise out on the main floor.

Every furnishing oozed understated, obscene wealth.

Two men stood guard outside the entrance instead of the standard single bouncer.

They held that cold, unblinking stillness you would never find with ordinary club security — these were enforcers, not just guys paid to toss out drunk patrons.

I almost didn't go in.

I should not have gone in.

I was already stepping through the door when I saw him.

Those green eyes.

I would have recognized them anywhere, even across a dim room full of cigarette smoke and expensive cologne.

The man from the meatpacking district.

The one who had watched me kneel in the snow and had given me ten minutes and a running start like it was a game he already knew the ending to.

My first thought was: he found me.

My heart was doing something loud and unpleasant behind my ribs, and I had to remind myself, very firmly, that I was wearing a face he had never seen and a body shape he had no reason to remember, and that I was, for all practical purposes, a completely different and entirely unremarkable person.

I made myself look at the rest of the room.

That was when I clocked the man sitting next to him, and something in my chest loosened by about half a degree.

Luca Falcone. Il Principe, the girls on the floor called him, always with warmth.

He came through the Golden Chalice regularly enough that his face was easy to place — all easy charm and amber eyes and the particular grin of someone who had never once had to wait for anything he wanted.

His sister's name had been floating around my life for months in a different and considerably less comfortable context, tied to my father's dinner calendar and the soft, persistent weight of arrangements I wasn't supposed to know about.

If Luca were here, this was business.

That meant the green-eyed man across from him was probably not here because of me.

Probably.

My feet stopped moving.

Every single rational instinct I had said: turn around. Put the bottle down. Walk back the way you came and find Danny and tell him you are going home sick.

I turned around.

I made it approximately one step before a voice called out behind me.

"Hey. Where are you going?" Luca said.

I turned back around with the expression of someone who had simply been adjusting her grip on the bottle, and found him watching me with open curiosity, his head tilted slightly to one side.

The green-eyed man had not looked up.

I walked back to the table and set the Cristal down with both hands, careful and steady.

"Sorry," I said, in the voice I used for customers who wanted something simple, "I thought I had the wrong room. Can I get you gentlemen anything?"

Luca looked at me for a moment, taking in the flat foundation and the heavy brows and the muddy shadow with an expression that landed somewhere between confused and genuinely concerned.

"No offense," he said, and the fact that he led with that told me exactly how much offense was coming, "but you look like you got into a fight with a makeup bag and lost pretty bad."

"Thank you for letting me know," I said.

He snorted.

"Seriously though, how does someone looking like that get hired at a place like this?" He said it the way people say things when they're genuinely curious rather than trying to be cruel, which almost made it worse. "What's the story there?"

"Good personality," I said. "And I don't spill things."

That surprised a laugh out of him. He pointed at me. "Okay. I respect that. What's your name?"

"Jinx," I said.

He blinked. "Like, bad-luck Jinx?"

"The one and only." I smiled the smile I reserved for customers who asked me questions I didn't want to answer — wide, slightly vacant, professionally harmless. "But I'm told I'm great for tips, so maybe it evens out."

He laughed again, longer this time, and I watched something settle in his expression, a kind of ease, the way people relax around someone they've decided is not a threat.

"Stay," he said, leaning back with the satisfied air of someone who had just made a decision he was pleased with. "We might need you tonight, Jinx."

It wasn't a question. The way he said it made that very clear.

At the sound of Luca's voice settling on a decision, the green-eyed man finally looked up.

His gaze moved across my face without stopping, without snagging on anything, and then he looked back down at whatever was in front of him.

I kept the smile exactly where it was.

Well, I thought. Jinx by name, jinx by nature.

Truly living up to the brand tonight.