Chapter One: The Rule

The first rule of Velvet Room was simple, never fall for a customer, and the second was even simpler, never let a customer think they own you. I had broken neither.

Music throbbed through the dressing room walls while I fixed the collar of my black shirt in the mirror, breathing slow and counting down to the floor, and around me the other performers laughed and argued over tips and checked their hair and pretended they weren’t nervous about who might be waiting tonight. I didn’t have to pretend. Two years had taught me how to smile without meaning it, how to hold a gaze just long enough, how to leave everything real in this room before I walked out that door.

“Zaire.” Ren filled the doorway, already dressed for the floor. “You have a VIP.”

“Again?”

“You say that like you don’t love VIPs.”

“I love their money.”

“Same thing,” he said, watching me grab my jacket. “Who’s mine?”

His smile dropped before he answered. “Dorian.”

I stopped moving. “Dorian Veyl?”

“How many billionaires named Dorian Veyl do you think we have?”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I was.”

My stomach clenched, because three months of Fridays had taught me exactly what that name meant, the same table and the same drink and never once asking for anyone but me, and I had told myself it meant nothing until it became the only thing I looked for the second I stepped onto the floor.

The club swallowed me whole, purple light sliding over glasses sweating on velvet tables and men who thought their money bought silence, and I crossed the room without looking for him and found him anyway. He sat alone, black suit, black shirt, no tie, whiskey untouched in his hand, and he wasn’t watching the stage, he was watching the door, watching me walk through it, and when our eyes locked his mouth curved into something that wasn’t a smile at all. It was worse.

I sat across from him before he could tell me to.

“You’re early,” I said.

“I’m always early.”

“Not always.”

“You’re keeping track?”

“Maybe.”

“Sit,” he said anyway, like he needed to hear himself give the order even though I already had.

“Same rules?”

“You remember them.”

“I remember everything.”

“Good.” He set the glass down hard enough that the ice cracked. “No touching unless you say yes, no questions about my life, and if you want me to stop, you say stop.”

“You’re careful for a man who spends this much.”

“I don’t pay for obedience, Zaire.”

“Then what do you pay for?”

“You.”

I laughed because the alternative was letting him see what that single word did to me. “I’m not for sale.”

“I know.”

“Then why do you keep coming back?”

Something crossed his face and vanished before I could name it. “I like watching you.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is tonight.”

The music slowed and darkened, and I stood before he could say another word that would sit in my chest for a week. “Then watch.”

On the stage I felt him the whole time, patient and unhurried, more dangerous than every greedy stare in the room combined, and when I came back down he was already standing with an envelope in his hand, black and unmarked except for one word written in ink I didn’t recognize.

“Leaving already?”

He set it on the table between us. “Tomorrow.”

“What is it?”

“A gift.”

“I don’t accept gifts.”

“You will this time,” he said, and walked past me close enough that I felt the heat off his skin before he kept walking toward the door.

“Dorian.”

He stopped with his back to me.

“Why me?”

The silence stretched long enough to hurt before he answered without turning around. “Because you still don’t know who you are.”

He was gone before I could ask what that meant.

I looked down at the envelope and saw my name written across it, not Zaire, not the name they knew me by on this floor, but the one I hadn’t spoken aloud in years. Zaire Laurent. He had never asked for my real name, and yet there it was in a stranger’s handwriting, waiting for me like he had known it all along.

My hands shook opening it, and a single photograph slid out into my palm, me years younger, standing beside a man I hadn’t seen since I was a child, a man I had buried in my mind a decade ago and never once let myself dig up.

On the back, four words in that same unfamiliar hand.

He never stopped looking.