Page 35 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

“I’ll take it all, furnishings and everything,” I said.

“You don’t really want this stuff.” The selling agent picked up a framed picture of a covered bridge. There was another with a horse and another with a woman waving from the Eiffel Tower. “You don’t even know this person.”

“I want all of it,” I’d said. “Everything here.”

“Wouldn’t you want your own pictures? Imagine a vignette in the corner with treasured objects from your travels.” She walked over to a shelf with lots of books and showed me how they were just cardboard boxes with sides made to look like spines. “I could give you the name of an interior decorator who’d handle it all to your tastes. Home decor is a way to express what’s inside of you.”

“How can I explain this?” I’d given her a hard look. “With some people, it’s best that they don’t express themselves.”

At that, she gave me all of it.

I wasn’t bullshitting. Expressing myself, whatever that would look like, surely wouldn’t end well, but more than that, a home is a transaction, just like a relationship.

I go through my schedule, seeing that I can pull Edie in tonight. In the meantime, she has the day off.

What does a woman like that do on a day off? Does she shop? Read? Watch movies? Do spa treatments?

I try to imagine her in all of those scenarios, and then I remind myself it’s just about the fucking.

Until a dark thought comes to me—what if she’s not on vacation? What if she’s taking clients secretly on the side? What if it’s not up to her? She may operate through some kind of a handler or an agency.

Heat rushes up the back of my neck as I imagine another man ripping off her clothes. Another man putting his hands on her. Fucking her and getting all that scorn.

I told her I’d rip a guy’s balls off if she did that. Did she understand I meant it?

If I could look into her eyes while I asked her, I’d know if she’d been with anybody else. That defiant fire in her gaze would flicker differently; her contempt is untainted when she looks at me, and it wouldn’t burn so bright through a lie. She’s mine—those eyes, that mouth, every inch of her body and what it does when I touch it. Mine alone.

Before I can stop myself, I’m texting her a warning. I hit send and throw the phone back on the chair.

No one touches what’s mine.

Chapter Thirteen

EDIE

I have two important classes to study for on Sunday. Historiography of the Crusades, which explores how the history of the Crusades was written, and Comparative Proto-Indo-European Syntax.

Proto-Indo-European is the common ancestor of half the world’s languages. It was thought to have been spoken in the Bronze Age, but nobody really knows.

I’m studying for that one at a table with a few other students from that class, laboring over identifying the roots of the word “farcical,” when my phone vibrates. My Luka phone.

I don’t want to look, but I have to. My heart pounds as I grab the phone and enter the passcode.

He wants me to turn on geolocation.

I tell him no because what else can I do? He can’t know I misrepresented myself.

We go back and forth. He’s not a man to take no for an answer, but somehow, he settles for a shot of my lips, which I do as discreetly as possible.

Just when I’m catching back up with the discussion of the roots of farcical, he texts again:

Just to reiterate, if I find you have been with any other man, I will string that man up by his feet. The screams will be deafening, and the rivers will flow black with blood. The same goes for any other person who was involved in that transaction.

I suck in a breath.

Another message.

Except you, of course. You, I will punish in a different way.

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