Dark Bargain (Rosetti Club Miami #2)

Chapter 1

The sublet has a mattress, a lamp, and a suitcase I never unpacked. That’s it. That’s the whole list.

Six weeks here and the walls are still bare, the windowsill still has the coffee ring the previous tenant left, the silence still belongs to someone else.

I threw out a dead plant on day one because dead things shouldn't have to linger.

Other than that, the apartment is exactly as I found it — the emptiness of a space that knows you're not staying.

It's two in the morning and I'm on the mattress with my phone, scrolling.

This is what I do when I can't sleep, which is most nights.

The internet after midnight is its own country.

Different rules. Different people. You can find anything if you follow the links far enough, and I've gotten good at following links.

I don't remember how I find the ad. That's the truth. I'm several layers deep in a forum I've never visited before when it appears, and something makes me stop.

The post is short. Clinical.

Professional man seeks woman for paid arrangement involving fear response.

Respond with "I understand the terms."

I read it once.

Then I read it again.

The third time, I notice something happening in my chest. A flutter, small and sudden, like a bird startling in an empty room. A tightening that climbs from my sternum to my throat. My pulse ticks upward — I can feel it in my fingertips, against the screen.

It takes me a moment to identify what this is.

Excitement.

I haven't felt excitement in five years. The sensation is so foreign it's almost alarming. I lie very still on the mattress and let myself feel it, this small bright animal thing moving through my chest, because stopping it seems criminal.

He wants to scare me. On purpose. For money. And I assume, somehow, that this will happen in a controlled environment with rules. I assume.

My thumb hovers over the reply button.

The sensible thing would be to keep scrolling. To chalk this up to the weird logic of 2am internet and go back to watching cooking videos or reading about the migratory patterns of birds. The sensible thing is obviously not this.

I type four words: I understand the terms.

I hit send before I can stop myself. Then I put the phone face-down on the mattress and lie back and stare at the ceiling.

The flutter doesn't stop. It gets bigger.

He replies in six minutes.

I know because I'm watching the ceiling and counting. Six minutes, and then the phone buzzes against the mattress.

I pick it up.

The message is brief. An address in Miami.

A time, tomorrow evening, seven o'clock.

Instructions for a brief vetting conversation beforehand.

He doesn't ask how I'm doing. Doesn't say are you sure or tell me about yourself or any of the things people say when they're uncertain.

No warmth, no reassurance. Just logistics, clean and efficient.

The efficiency of it sends another frisson through me. Not warmth, the opposite of warmth. Cold water.

He's serious. This is real.

Miami. I've never been. I pull up flights on autopilot, and there's something almost funny about how quickly my hands move, no deliberation, no weighing of options.

My sublet is paid through the week but I was leaving anyway.

I'm always leaving anyway. There's a five-forty-five out of LaGuardia.

I book it before I've consciously decided to go, the confirmation email landing in my inbox like a dare I've already accepted.

Cheap flight. Budget motel — I find one near the address, cash by the week, a name that tells me exactly what kind of place it is. Sunset Dreams. I have enough. I always have enough for the next temporary thing.

I set the phone down.

And then, unbidden, I see her face.

My mother, near the end. Hollowed cheeks. Skin like paper held up to a light. Eyes already doing the long work of leaving while the rest of her was still technically there. The image surfaces the way they always do, sudden, complete, gone before I can do anything with it.

I blink. The ceiling comes back.

The flutter is still there. Smaller now, but there.

Five years of cities and temp jobs and sublets that look like this one, waiting for something to cut through. The numbness arrived gradually. By the time I understood what had happened, I was already deep inside it.

I'm going to Miami because a stranger offered to scare me, and that is, objectively, insane. And also like the first real thing I've wanted in longer than I can properly remember.

I set my alarm for four. I lie in the dark and feel the flutter until I fall asleep.

LaGuardia at dawn is beige and exhausted, like everyone in it.

I move through security in the half-conscious shuffle of early flights, belt in the bin, shoes off, laptop out. The coffee from the terminal kiosk is terrible. I drink it standing at the gate window, watching a plane back away from the jet bridge in the gray pre-dawn light.

My sketchbook is in my bag. I flipped through it before I left the sublet, a barista's hands, a fire escape in snow, a man on the subway who had the most interesting ears I'd ever seen.

Quick studies, pencil smudged at the edges.

When it's full I'll throw it away and start another.

I always do. The keeping isn't the point.

I find my gate. Sit down. Cross my legs.

And think about him.

I let myself imagine it properly, now that the ticket is bought and the decision is made and there's nothing left to do but fly toward it.

A room I've never seen. A voice in the dark, low and controlled, telling me what's about to happen and giving me no say in it.

The back of my neck is prickling. It's the way your body decides something is real before your mind catches up — the adrenaline arriving, your hands shaking, your breath going short, and suddenly you are here.

That's what I want. That. The being-here part.

I press my thighs together.

No one knows I'm here. No one knows his name or his address or what he wants from me. If something goes wrong, and something could go wrong, I am a woman alone flying to meet a stranger who wants to frighten her, there is no one to call. No one waiting for a check-in text.

The thought should stop me.

It doesn't. That's the point.

The gate agent announces boarding. I stand, hitch my bag onto my shoulder, and get in line.

On the plane I have a window seat. The East Coast slides by below, gray and winter-brown, and I barely see it.

My skin prickles. Goosebumps rise along my forearms, crawl up to my shoulders. I'm frightening myself with my own imagination at thirty thousand feet, and it's working, my pulse is up, my breath is slightly short, my body responding to a threat that doesn't exist yet.

I press my fingertips against my inner wrist. My heartbeat is right there, steady and quick.

My mother's wasn't.

Near the very end, she was cold all the time, shivering even under two blankets, three blankets, the extra one I brought from home that still smelled like our house.

I'm cold, she kept saying. I'm so cold. The room was seventy-two degrees.

I checked. I kept checking the thermostat like the number would eventually make sense.

I held her hand and she shivered and I sat there dry-eyed and still, and somewhere underneath the stillness I was already starting to lose feeling, not knowing it yet, not understanding what was happening, just registering a strange quiet spreading through somewhere central.

I look out the window. Florida is below us now, flat and green, threaded through with water, sun hitting the surface of a thousand small lakes. A different world from the gray I left this morning.

The plane begins its descent.

Miami is a wall of heat.

I step out of the terminal and it hits me full in the face, thick and wet, January heat that has no business being this warm. New York in the same month is gray slush and coat collars pulled up. This is palm trees and a sky so blue it looks painted over the real one.

I take a rideshare. Through the window, I clock neon signs for clubs I don't recognize, music from passing cars I feel in my chest before I hear it with my ears, a billboard in Spanish and English both.

A city that doesn't bother to pick one language.

It sprawls differently than northern cities, more horizontal, more open, willing to show you everything and still keep its secrets somehow.

The driver has a radio station on I don't recognize. We don't speak.

The motel is exactly what I expected. I pay cash for three nights and the clerk hands me a key card without looking up.

The room has one window overlooking the parking lot, a bed with a green coverlet, a bathroom with water pressure that's more of a suggestion.

I set my suitcase down by the door. Don't unpack. I never unpack.

I shower. The heat is good even if the pressure isn't, and I stand under it longer than necessary because I'm not ready to think yet and the water gives me an excuse not to.

When I get out, I look at myself in the mirror.

Really look, which I don't always do, have been avoiding doing for a while, because the woman in the mirror has been hard to recognize.

There she is, though. Brown hair still damp.

Gray-blue eyes. Jeans, a gray t-shirt, the jacket with the deep pockets.

Nothing that tries too hard. Nothing that says I don't care.

The kind of clothes that don't require a decision.

She looks, against all odds, like she might be alive.

I sit on the edge of the bed and check my phone.

Three hours.

Three hours until I need to leave, and suddenly three hours is an impossible amount of time to fill. I think about what he might do, and my body responds to each possibility like a hand to a flame. Heat low in my belly. Breath coming shorter. My heart rate climbing, one step at a time.

I put my hand on my chest.

Beating. Fast and real and there. My heart, which has been very quiet for five years, apparently has opinions about Miami.

I lie back on the bed and stare at the water-stained ceiling.

Brown ring in one corner, an old leak, the kind of mark that motel ceilings accumulate like tree rings. I count the minutes on my phone screen. They crawl. One, then two, then five, each one taking slightly longer than sixty seconds, I'd swear it.

I don't know his name. Don't know his face. Don't know what he's planned, what the room looks like, what his voice sounds like, whether he'll give me warning or whether the fear will just arrive. I have no control over any of what comes next.

The absence of control is itself a kind of fear. Already working on me, even now, even here, with hours still between me and the moment.

The ceiling stares back, patient and water-stained.

I'm lying in a budget motel room in Miami, watching the clock crawl toward the hour when everything might change, and my heart is beating so fast I can feel it in my palms.

I laugh.

Small and quiet, a sound for no one. Five years of nothing, and here I am, getting a head start on the fear like some kind of overachiever.

The laugh fades. The feeling doesn't.

I put my thumb over my pulse. Still there. Still climbing.

Tonight.

Tonight I'm going to walk into a room I've never seen and let something happen, and I'm going to feel it, all of it, whatever it is, with every nerve ending I haven't used in five years.

The minutes crawl. I don't want them to stop.

I can't wait to be afraid.