I’m alone at the Den the next day, because we aren’t going to meet again until Sunday. I could have called the other men in the Thieves Club, but that would have meant admitting how much last night meant to me. How hard it was to leave her with a kind but reserved, That was lovely, darling. So when someone sits down at the armchair beside me, I’m startled.

Damon Scott looks out the window at the blur of cars and glint of sunlight. He does not ask permission before taking the seat, because he owns the place. Though I’m not sure he asks permission for anything, regardless. Except perhaps to his pretty lady friend.

We sit in silence in the way that only men can do. A woman would have asked me twenty question by now. And normally I could field them with charm and seduction. Right now I’m only fit to brood.

“Beatrix Cartwright,” he says. “You didn’t know?”

“That she was rich, yes. Not about her family.”

“More than rich. She has one of the largest portfolios in the country. I knew she lived in Tanglewood but I never met her before last night.”

“She doesn’t get out much,” I say, my voice bland because I don’t wish to share the details of her personal struggle with this man, even if the information might be worth something to him.

“Because of her guardian? That’s what I always assumed.”

My curiosity is piqued despite myself. Her guardian. The missing link between when she lived in a mansion in California and when she was planted in a penthouse in Tanglewood. The person who must have raised her after her parents were killed.

Someone who must know the owner of L’Etoile.

“Who is she?” I ask, but it’s impossible not to appear interested. Not when I’ve been searching for this for so long. I’m leaning forward in my chair, any pretense of being casual long gone. There is a burn in my body, like acid. It fills every inch of my skin, singeing me from the inside out. The fire is revenge.

Damon doesn’t look surprised, as if he knew I would want to know. Perhaps he did know. He’s that kind of man. Dangerous to someone who would cross him. “Her parents were both isolated. Both only children. There was no extended family to take her in.”

“Her name.” I’m gritting my teeth against demanding more, now, faster.

“It’s a man, actually. I’ve met him a few times.”

A man. Why does that make me uncomfortable?

Perhaps because he has her locked up in a damned tower, so afraid of men she had to pay one to take her virginity. Or perhaps because he let her hide herself from the time she was a child instead of helping her recover from her parents’ death.

“Is he a member here?”

“Yes, although he does not come frequently. I could introduce you.”

That would be… exceptional, considering I would no longer need to use Bea for that purpose. Would she find out? That depends on how much this guardian, this man, has done. “What would it cost me?”

Damon only smiles. He does not refute the claim that he will charge me something, because we both know that this is a place of business. “I’m not certain it’s a price you’re willing to pay.”

“Ah, money. How crude.”

“It is how I’m accustomed to doing business. I’m sure you know that.”

“It’s not the cost I was referring to, however. What if you had to choose between Beatrix and finding this person? What if you had to choose between Beatrix and revenge?”

I sit up straight. It’s one thing for him to guess at my curiosity; another thing for him to know the source. Hearing her name makes a strange possessiveness rise in me. Possessiveness and pain, at the idea of losing her. “How the fuck do you know what I want with the owner of L’Etoile?”

“Do you know what I sell, Hugo?”

“People,” I say, because Damon is known to own strip clubs in the city. Many of them. High-end ones. And he held a virginity auction in the Den once.

“And how would I sell people without information? That’s the leverage I truly need to run my business. Which is how I know about the discreet inquiries you’ve made.”

“Not discreet enough.”

“I’m rather a special case, if you don’t mind me saying so. Most people won’t know.”

“Well, I hope you don’t plan on selling me to the highest bidder. I’m afraid my virginity is long lost.”

“Lost early, if I had to guess.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. Guess, that is.” I was fifteen when I lost my virginity, though it didn’t feel like a loss at the time. It felt like I had won something—a beautiful, glamorous woman. “If you have information to sell me, then sell it. But don’t think that you will leverage me, because I have enough people doing that.”

“The beautiful Melissande.”

Of course he would know her.

Perhaps I had been too young. At fifteen I had felt like a man. Had been built like one after working summers in the field. Mama had been gone two years before then. Breast cancer, caught far too late, and with far too little money to do anything about it. There had only been enough to buy Valium to ease her pain toward the end.

I had been young but I'd grown up early.

“Beautiful, indeed,” I say grimly.

“I want her out of business,” Damon says, his voice flat and final.

That’s his price, I realize. It really won’t be a sum of money I can pull from my investment accounts. It will be a person that I must sell in order to achieve my revenge. “Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Perhaps.”

“Would it make you feel better if I said there was a noble reason? That she is a danger to Tanglewood and the people inside it? That I care about this city more than money?”

“You are not a noble man.”

He smiles. “No matter what Penny thinks, you are right. And so the real reason is much more simple than that. She’s competition. And here is a way to get rid of her.”

“I see.” Melissande has done me no favors in this life, despite what she may think. I was too young to have sex with a woman in her late twenties, someone sophisticated and with an ulterior motive in bringing me to the states. She encouraged me to fall in love with her knowing I would be nothing but a pretty little commodity for her business.

But I also do not wish to harm her. There’s a connection between us. She’s the woman who took my virginity. And gave me a future in the process.

Damon’s mouth twists in bitter understanding. “It’s not so easy, is it?”

Hurting a person to further my own gains? Not easy.

Then again it was not easy for my mother to work eleven hours a day cleaning soiled sheets and toilets for rich gamblers in Tangier. It was not easy for her to trudge two blocks before dawn only to return after nightfall, her muscles trembling with exhaustion.

It was not easy when one of those gamblers followed her home.

“A name would not be enough,” I say.

Damon nods, as if he expected that. “The means to ruin him.”

I would only wish to ruin him if he’s the man who pushed in the door when I was seven years old. The man who shoved me into the closet while my mother shrieked, blocked me in with a chair. The man who raped my mother on the floor while I watched from the crack in the door.

Once I meet the man, I’ll know if he is the one. I would recognize him anywhere.

From the look on Damon’s face, he knows what my answer will be. Which proves my deal with the devil is inevitable. I will trade anything for revenge.

Even Beatrix Cartwright.