That night, I slept like a baby.

Living alone was a choice I made rather happily.

The alternative was living a lie, and I didn’t do lies, nor theft—not since both things had exploded in my face in spectacular fashion. Even though I had a car, I took the subway to work every morning. And since everyone in my family for the last three generations had personal drivers, I was seen as the black sheep of the tribe. Luckily, the tribe had dwindled and was nearly nonexistent, so it’s not like I had anyone to impress.

Besides, I liked the smell of piss and the general misery of harsh city life. It reminded me that I was a lucky motherfucker, even on the days I felt like God—if he existed—had made a point of pissing all over my plans.

On my way to work, I thought about what had driven me to pull Judith into the power room on Friday and fuck her mouth into what could have been a mass power outage in one of the largest skyscrapers in New York. My jizz definitely shouldn’t have been anywhere near all those electrical switches.

I was definitely trying to piss all over my territory, but in the process, I’d also pissed over my no-repeats rule, as well as my professional relationship with her. Currently, I was trying to decide if I should go back to normal and act like she didn’t exist until she quit and the problem took care of itself, or figure the damage had already been done and make her a booty call for when I was too tired to go on the prowl.

Pros: the Manhattan singles scene was beginning to grate on my nerves. I was starting to see the same faces in the same clubs. Every hookup and Tinder profile blended together in my head. At least with Judith, I had sexual chemistry.

Cons: her pussy aside, she had an annoying, holier-than-thou attitude, not to mention, she was mouthy, and I really couldn’t fucking stand her.

When I got to the office building, I had to take a phone call. Lily. I normally sent her straight to voicemail, but this was the third time she’d called since I’d gotten off the subway, so I wanted to make sure Madelyn, her grandmother, was okay.

“Anyone dead?” These were my exact words when I took the call.

I didn’t go into the building, knowing things could get pretty crappy and fast when it came to Lily and me. I rarely raised my voice, but for her, I was always happy to make an exception.

“What?” Her default voice was whining. The kind that sounds like a fork scraping against a plate. “No. Grams is doing great. I was just wondering if—”

“No need to wonder. The answer is no.”

“Célian, wait! I—”

But I’d already hung up. I turned around to walk through the double glass doors and spotted Judith sitting on the top stair reading, soaking in the first rays of sun like a thirsty flower. She wore one of her crumpled, wannabe-grownup black suits and hugged her backpack.

Her Chucks were red today. Oh, boy.

She wiped her eyes quickly, but I wasn’t sure whether she was crying or about to. She was talking on the phone, and any other bastard would’ve turned around, walked away, and vowed to stop making her life more difficult.

But I was programmed differently, carved from stone like the very people who’d created me.

I rounded her tiny, blond figure, half-listening to her conversation.

“Okay, Milton. Just…please don’t tell him.”

Milton sounded very much male and very much like a douchebag. The latter wasn’t based solely on his affiliation with Judith, but also his name. Now I was fully invested in the conversation.

“I’m really not interested in hearing what you have to say.”

Pause.

“Please don’t make it any more difficult than it already is. Promise me you won’t tell him. That’s all I ask.”

Pause.

“Yeah, well, I have a job to go to. Bye.”

She stood up. I pretended I didn’t see her, pushing the door open and waltzing to the open elevator. She was a few feet behind me, so when I turned around, our eyes met. She hurried to catch my elevator—of course I didn’t push the hold button—and sneaked in at the last second. There were two more people inside. Two assholes who went to the second floor. HR.

“Hi,” she breathed, turning around to give me her back and ass. Not a bad deal.

I nodded solemnly.

Silence. Silence. Silence. She didn’t act shy or awkward. Something about this morning told me she had more pressing issues to deal with than sucking her boss’s dick, and I decided on a whim that I needed to know what was on her mind.

Naturally, talking to her was out of the question. She sassed way too much and always nagged me about my behavior. No. I fired a quick text message to one of my reporters, Dan, with her name and address while the elevator made its way to the sixth floor in record negative time.

Célian: Judith Humphry. Her file is with HR. I want to know everything there is to know about her, from her education to her favorite color. Who she fucks, who she lives with, who she talks to.

I fingered my chin, watching my message and firing off another one immediately.

Célian: And how many pairs of Chucks she has.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t any of my business. But Judith was shaping up to be such a trainwreck—stealing from her boss, then fucking him, then avoiding him, then sucking him off, then having public fights with people on the phone outside her work building—I wanted to make sure she was on the sanity spectrum.