The restaurant had a name she forgot the moment she walked in.
Richard was already at the table in the private room, scrolling through his phone, his thumb moving with the quick, efficient strokes of a man closing deals.
He didn’t look up when she entered.
But someone else did.
The man sitting across from Richard was small.
Not short, small, as though life had shrunk him in stages.
His suit was expensive but slightly too large, hanging off his shoulders like borrowed skin.
His hair was thin, combed over a pink scalp, and when he smiled, his teeth were very white and very even.
“Richard,” he said, standing.
“And this must be Aria.”
He said her name like he’d practiced it.
Like he’d already said it a hundred times.
“Mr.
Kowalski,” Richard said, finally looking up.
His eyes swept over Aria’s dress, her hair, her face.
He didn’t comment on the fit.
He simply gestured to the chair beside Kowalski…
not beside him, beside the stranger.
“Sit.”
Aria sat.
The chair was too close to Kowalski’s.
Their elbows brushed as he settled back into his seat.
He smelled like cologne and something underneath, something sour and eager.
“I took the liberty of ordering wine,” Kowalski said, his eyes on her chest where the dress gaped.
“A ’96 Margaux.
I understand you prefer red, Aria.”
She didn’t.
She preferred water, or the cheap coffee from the bodega near her apartment.
But she didn’t say that.
She simply looked at him and said, “We’ve never met.
How would you know what I prefer?”
The smile on Kowalski’s face didn’t waver.
But something flickered behind his eyes…..
surprise, perhaps, that she had spoken at all.
“Richard has told me so much about you,” he said, reaching for the decanter.
His hands shook slightly as he poured from excitement.
“Your design work.
Your…
situation.
He said you’ve been struggling to find your footing since you left the family business.
Independent ventures can be so…
precarious.”
Aria’s glass paused halfway to the table.
She looked at Richard.
He was cutting his steak, his eyes on his plate, his jaw working with mechanical efficiency.
“My situation?” Aria repeated.
“Financially,” Kowalski said smoothly.
He slid the wine toward her.
It stopped directly in front of her, the red dark as ink in the candlelight.
“Richard mentioned your little office.
The one with the window facing the alley?
The landlord who takes cash?
Very…
bohemian.
But not secure.
Not for a young woman alone.”
Aria paused then set her glass down.
“You know where I work.”
“I know many things.” Kowalski’s smile widened and He leaned closer.
His knee pressed against hers under the table.
“I know you’re lonely, Aria.
I know you’re tired of struggling.
And I know you want someone to take care of you.”
Her stomach turned to ice.
She looked at Richard.
He was still eating, his knife scraping against the plate, his eyes fixed on some point between his food and Kowalski’s shoulder.
He wasn’t looking at her.
He hadn’t looked at her since she’d sat down.
And the security, the two men who usually stood near Richard at public events, the ones who wore black suits and earpieces, they weren’t here.
The private room had a single entrance, draped in heavy velvet that swallowed sound.
No guards.
No witnesses.
“Richard,” Aria said.
Her voice sounded far away.
“What is this?”
“Business,” Richard said, not looking up.
“Drink your wine, Aria.
You’re being rude.”
She looked at the wine.
The glass was heavy, the stem cold.
She hadn’t seen Kowalski pour it.
Hadn’t seen Richard pour it.
It had simply appeared in front of her, placed by a waiter who had vanished behind the curtain.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
Kowalski’s hand covered hers on the table.
His palm was damp, soft, and it pinned her fingers to the cloth with a strength that belied his small frame.
“One glass,” he murmured.
“To new partnerships.”
Aria pulled her hand free.
She stood.
The chair scraped too loud against the floor.
“I’m leaving.”
Richard’s head snapped up.
For the first time that night, he looked at her….
really looked at her and his expression was not angry.
It was impatient.
The look of a man whose schedule had been disrupted.
“Sit down,” he said.
“No.”
“Aria.” His voice dropped to the register he used in boardrooms.
“Sit down, or I will have you escorted to the car.
And you won’t like who does the escorting.”
She looked at the empty doorway then at Kowalski, who was watching her with an expression that made her skin crawl.
She sat.
The first glass of wine was pressed into her hand.
She drank it because her throat was dry, because Kowalski was watching, because Richard’s eyes held a warning she had learned not to ignore as a child.
The wine was rich, complex, sliding down her throat with a warmth that immediately spread through her chest.
Kowalski refilled her glass before she set it down.
“Tell me about your designs,” he said.
“Richard showed me your portfolio.
The sketches with the butterflies.
Very delicate.
Very…
feminine.”
Aria’s fingers tightened on the stem.
“Richard showed you my sketches?”
“They were on the shared drive,” Richard said, not looking up.
“Kowalski expressed interest.
I saw no harm.”
No harm.
No harm in showing a stranger her private work, her private habits, her private address.
No harm in sitting her beside a man who knew what bus she took and what she drew in the margins of her contracts.
By the second glass, the room had begun to tilt in earnest.
Not drunk.
She knew drunk.
This was different ….a slow, syrupy heaviness that started behind her eyes and sank down through her shoulders until her hands felt like they belonged to someone else.
When she tried to set the glass down, it missed the table edge.
Red wine spilled across the white cloth.
“Clumsy,” Richard said, but he wasn’t looking at her.
He was looking at Kowalski.
Kowalski was looking at her chest.
“I think I need air,” Aria said.
Her tongue felt thick.
Alien.
“Of course.” Kowalski stood, offering his arm.
His hand settled on her lower back, then lower, his fingers pressing into the bone above her spine.
“I’ll escort you.”
“No.” She pushed back from the table.
The chair scraped too loud.
“I’ll go alone.”
She made it two steps before her knees buckled.
Kowalski caught her.
His hand was damp even through the silk, his grip tightening as she tried to twist away.
“Easy, sweetheart.”
She drove her elbow back.
It connected with something soft and wet.
Kowalski grunted.
“You little….”
She ran.
Not well.
Not straight.
Her heels skidded on the marble floor and she caught herself on a server’s tray, sending glasses crashing in a symphony of crystal and shock.
Behind her, Richard shouted her name ..
Angrily.
The way he sounded when she broke something expensive.
The elevator.
She saw it at the end of the hall, brass doors gleaming.
She hit the button with her palm, then her fist.
Come on.
Come on.
The doors opened.
She fell inside.
Her fingers found the buttons, a blur of gold numbers.
She pressed the highest one.
The doors closed on Richard’s face, twisted into something she’d never seen before.
Something hungry.
The elevator rose.
She slid down the wall until her knees hit the carpet.
Her vision was narrowing, tunneling.
The drug was stronger now, pulling at her like tide, like hands under dark water.
She needed a door.
A lock.
A place to hide until her body metabolized whatever he’d given her.
The elevator chimed.
Presidential Suite.
She stumbled out into a hallway that looked nothing like the rest of the hotel.
Dark wood.
No windows.
Two men in black suits stood by a set of double doors, and for a sickening second Aria thought she’d run straight into more of her father’s security.
But they didn’t grab her.
They looked at her at the red dress, at her flushed face, at the wild mess of her hair and one of them stepped aside.
“Mr.
Barone is expecting you,” he said.
Aria froze.
The words didn’t make sense.
She had pressed a random button.
She had run from a nightmare and landed here by accident.
No one knew she was coming.
No one could have known.
But the guard hadn’t asked her name.
He hadn’t reached for a phone, hadn’t checked a list, hadn’t looked surprised to see a barefoot woman in a torn red dress stumbling out of an elevator at midnight.
He had simply stepped aside.
Mr.
Barone is expecting you.
The thought should have been a comfort.
It wasn’t.
It was a trap door opening beneath her feet.
She pushed through the doors and fell into the room beyond.
It was dark.
Not completely city light poured through floor-to-ceiling windows, turning everything blue and silver.
But dark enough that she couldn’t see clearly.
She made out shapes: a couch, low and leather.
A table with a glass on it, half-full, catching the light and on the arm of the couch, something that gleamed like wet ink.
A pair of gloves…Black leather perfectly arranged.
The smell hit her next.
Expensive soap and something masculine and clean that made her mouth water without her permission.
Water dripped onto hardwood.
Aria forced her head up.
Her vision swam, doubling the figure standing in the middle of the suite.
He was tall, naked above the waist skin pale and carved in the blue city light, muscles defined beneath the damp surface, water tracing paths down the ridges of his chest, his abdomen, disappearing into the dark hair below his navel.
Below that, a white towel hung loose around his hips, damp and barely clinging, low enough that she could see the sharp cut of muscle where it ended.
His hair was dark and wet, pushed back from his forehead.
He was holding a glass in one hand.
The other hung at his side, bare, pale, dripping water onto the floor.
He looked at her at the red dress bunched around her thighs, at her hair tangled across her face, at her hands trembling against the leather couch and he didn’t look surprised.
He looked like he had been waiting.
The glass stopped halfway to his lips.
Water dripped from his hair onto the hardwood.
Once.
Twice.
“You’re a Monroe,” he said.
His voice was deep
Aria tried to answer.
Her tongue felt too thick for her mouth.
The room tilted again, and she gripped the couch harder, digging her nails into the leather.
“I …” she started, but the word dissolved into nothing.
The darkness rushed up to meet her.
But before it swallowed her whole, she saw his face the storm-colored eyes, the jaw tightening with something that looked like satisfaction, the bare hand that had already reached for her before she hit the floor.
He knew exactly who she was.
And he had been waiting.