Princess loved almost every part of her work, except while she was actually doing it. In the dark and discrete basement off Wall Street, which was her daddy’s nightclub, she greeted the guests by name. She waited tables and knew all of their tastes.
The clientele were mainly rich men in the financial sector, and sometimes their egos would get the better of them. That was how she put it to Ethan, her BFF, and she especially described it in those—or even milder—terms to her daddy.
The members, almost all of them men, treated Princess with a respect that she enjoyed, and while she had more than her share of compliments and admiring looks, the men understood that whatever else went on in the club, she was off-limits. There were always some who still had to test the theory.
However big the tips, the explosive testosterone of an overweight and over-intoxicated man in his fifties could be a challenge to deal with. The more so because Princess walked a diplomatic high-wire. If she didn’t, the club could run out of customers fast.
Daddy tried and tried to persuade her to go away to college, to learn other skills, meet different people, but she was determined to stay in Hotsteppa’s.
Princess had grown up among the explosive mix of bankers, jazz musicians, and the women who flocked to cluster around them. It was the life she was born into.
Her neat black blouse and skirt, the seamed stockings, and the black stilettos were her suit of power. Her battle dress. Her simple makeup, pale tan foundation with ruby red lips and nails, were her armor.
In Hotsteppa’s, Princess felt strong and in charge, even though Daddy was the law there. The outside world always seemed to her like a dull second best.
He told her she could learn and gain some experience of life, travel some, then come back if she wanted to. As far as Princess was concerned, there was more than enough education and experience to be had in the nightlife right here. The streets and neighborhoods of the financial district were all the travel that she craved, save for an occasional journey to Coney Island or up the Long Island Expressway.
To encourage her out, Daddy stopped paying her a while back, but since she lived rent-free upstairs and did well enough on tips not to mind, it was a pretty minor inconvenience.
When he told her there was no point waiting for a handsome prince to come and take her away, she said that he was her handsome prince and she didn’t want to be taken. If she had to have a handsome prince, she’d rather wait for one who would come and help out behind the bar.
Anyway, it wasn’t long before Daddy started to give her an allowance, and that happened to be about the same as she would have been earning.
Daddy worried about the male company that Princess was surrounded by. Since she was little, Daddy had told her not to trust the kind of men that visited Hotsteppa’s, or any of the men that he did business with, but she grew up accustomed to men looking at her and approaching her in the club.
Most of them thought of themselves as Wall Street bulls. That’s the term one of them used. He’d cornered her in a small booth. Her blouse was a little open and her lips were ready to part. The big, swaggering banker with dark eyes and smoky breath, dressed in an expensively tailored suit, said, “The whole country, the whole world, has to do what the Wall Street bull says.”
“Oh, yeah?” Princess was ready for a man to tell her what to do. To make her do it. She tested him, saying, “No man has the balls to make me do anything I don’t want to.” In that instant, he looked angry like a spoiled kid. Any authority that he might have had with her had evaporated between them, right there.
It wasn’t uncommon for a patron to proposition her or make a pass. They’d whisper low, whiskey and cigar breath in her ear and on her neck, suggesting something in a secluded corner or even away in a hotel room. Musicians and DJs, too, but less often. They were “club natives” and had better club manners, as Daddy said.
Princess was more club native than most and she had little difficulty fending off unwanted attention. Getting the more wanted kind of attention, finding the kind of a man she’d want to sneak off into the shadows with—that hadn’t really been happening so far.
But Hotsteppa’s was her world. It was where she grew up, and she loved it.
One electric night, Pierce Agostini’s thousand-dollar Italian heels clacked down the ironwork spiral stairway into the club and everything changed.
Princess was setting out drinks from a silver tray. The moment he stepped into the room, the tone in the club shifted. The suits in the alcove huddled and whispered about Agostini. The sharp intensity of their attention made Princess turn to see what kind of a man they could be talking about.
Tall, broad, and dark, he descended the stairs and entered like the owner of all he surveyed. An animal of muscle and restrained aggression, poured into a thousand-dollar suit.
He moved like a panther, a predator, slow and easy in the immaculately tailored suit, and he wore it like it was a t-shirt and jeans. His searing blue eyes scanned every nook and alcove like laser sights.
Rumor had it he grew up in a tough Sicilian neighborhood in Staten Island. It was said that he had brought the Mafia to Wall Street. The word was that he operated boiler rooms of unscrupulous traders, pumping worthless—or even non-existent—stocks to pensioners and workers reeling from the shock of recent redundancy checks.
Everyone knew who Pierce Agostini was. At the same time, nobody knew one sure thing about him. He had money was about all, but no one could say whether any of it was his own. Agostini had been accused of everything from running investment schemes that were thinly disguised confidence tricks to loan sharking with a gang of enforcers who wielded baseball bats.
The woman who clopped down into the club behind him was falling out of a wrinkled, silky dress in a pale blueish-gray. She had obviously made hasty wardrobe adjustments and very recently. Without the aid of a mirror, Princess guessed. The woman kept her face down, but Princess thought that she recognized her.
Two heavy-set black men with close-cropped hair and black shades followed her down the steps. They moved slowly and were almost identical in tailored black suits, like a gangster’s idea of formal menswear. Shiny, buttoned tight over their bulging frames, they showed extravagant French cuffs. They were easily a head taller than Agostini.
The crowd parted into two waves to let Agostini pass through. Women fluttered their eyelashes or pouted their lips. Men straightened to stand taller. Made their faces serious. Nobody even pretended to ignore him or to not notice.
Agostini’s eyes swept the room as he made straight for the bar. The woman was a long, willowy model type with sunken, hurt eyes. Princess was sure that she recognized her, but she couldn’t place her, maybe because she was distracted by the woman’s smeared makeup and the twisted and stained dress.
The two black men stopped by the stairs and clasped their huge hands in front of them. Rings set with massive stones bulged on their fingers.
Princess craned to watch Agostini lean across the bar and beckon her father. He had a long neck and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed when he swallowed. From the booth where Princess was standing, she saw the crease in Daddy’s forehead and the tremor in his hand as he turned the brass handle to show Pierce in through the black door and lead him into the little back office.
When they came out about ten minutes later, Daddy’s face was gray and he looked like he’d aged about a decade. As Pierce swept back through the crowd and back to the iron steps, the beams of his eyes swung to fix on Princess and he stopped.
Her pulse pounded. Her throat thickened and her breath caught. Slowly, he looked her up and down. The glasses rattled on the tray she was holding. Unexpected tingles trickled fast from her core, all through her body and limbs. Her mouth dried.
As his eyes traced her body, inch by inch, she buzzed inside and her knees shook. Her breath thickened and filled her chest.
The twinkle in his eye was predatory, like he would devour her. But more, there was a recognition. A look that said, I know you. And she felt, despite her trembling knees and the cavernous flutter in her stomach, that she knew him, too.
Then she saw that his eyes had shifted. His focus was on something behind her. Now she felt awkward, like someone had cut her string. Now she wasn’t sure he had really been looking at her at all.
Her chest was tight and her blood was hot. From behind her, she heard movement, and a little round man with little round glasses on the front of his bald, round head bustled past her to beam his nervous grin at the imperious Pierce Agostini by the foot of the stairs.
“Mr. Agostini,” he sputtered, pressing forward as he reached into his suit coat, “I’m Barney.” Agostini raised a dark eyebrow as he looked down at the card the man thrust at him. “Barney of Blair Barney. Here, please, take my card.”
Agostini snatched the card and gave Barney the briefest nod. When his eyes lifted back to Princess, her stomach fell through the floor. Then he was up the steps and gone.