Page 58 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

Orton pushes a plate of baklava toward me. “You’re a target now.”

“It was always just a matter of time,” I say. “They won’t come at me personally—not at first.”

“No, they’ll throw something at you to figure out what he’s up against. Nobody knows what you’re made of. You should keep Storm around you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t be fucked up. Keep Storm with you. They’re gonna test you.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard.”

Orton drains his raki.

I press my fork into the triangle tip of the baklava, oozing with honey and spices. The baklava here is unmatched. Edie would’ve liked it. I should’ve made her stay for it.

As if hearing my thoughts, Orton taps his own fork on one of the glasses left at the table. “Want me to run it for prints?”

So he held back Edie’s glass. “Nah.”

“You don’t know who she is.”

I take another bite. “She’s nobody to me.”

Orton stays silent, eyeing the glass.

Chapter Twenty-Two

EDIE

I’m reading in bed the next morning when Odetta bursts in, fresh from her Etruscan seminar, with two large mochaccinos and some residence hall gossip, which she imparts in her fun, dramatic Odetta way.

She really is a good friend. This is what somebody who cares about me does, I think. Somebody who cares about me doesn’t push me around and treat me like a possession.

“So?” she says once we’ve exhausted the subject of how bonkers some people can be. “How was your dinner date?”

I marvel at the question. It was a level-nine DEFCON, stay-in-your-pajamas-for-a-week date.

I take a sip. “It was... intense.”

“Yeah? Where’d you guys go?”

I describe the restaurant and the extravagant foods, though I leave out the gory dinner chat.

“And afterward?” Odetta gives me a sly look.

“You think I’m this cheap? One coffee and I’ll tell all?” I wish I hadn’t asked it that way, though, because I’m cheaper than she knows. A man can buy my soul. “We ate dinner. I met a few of his friends, and then I came back home.”

“No... your place or mine?”

I shake my head.

“How very old-fashioned.”

“He is kind of old-fashioned,” I say. Suits and ties. Death and honor.

I sit back and stare at the ceiling. We put adhesive glow-in-the-dark stars all over it the week we moved in. It feels like years ago.

I sip my coffee. Boys shout outside the door. There’s a sound on the hall wall like a dodgeball ball hitting a flimsy wall.

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