Amazing grace…
Nadia…
There was something different about the new girl.
The dancers at Empty Cage gentleman’s club surreptitiously eyed her with fairly concealed envy, or rather covetousness. They’d known without a flicker of doubt, the second she’d walked into the club, that she’d become club favorite.
She was too physically perfect—naturally so. And girls this naturally perfect weren’t usually found in exclusive gentleman’s clubs. They were found on runways and big screens. They were socialites and trophy wives. Millionaires’ arm candies, and billionaires’ spoilt mistresses.
If all a girl like her had to do was wink at a man and own him, it was beyond baffling why she was working at Empty Cage.
Her strides were so confident. Her shoulders perennially squared, her chin perpetually jutted up and out, as if working in such a place was an honor. Nothing short of peculiar.
The other girls whispered about her behind her back. Good things, incidentally—which was rare when it came to women who competed for attention in a four-walled work zone.
Have you seen those green eyes? She’s unbelievable! She looks high-born. What’s a girl as refined as her doing in a place like this? You think she’s a rich runaway? She doesn’t fit here. Ohmygod, I’d kill for those tits!
New Girl was like a diamond among broken shells. Customers gaped at her as she swayed by. Men and women alike.
At an estimated five feet seven inches, she had hair the color of midnight—jet black, and whenever the light bounced off the straight, long tresses from a certain angle, it glinted midnight blue. Covetously long, but always pulled up in a tight ponytail.
Unlike the other dancers, she wore little to no make-up, never trying to hide under thick layers of face concealer, fake lashes and eyeliner. No bright colored wigs or mysterious costumes.
She wore fearlessness like it was an expensive fur coat gifted from a powerful drug lord. And she moved as smooth and graceful as a legless snake slithering in a clear pond.
The weaponless killer was her body. Perfect C-cups, slim waistline ending where her hips began and shaped out into wide curves. Abs like no woman should have, and arms that needn’t be so toned. Runway models would slit throats for her legs, they were so long.
Whenever she was up on that stage, wrapped around the pole like a goddamn contortionist, she was magic. Pure magic.
She didn’t dance for money. She performed.
And during her sessions, the entire club would pause to watch. She was a spotlight all on her own, that girl. Shining brightly on herself. Glowing from the inside out.
A beautiful enigma.
But while she left the majority in a whirl of mesmerizing entrancement, a few of the honed, acute ones were left in suspicion.
The ones who took note that she didn’t drink alcohol or flirt with men. The ones who noticed her unnatural maturity for a girl estimated to be no older than twenty-three. The ones who took note that she didn’t work the floor like a stripper hunting the next dollar, but instead constantly eyed the club entrance. The ones who noted that her money purse was a little too big, and noticed the questionable bulge in her right boot. The ones who noticed she hadn’t the mannerisms of a normal new adult, but was always alert, poised, ready. But…for what?
The ones who knew, unequivocally, that she was no one innocent, no one to be trusted, no one to be underestimated.
New Girl was a beautiful disaster waiting to happen. Beautifully dangerous.
Dangerously beautiful.
One of those people was Nadia, a spy for the owner of Empty Cage, also covering as a stripper. Nadia wasn’t instructed to spy on the enigmatic new girl, but something had been so off about her since she arrived a week ago that Nadia’s natural instincts had her monitoring her every move.
And after a week of spying, Nadia was convinced New Girl was bad news.
Very bad news.
She was out for someone, and this stripper job was a cover.
Sitting on this conjecture, Nadia waited for her boss to show up on one of his guaranteed days: Monday, Wednesday or Friday. But when the entire week flew by and he didn’t show up, she figured he was out of state.
She couldn’t call him to ascertain. She wasn’t allowed to call. No spy was allowed to call. No matter how important. He called whenever he was ready.
So she waited.
Wednesday rolled around again, and as Nadia exited the changing room after primping for another night on the job, the shift in the air told her the boss was in for the night. The entire atmosphere felt different whenever that man was in the building: a little ominous, yet a little safer.
Nadia glanced over to the right where her boss’s two grim, hulky guards were blocking off the stairway leading up to the boss’s office.
Before heading over to the guards, she inconspicuously scanned the club for New Girl, her eyes finding her a minute later.
More like a customer than a dancer, she was sitting coolly unconcerned at a high-table, and one of the strippers was giving her a slow, sexy lap dance, while she stuck dollar bills into the stripper’s thong. But New Girl’s eyes weren’t on the stripper. No, they were watching the guards over at the stairway. Hard.
Abruptly, that gaze shifted across the crowd so fast and latched onto Nadia’s, that Nadia stiffened, suddenly intimidated.
Those green eyes, they held something. A threat.
New Girl knew Nadia had been watching her. Hell. She knew.
With her threatening eyes still on Nadia’s, New Girl palmed the stripper’s throat and roughly yanked her head back, then she brought her mouth to the side of the stripper’s neck and licked it, then sucked on it, her other hand drifting up to squeeze the stripper’s breast.
The unexpected effect that viscerally unfurled inside Nadia had her questioning her sexuality. She shouldn’t have been turned on by New Girl. But she was. She bewilderingly was.
Swallowing hard, Nadia resumed her jaunt to the stairway, her steps quicker.
The guards knew her role there so they nodded respectfully when she got up to them, but didn’t give her pass.
“I’ve got word for him,” she told them.
One of the guards, whom she knew as Ronnie, held up a hand in a ‘hang on’ signal then took out his cell and hit a number…
“Nadia’s got word, boss…yeah…no…’kay.”
Ronnie hung up and moved aside to grant her pass, and she went ahead and navigated her way to the boss’s office. The door was ajar but she knocked anyway.
“Come, Nadia.”
Nadia went in.
Sitting in his office chair behind his modern glass desk, flipping through a mess of photos scattered across a large manila envelope, the owner was a torturous sight to the female eyes. Too damn good-looking to be doing—whatever it was he did that was so bad he needed bodyguards. She never asked questions. And she knew she was better off not knowing the gore. She just did what was expected of her and collected her lump sum every fortnight.
Tall and lean, the man behind the desk wasn’t packing with muscles, but just enough to fit his body type. Dirty blond hair that didn’t have one particular style to it. Sometimes he trimmed it in a rocker’s style, sometimes he let it grow out in limp, loose waves like a surfer, and sometimes he trimmed it like an Ivy League gentleman. Whichever way he wore that lovely hair, it worked for him. Nadia was sure that, even on his worse day, he looked a lot better than every other man she’d ever come across in her entire life. He was just that undeniably, irresistibly mouth-watering.
With dark eyes and lips that didn’t smile, Nadia often wondered what it would be like to have sex with a man so sexily fierce. With her open body language, she’d made it obvious, loud and clear, that she desired him since the moment he hired her. But the man wasn’t interested. In her or anyone.
Cool and detached, never screwing around, never messing with the dancers.
“Hey, boss—”
“What do you have for me?” he asked without looking up from the photos in front of him.
That familiar tone told her to get on with it. “There’s a new stripper. Been working here for over a week now. She goes by the stage name ‘Blood’ and—”
“Blood? Really?” his smooth voice asked, accompanied by a light chuckle. “Does she make money with that name?”
Momentarily taken aback, it took Nadia a minute to respond, because she’d never heard this man do anything even remotely close to chuckling before. “Lots. Without even working for it. She’s…flawless.”
“Hmm…” he hummed, clasping his hands above the scattered photos on his desk and raising his head to give her his undivided attention. “Well, if she’s so ‘flawless’, why’re you reporting her to me?”
“Because I think—no, I know she’s dangerous.”
Slowly, his lips tipped up in a breath-stealing smile, as if ‘dangerous’ was his all-time favorite word. And this time Nadia wasn’t just taken aback, but dumbstruck that this man actually smiled. He must be in an extremely good mood tonight.
With all these uncharacteristic gestures—chuckling, smiling—she wondered if he would let her suck his dick if she offered. Sweet Lord, she’d give anything to get on her knees in front of him, suck him deep in the back of her throat, and swallow his cum like it’s a goddamn elixir of life.
“Now I’m beyond intrigued,” he said. “I’ve never met a flawless-dangerous person before. That’s an almost impossible combination.”
Now he was jeering her.
“No, I meant flawless physically. People just stare at her like she’s a new species or something. But she, as a person, is not just a normal girl. She’s here for a reason. And stripping is not it.”
“And how have you come to this conclusion?”
“I’ve been watching her since she came. When she gets dressed, she puts something like a dagger in her boot, a Ruger .38 in her purse, along with a vial of something I’ve no doubt is poison.”
Boss’s eyes drew tight at the corners, but still he shrugged. “Maybe she’s just trying to be careful. Stripping is a risky job.”
Nadia knew he didn’t believe that. He was trying to screw with her head. He did it all the time. It was a game to him.
“Yeah, except she isn’t working. Once she dances onstage for the night, she sits and watches the door. Waiting for something.”
Expressionless, he tapped his finger against the desk, just staring at her.
“She only works three nights a week, boss,” Nadia informed, trying to get it across to him that this girl needed to be detained and questioned, or at least monitored closely until she slipped up. “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The only three nights you might show up here.”
Taking a step further into the room, she said, “That girl is here on a mission, Mr. Niiveux. And I think her mission is you.”