Page 1 of The Cost of Corruption

Chapter One

CHASTITY

“Oh yeah! Take it off, baby! Let me see that body.”

The stripper’s white button-down shirt flew across the room. Arcing high, it suspended in the air at its zenith like a dove with outstretched wings for just a moment before gravity took hold and pulled it back down…right into my lap.

The material, weighed down by a layer of sweat, landed against my tightly pressed thighs with an audiblethwap,causing the room to explode into a round of excited laughter and cheers.

I pinched the fabric and pulled it off my black wool skirt before it could leave a stain. Then, after gently folding it in half, I placed it on the empty spot next to me on the couch.

Apparently, that was the wrong move. The whoops quickly faded, turning to groans instead.

“Oh my God, Chastity. Loosen up. This is a party. My party!” my cousin Alessia shouted over the pounding music. The pink satinBride To Besash draped across her chest flapped as shebounced her rear against the half-naked dancer behind her. “Somebody get that girl another glass of champagne!”

“I’m fine,” I protested, even as another one of my cousins pressed an overflowing flute of bubbles into my hand. “I don’t need another drink.”

“Yeah, you do.” Yet another cousin insisted with a tipsy giggle. “You’re bringing the whole room down.”

“Sophia!” Someone gasped, but since the space was so crowded, I couldn’t tell who. All I knew was they had to be a relative. With a dozen of us Costa girls and three male strippers stuffed into this private room, it was amazing that there was enough air for us to breathe. “You can’t talk like that to a nun.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s a mortal sin,” another voice agreed.

“It’s not,” I assured everyone, softly shaking my head. It wasn’t even a minor one. And not just because, despite the simple black pinafore and white veil covering my head, I was only a novice, not an actual nun.

Not yet, at least.

I was still a few weeks away from taking my final vows. “You can still talk to me the same way you always have.”

“Great!” Alessia declared, still grinding her backside against the groin of the muscular stranger behind her. “Then drink up, bitch! Because this party is just getting started!”

Another round of deafening, hedonistic cheers filled the room.

Yeah, that was what I was afraid of.

Even before I stepped out of the house with the gaggle of my cousins, I knew it was a terrible idea. And when I spotted the hot pink party bus waiting to whisk us all off to a night of drunken debauchery, an uneasy feeling took root in my belly. I’d tensed up so tight that my ears started to ring.

I didn’t want to go, but there were just some obligations a person couldn’t get out of, no matter how ill-advised they mightbe…and attending my cousin’s bachelorette party was one of them.

Honestly, I’d been amazed that my father had allowed me out the door with only the female side of my family in the first place…and not just because he was a notoriously protective papa when it came to his only daughter. But also because, just like me, my father knew just how wild the Costa cousins could get when they went out together. Girls or boys—it didn’t matter.

Where there was a group of Costas, there was trouble.

Everyone in New York knew that.

But apparently, even my hard-as-nails father wasn’t above being sweet-talked by his favorite niece. Especially not a few days before her wedding. All it took was a couple of innocent bats of her eyelashes and a sugary voiced, “Please, Uncle Michael. I need all my cousins at my bachelorette party—even Chastity. It won’t be the same without her. We don’t do anything crazy. I promise,” and my father had caved.

I doubt he believed her claims of having a mellow night planned any more than I did. Alessia and crazy went together like communion wafers and sacramental wine. You couldn’t have one without the other.

No, I figured it was far more likely that now that I was back in his house for the first time in over a decade, he finally believed that his grand plan for my life had come to fruition.

I was finally the woman he’d vowed I’d be—pure, virginal, and devout. Untouched by man, uncorrupted by the world. In his eyes, my simple pinafore habit and veil were like shining armor against a sinful world.

And as the boss of the Costa crime family, my father was a leading expert on sin. You’d have to look long and hard to find a law he and my brothers hadn’t broken somewhere along their rise to power.

All that blood on his hands was why, on the day I was born, my father made a solemn oath to God. He would give his only daughter to the church. I would be his repentance. I would remain as pure as he was corrupt.

Hence my name—Chastity.

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