Page 5 of Gilded Caresses

The Southern Alliance.

My family’s enemy.

The three men I’ve lusted after for two years. I hadn’t seen them this close in months and seeing them just feet from me is a temptation I don’t need. They’ve made me realize I might actually understand the allure of why my father did what he did. His dreams were right there in front of him day after day until one morning he woke up and said no more.

When I first walked through the doors of Chicago’s most elite adult club I had no idea Elyah, Lev, and Gregor would be there. I nearly chickened out and ran home when their collective auras of power hit me head-on.

Only the fear in Belle’s eyes of being left alone kept me rooted to my seat that first night.

Because they are men I can never touch, I went home that night and came three times before passing out. But between you and me, my body doesn’t care about mafia politics, territories, and old grudges. Nor what my battery-operated boyfriend can do. It wants them.

Seeing all three of them in their expensive suits and their tattooed hands wrapped around vodka glasses brings out a side of me I am struggling to recognize.

I palm my phone and a small computer case carrying my laptop.

Please don’t judge when I say this. Every night I sit in that audience with the smell of sex permeating the air around me and it makes me wish they would walk over to my table, steal me away to a room in The Gilded Key Society, and screw me until I no longer know my name.

I signed on to be Belle’s moral support, but I keep hoping a miracle will happen.

“Until this evening, Ms. Constantine.”

Damn. I got lost in my thoughts again.

I open my door and slip from the back of my cousin’s Mercedes and lean down a little to answer his driver. The man is in his late sixties, has gray hair, and owns one of the sincerest smiles I’ve seen on a man.

“Thank you, Raphe.” He gives a knowing smile and I make a mental note to pick him up the sweet cherry-flavored pipe tobacco I know he prefers.

Club members come and go at all hours, but the majority don’t show up until sundown; since it’s barely three in the afternoon it’s not unusual for no one else to be in the underground parking. I spent most of yesterday and last night pulling overtime on a contract so I took some personal time and decided to come in late. A perk of my new job.

True to form, the driver waits as I enter the elevator before pulling away. I punch the large number three on the wall panel and stand back as the doors swoosh closed. Seconds later I’m walking onto Genesis’ dark floor. Not because of aesthetics orits black carpet, but because this level is treated like a vault of silence.

What happens on the dark floor, stays on the dark floor.

When my cousin read the rules to my position I laughed too, but he was dead serious. Something he’s been a lot of lately.

Landlocked with two floors above and two below, the third level of Club Genesis is a country of its own. The price of entry is a Genesis membership, your fingerprint in blood in my ledger, and no less than five hundred thousand dollars in the undertaker’s escrow.

Unless you are a runner. That membership is blood in, blood out once you have given your loyalty to the Northern Alliance.

This floor is where deals are made, sealed, and enforced by my cousin’s crew. Bounties are issued and collected. And all overseen by me.

I step out of the elevator and immediately to my right the day receptionist greets me with a polite smile and tilt of her head.

In front of me, the open floor plan is sectioned off into three areas. Against the far wall is where the private rooms are. Behind those doors is where negotiations are handled by the men of Genesis. If you ever wondered where the bad guys with guns come to make deals with other bad guys with guns, well, now you have your answer. In the back rooms of Genesis’ dark floor.

Toward the middle of the spacious opening is my area—the parlor. Cute name for where hits and retrievals are taken out in the underworld of Chicago. It has raised half-walls that give me a level of privacy with clients, but not much. Toward the frontand near the receptionist is the lounge—a collection of sofas and low knee-level tables where Genesis’ runners come looking for a contract to fulfill. Or collect payment on one.

And right now, I have a handful of runners tracking my every move.

Creepy bastards.

I grew up here back when my cousin’s father ran the place with my father. They were thick back then. Before the shit hit the proverbial fan anyway.

Being here isn’t the issue. It’s doing his old job, being around the sons of the men he worked with…that is what has me questioning my very reason for breathing.

The air is cool and smells of an odd combination of gunpowder courtesy of the runners and the scent of roses coming from the large bouquet at the end of the counter.

I step up to the reception desk and the woman behind the counter hands me my ledger.

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