I arrive for the Halloween party in my skimpy black kitty cat costume and a scowl on my face.

“You’re late,” says my best friend, Wendy, who is wearing an equally sexy candy striper nurse outfit.

I stomp up the driveway from the taxi cab that dropped me off. “Fuck, yeah, I’m late,” I say. “If you remind me of that again we’ll have a problem.”

“Calm down, Mary Anne,” she grumbles, falling into step with me.

“Where’s Holly?” I ask about my roommate, one of the main reasons we came to this particular shindig tonight.

“Already inside in her horny devil costume,” Wendy informs me. She grabs my arms and gazes down my body. “Hang on. Where’d you find those shoes?”

“Jimmy Choo,” I say. I roll my eyes and take a second to pull one of them off before she can wrestle me to the ground to get her hot little hands on it. Wendy likes shoes that much.

“These are fucking hot!” She takes it into her hands delicately like the thing is made of gold. Wendy runs her fingers up along the seven-inch black heels, then down across the cute combination of clear PVC and black suede straps. I swear if I leave her with it for a second longer, she’ll hump the damn thing right here on the steps of this Southern plantation house where this year’s Halloween “it” party is being held. “You hid these from me, didn’t you?” she asks, almost accusingly.

“Of course not. You don’t live on campus in the first place, but even so, I just bought them during my lunch break.” I stand there looking and feeling lopsided with my hand extended out, waiting for her to pass it over. While she’s slobbering over Jimmy’s creativity, three sophomores from the frat house beside my dorm roll up. I recognize their faces, but I don’t know their names because I avoid frat boys at all costs. They all climb out of a pickup truck, wearing various versions of demon costumes. I smile when they offload a shiny black coffin from the truck bed and lug it over to what I assume is the mansion’s side entrance for deliveries and such. Only on Halloween. This is going to be fun.

“Where did you get them?” Wendy asks urgently, breaking me out of my euphoria. “Don’t tell me it was at that boutique on Corporate and Jefferson Highway.”

“Nah. The one on Perkins.”

“What? I was just there this morning. Who served you?”

“How would I know? I wasn’t checking for her name tag, honey.”

“She probably didn’t like me,” she groans. “Jealous bitch.”

“Sorry missy, but I kinda needed these more than you today.” I wrench the shoe from her hand and slide my foot back into it as fast as I can. Wendy is starting to get way too attached. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been doing for the last five hours?”

“That shitty intern position?”

“It was a shitty intern position when I was doing grunt work and fetching coffee for the senior partners and associates.” My blood starts to boil just thinking about the place. “Now it’s the low-paying piece of shit slave labor job from hell. It’s bedlam. Today I sat on the phone for hours talking with two courier companies, the office building concierge and a smartphone company customer satisfaction rep, only to have to jump into a company car and drive across town to the mall, where I was told I’d wasted my time making the trip. You want to know why?”

She shakes her head. “You’re gonna tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

I glare at her. “Of course. You’re my best friend. Who else can I rant on and on to about my day?” I don’t wait for her to answer, because she has that playful, scheming glint in her eyes, and I know exactly whose name she wants to roll off her tongue right now. The worst part is that the name she’s about to utter is the same as the object of my present grief.

“Tell me why, then.”

“Levi Eldridge. Fine. There, I said it, and you already know how much his name alone gets under my skin. The bastard had the nerve to make me try and track down a two-thousand-dollar cell phone he ordered that never showed up. Two thousand bucks! For a phone! I won’t even make that much working in this internship for the entire school year. I’m supposed to be learning about large-scale logistics and flexing my operations research muscles, Wendy. We’re talking about Eldridge Worldwide Logistics, the multinational supply chain and logistics management firm here. Instead, I’m liaising, he calls it, fucking liaising with delivery companies and suppliers about his phone order that happens to be for personal use. Front desk tells me they didn’t receive it. The shipper tells me the building front desk signed for it, and sends me a delivery notice signature of a person who doesn’t even exist in our building. Then I call the phone manufacturer, and they start telling me it was shipped to their store in the mall on the other side of town. Can you guess what I found out when I got there?”

She shrugs her shoulders and continues to stare at my shoes, apparently more interested in Jimmy’s handiwork than my mental well-being. “The phone wasn’t there?” she guesses.

“Exactly. And after all that, Levi’s father’s executive assistant has the nerve to call my cell to ask me why I’m not at my desk. I start to tell her why, but instead she just screams at me. She literally half-deafens me, and reminds me that my internship position does not include carrying out personal tasks for Levi Eldridge, even though he’s the boss’s son and has every intention of reminding me of that fact every chance he gets! I’m damned if I do, and singled out if I don’t.”

I huff out a breath, and Wendy rests a hand on my shoulder. “You should count yourself lucky, and you know exactly why. Just look at me. If I didn’t have tonight off, I’d be half-naked and stretched out on a nightclub counter with nasty ass men picking California rolls and sashimi off my body.”

Wendy has always been good at helping me keep things in perspective. Case in point. I give her a big hug, reaching one of my kitty cat paws up to my head to keep the black and pink cat ears headband in place. “I must sound like an ungrateful bitch right now,” I tell her, smoothing her long, honey blonde hair from her nurse’s hat all the way down her back. “Sorry, hun.”

“It’s all right. I forgive you, particularly since you and I are about to be accomplices to what Holly is about to do.”

I nod. We came to this party to be very bad girls in so many ways. “You have everything?”

“Yes.” She pats the oversize purse she’s carrying. “Holly has the rest.”

“Awesome. Let’s get our sexy little asses inside, accomplish our mission, and after that, we can turn some college jocks’ heads and hope not to spend the rest of Halloween in county lockup.”

“Let’s do this!” she agrees, giving me a mock salute.

I look up at the brightly painted red double doors that I can only describe as fitting for Halloween. It screams Gothic church, or something out of a fifties vampire flick. The thing has black rivets, carved panels, wrought iron accents, and even a large carved pentagram above the soaring archway. And those aren’t even decorations. This front entrance seems ominous. We shouldn't have even dreamed of doing what we have planned here, but I made a promise, and I’m feeling wicked. I’m all in. I notice two seniors open a second floor window. I shake my head. These guys are hanging a freshman out the window by using bedsheets as an underarm sling. They throw a white sheet over him to make the kid look like a ghost, and start high-fiving each other. They see me looking up and wave. One of the idiots says something to the effect that they ran out of decorating budget.

The kid under the sheet shouts out, “I volunteered for this!”

To be honest, his job is starting to look way better than the one I have as an intern, so I just loop my hand into Wendy’s arm and push open the front door. “Let’s find Holly, drink, dance, and get shitfaced,” I tell her, reaching into my clutch purse to turn off my phone. “How do I look? Is my tail on straight?”

Wendy looks me up and down. “Shake out those curls a little,” she tells me. “You’re a redhead. You want to look wild and windblown.”

“It’s not wild enough being this red?”

“Hell no.” She straightens my already sleek, strapless leather bustier with the deep V-neck, and ruffles up the back of my layered black tulle tutu. All I have on underneath this tutu are my thong panties, and the matching black frilly knickers that came with the bustier.

“You sure?”

“Meow, sweet cheeks,” she drawls out, and slaps my almost completely exposed ass.

“With the mood I’m in, it’s more like purr, hiss, snarl and scratch someone’s eyes out,” I admit.

“We’ll channel that anger and make it count.” Giving me a nod, she steps inside. “Happy Halloween, bitches! Look what the cute kitty cat dragged in!” she yells to the crowd of party people. Good thing the music drowned out most of Wendy’s voice. Levi Eldridge is supposed to be here tonight. My goal is to get our little task complete, drink my face off, lay low and avoid him for the night. I’m off the clock and on my own time. No Eldridge—father or son—is getting one second of leeway to fuck with my impending buzz.

Except Levi must not have gotten the memo.

He’s the first one to spot me as I walk in, and he’s heading my way.

Well, fuck.