Sadie
“We’re sorry to see you go, Sadie,” one of the managers said, giving me an insincere smile. I knew I was getting out of my banking job just in time; while my soon-to-be former coworkers loved me enough to pay me all the bonus cuts they owed, whispers about what I was doing had started to escape the people who helped fuel my arrangement with Micah, and before too long it would reach the wrong ears.
I had decided to plunge fully into the business with Micah after working with him another two months; it had been long enough to get the bonuses I’d been promised, which would be enough money to tide me over until I started really earning from Micah and the girls. The escort end of the business was booming—and I’d started making my own contacts among businessmen, taking referrals from the guys Nate and the others set up with for their own purposes.
Micah had been thrilled when I’d told him, the month before, that we needed to start recruiting more girls specifically for the escort business. We’d both managed to pick through the girls who’d come up through the streets and the call rooms to bring up to work with the businessmen, and as Micah’s and my reputation grew we needed more. Micah had put me in charge of it, taking “applications” through Rob and then having me conduct the interviews, do the training. There were a lot of women who wanted into that line of business, unsurprisingly.
I’d hired on five more girls, for a total of twelve, and almost every night at least one of them had someone to meet with. I schooled my girls on the right way to look, the right way to dress, and how to act around the big-money businessmen. Micah had technically been in control, along with Rob, at first—but now that I was getting ready to leave my banking job, I was taking more and more command of the group of escorts, and I kind of liked the idea of myself as a Madame, arranging dates, taking my cut.
I didn’t like to work in the drug end of things; that was just a little too dirty for me, a little too risky. If my girls got caught escorting, and it came back to me, I could probably get away with saying that I didn’t know they were doing “extras.” But if I got caught with drug involvement, I would be screwed.
I wandered around the little going-away party that the bank threw for me, smiling at my coworkers. They were still going to come to me for their clients’ needs, just like their clients would come to me for their clients’ needs, but I had gone beyond the need to work alongside them to get the deals. My girls were making enough to support me with my cut—I didn’t need any of the bonuses.
“Is it true you’re involved with Micah Rintley?” Nate looked at me with newfound respect; I’d never actually told him who my connection was, or how I’d gotten into the business in the first place, but I couldn’t fault him for figuring it out—at least part of it.
“Friend of a friend situation,” I told him. “Someone set us up.” I grinned at Nate, enjoying the look in his eyes as he stared at me. I’d taken to dressing a little more daringly at work, especially after I put in my notice.
“You are far more dangerous than I ever gave you credit for,” Nate told me, shaking his head. “Going to miss you around here—you kept things interesting.”
“If you want to grab lunch sometime, you have my number,” I told him.
I left the party as early as I could, and headed to my apartment. Micah and I had a standing meeting to talk about business—and then fuck each other’s brains out—every night at nine; I would have just enough time to get a shower, change clothes, and get over to Vagabond. I grinned to myself, feeling tingly all over the way I always did before meeting with Micah.
I thought about the way that my life had changed so drastically since meeting the mob boss. In a way, I thought I should probably be more grateful to my brother; if he hadn’t made the stupid-ass decision to get involved in drug running, and hadn’t gotten robbed by Manny’s friends, then I wouldn’t have found what had sort of become my calling in life. I had focused so hard on being upright, on doing the right things and making the right moves and being socially acceptable; getting involved with Micah—both in the business and romantically—had been completely freeing.
My phone buzzed in my pocket when I walked into my apartment. Got a special surprise for you tonight. I grinned to myself. After the night when I’d shot Manny, Micah had gotten serious about me, almost right away; I’d gone back to his place for the first time, and we’d spent the rest of the night having sex—alternating between rough and sensual, with Micah giving me everything I could possibly want or need. Ever since then he’d treated me as a real girlfriend, not just as someone he loved to fuck, and it was clear—to everyone in his organization—that I was almost as much to be respected as Micah himself.
He’d promoted Rob to his second-in-command, letting the guy take over part of the drug running business to supplement the situation with the girls. Late one night, after we’d gone for it for hours, Micah had said that he felt like he’d been wrong to keep the area of business separate—that keeping it distinct from the straight drugs and the prostitution both had been part of what made it possible for Manny to steal from him.
Brody had taken over Manny’s old position, watching over the girls and coordinating things. He’d brought his brother in—the only other person Micah would trust as much—and Mark watched the door of Micah’s office at Vagabond as well as his brother had.
I texted back to Micah to tell him that I was looking forward to the surprise he had for me, and plugged my phone in to charge while I stripped off my clothes for a shower. He knew about the fact that it was my last day at the bank, and I had rather thought that I’d get some kind of recognition from him on that score. I turned on the water in the shower and ducked out of the way to let it warm up a bit. I still got occasional chills when I remembered that I’d shot Manny, that I’d killed him. I never knew what Micah had done with the guy’s hands, and I didn’t want to know. But gradually I had come to accept that I’d done what was necessary. Manny would have killed Micah, or at the very least done his level best to kill him.
I showered as quickly as I could, resisting the temptation to touch myself while I was in there; just thinking about being with Micah again was enough to get the heat flowing through my body, enough to make me wish I was with him already. I didn’t bother washing my hair, since it would take too long to dry it, but I checked over my legs and my pussy to make sure I was completely smooth.
My parents didn’t know anything about what I was doing with my life—Chris was under threat not to tell them anything, as part of the conditions of his new job working for Micah. He handled money, but he didn’t have any kind of status in the organization; he’d already proved he wasn’t responsible enough to deal with that kind of work. So he was at the bar, handling the money the girls made, handing it off to Rob or Brody. It was the best I’d been able to do for him, since his name was pretty much mud in the town, at least as far as jobs that might come to him that would have to do with the crime syndicate. Micah had given him the job as a favor to me, since Chris obviously needed something to keep himself afloat, and legitimate work wasn’t going to cut it.
I was making almost twice as much working alongside Micah as I made at the bank, and I was more than certain that my earnings would increase. Micah had made it clear that he was going to treat me as his partner in every respect. I didn’t have much of an interest in the drug business, but we were taking the escort end of things higher and higher, and we were going to be straight-up partners in that. I’d managed—between the last time I’d seen Micah and our upcoming meeting that night—to secure a few more new clients, based on referrals, and I had just finished training up some girls to take over the work.
I did my makeup quickly, thinking about how strangely my life had turned out. Micah had turned me on from the very start, and I couldn’t deny that fact. That we’d somehow managed to turn out into good business partners as well as something more than just two people having sex was icing on the cake. Who would have ever thought that the man of my dreams was a mob boss who pretty regularly kills people? I knew I was going to have to square with that one day—it was morally and ethically wrong—but for the time being, I kept out of that part of Micah’s decisions, and we were together in everything else.
I got to Vagabond and parked in the employee lot behind the club; they’d long since gotten used to me coming in to see Micah. I did the coded knock on the back door and it opened in a minute, one of Micah’s guys on the other side. “Boss is looking for you,” Billy said, giving me a quick smile.
“Of course he is,” I told him, breezing past and heading for the stairs to his office. My heart was beating faster as I moved closer to the door where Mark stood, guarding over the access to Micah. “How’s it going?”
“He’s in a good mood tonight,” Mark said, grinning at me. He knocked on the door and opened it a crack—even though everyone knew me, and everyone knew what I was to Micah, it was still the protocol—and called in, “Sadie’s here.”
“Let her in,” Micah said. Mark opened the door and I walked past him. I saw Micah seated at his desk, and my heart skipped a beat in my chest. Even though we’d been dating for months—really dating, starting from the time that we’d put Manny and his friends out of business—I still got tingly and giddy whenever I was around him.
“So,” I said, sitting down across the desk from the man who’d become my partner in almost every sense of the word. “Do you want to talk business first, or was the surprise meant to come first and then money chat?”
“Surprise first, since I can’t wait to see your reaction,” Micah told me. He reached into his desk and took out an envelope, holding it out where I could reach it. I took it from his hand and opened it, wondering what it could possibly be.
Inside the envelope, there were two tickets to Barbados, and a print-out of a resort reservation. “I’ve got some business taking me to the islands,” Micah explained. “Some work visa crap I need to be there in person to take care of. But since that’s only going to take one day, I figured why waste the flight?” One of the tickets had my name on it.
“You’re taking me to Barbados?” Micah nodded, grinning broadly.
“I want you to get a full wardrobe, too—you can bring exactly two of your prim and proper business outfits, but the rest of the time you’re going to be my own personal little slut.” I trembled at the idea; but deep down I loved it.
“I hope you haven’t booked any activities,” I said, feeling the heat deep down between my hips intensify. “Because I don’t think we’re going to want to spend much time outside of the room.” Micah laughed and sat back from his desk, giving me a look I knew all too well.
“Why don’t you come here and show me how grateful you are?”
I got to my feet quickly to do just that.
THE END