Page 100 of Pretty Little Things

Thirdqualitydrink.

Without a stink of sadistic gun runners.

And finally, I pick up my phone and open Magdalena’s message.

Fuck me. I grab my computer and open it, going to the relevant account. And then I go back to the message.

Mr. Miller, this is Ms. Rossi’s assistant. I regret to inform you the job you hired her for cannot be completed. Please find the funds, including expenses you paid for, refunded in full. I wish you the best.

“Fuck.” I call the number but there’s no answer. It goes straight to voicemail.

There’s only one way I know that will get her to respond, to get over this hissy fit.

Hissy fit? Fuck, I know what it is, and it makes something in me sit wrong, like I’ve swallowed something heavy, jagged. And yeah, it sits wrong. Whatever it is tastes a lot like guilt.

I recalibrate, shoving that feeling away, and send her one text.

Like hell.

SEVENTEEN

MAGDALENA

“Why are you here?”

My pussy’s throbbing, growing wet, at the sight of the man in black. This time he’s not in a suit, and that’s all it takes for my mind to be filled with fantasies of me and Hendrick doing kinky, nasty, delicious things in other people’s places while robbing them, as he likes to put it, blind.

I know why he’s here. It’s been a week now, and he finds time to stop by. A lot. These aren’t dates. They aren’t sex. They’re something I’m not really sure either of us know what to do with.

But I might shrivel up if he stopped.

“What would you say if I professed my everlasting love?” Hendrick asks, moving past me with a paper bag in his hands.

“And here I thought you’d done that.”

He laughs and goes to the kitchen, putting down the bag. I follow, watching him.

There’s whiskey, mezcal, crackers, and cheese. There’s also fresh fruit, Dutch carrots, and something in a tub that looks divine. He puts those in the fridge and makes me a mezcal cocktail and a whiskey neat for himself.

He fascinates me. Two days ago, he stopped in and fucked me hard against the wall. After, he just pressed me into it, holding me there, his mouth on my throat, my clothes in disarray, stroking my clit with his fingers back toward orgasm.

Hendrick told me he needed that, his day wasn’t done, and I wasn’t getting the jewels and then he left.

Today I read how in the past week there have been a whole bunch of violent acts. Murders, shake ups.

These things happen. I live in a city run by the Quinate themselves and every single person who went down were criminals, members of ugly little gangs. One was a human trafficker, and yesterday some slum landlord from Water’s Edge—the real slums of the city, down by the docks—where the hookers and skin trade of the lowest kind happen.

I met kids who didn’t go to school and worked with drugs and the fishermen, or on the docks. I met kids who made a buck by selling themselves. Not many of the latter, but one or two.

I never met one who did double duty. I want to put it down to it being just a joke. Harry says it is. I just hope that.

And Ray Rodgers? The now dead man?

That man took slumlord to higher levels. He fucked whatever women he could get his hands on. He turned out the pretty, young ones, letting them live for free in his apartments. He discounted the ugly or old ones by using them for sex parties, holes to be used and abused, and by free and discounts I mean he took the money they made and gave them enough for food and drugs.

I was too fast and mean to be caught, and too good at picking pockets to be desperate. And my mom? She was too long gone to the drugs and that life to notice what I did.

But she kept the lock and the ring. And when she gave them to me, I knew she’d given up.

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