Chapter 2
Chapter two
Riley
The bus station reeks of piss, but it’s mostly deserted.
I triple-check the hallway and lock the door before I lay the bills out on the stained counter of the family bathroom.
Ten thousand. Charity I didn’t ask for but can’t afford to refuse.
The state gave me a twelve-hundred-dollar check for “re-homing” when they kicked me out of the home.
My little rooming-house cubby-hole has already drained seven hundred of it.
I spent another hundred on my dress and heels, trying to appeal to men who would judge me by appearance only.
Thanks to Mikhail Kutuzov, that’s irreplaceable money down a drain.
I count the money again. Then I do the math.
First month plus security deposit for a shitbox studio in Dorchester: three grand minimum.
Chair rental if I hustle without my own shop.
In someone else’s place, I’ll spend at least two-fifty a week and hope to bring in five.
Not enough. I need to open my salon, that’s the goal, but commercial space, products, liability insurance, and state board fees are so expensive.
The ten thousand will disappear before I wash my first head.
Two months. Three if I skip meals and shower at the Y.
A start. Not a finish. I stuff the cash back into the envelope and stare at my reflection.
Red braids, dingy gray t-shirt, holes in the jeans, budget gym shoes already coming apart.
Who would even come to me looking like this?
But that’s defeat talking, and I’m not a quitter.
Mikhail said to be someone. He handed me a ladder with three rungs and told me to climb to heaven.
Fuck him. Fuck this. But mostly, fuck being hungry.
I take out my phone. Scroll to a name I swore I’d never use. Dante Briggs. The last group home. He was older, visiting his cousin who bunked on the boys' floor. Always had cash.
He’d said: You ever need real money, not foster-care nickels and dimes, call me.
I need real money. I know it’s a risk. I know exactly what he is. But I don’t have a better option.
Dante picks up on the second ring. He doesn’t immediately answer; he waits. I get it. A man in his position doesn’t speak to strangers without a damn good reason. “It’s Ril—”
“—Riley Miller. They said you aged out. You good, or you need help?”
“Help.” I grit out. “I got ten thousand cash. I need it flipped fast.”
He laughs, and my stomach turns. “You? You're trying to get your hands dirty?”
“I hear about your corners. You’re expanding into Roxbury. You need more money. I got it. Two weeks. Triple. Then I’m out.”
Silence. I can hear him thinking. Not about the money. About me. Pretty. Alone. No people. The perfect mark or the perfect set-up. We’re both taking a risk. “Come by,” he says. “Tuesday. The spot on Dudley. Don’t be late.”
I’m not late. The building is a three-decker with a bodega on the first floor and Dante’s operation above it. Bass music leaks through the ceiling. The kid at the door—sixteen, maybe, with hungry eyes—frisks me with hands that shake. He finds nothing.
Dante waits in a back room. He’s bigger than I remember. Thicker. Gold chains. A grin that doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Riley.” He spreads his hands. “Beautiful as ever. Sit.”
I sit. The leather couch crackles against the back of my thighs.
He counts the money on the coffee table. Licking his thumb. Taking his time. “Ten grand,” he says. “You sure about this? Two weeks is a fast turnaround.”
“I’m sure.”
He studies me. Predatory. Patient. “Alright. I like a girl with ambition. Come back in one week. We’ll assess the portfolio.”
“One week? You said—”
“I said two weeks if the market cooperates.” He smiles. Dead teeth. “One week for the first assessment. Take it or leave it.”
I take it. What choice do I have?
***
The longest week of my life, I filled it with a couple of clients.
Two high schoolers who don’t mind washing their hair at home and bringing their own supplies.
They don’t mind sitting on the floor of the small room.
They also don’t have the money to pay over fifty a head.
It takes six hours each to braid the micro-extensions they want, and the going rate would be four times as much in a real salon.
Some places charge ten times what I receive, but only in certain neighborhoods.
The locks are so shitty that I sleep at night with a knife under my pillow and the table wedged against the door, hiding my license and my last two hundred in a sanitary pad wrapper.
No one steals those. I don’t sleep. I plan.
The shop. Riley Miller Beauty. Clean. Simple.
Mine. I sketch the floor plan on the back of intake forms. Three chairs.
Shampoo bowls in the back. Plants in the window so it doesn’t look like a trap.
Every morning, I wake up and check the stash.
Every night I count it again. Seven days.
I dress carefully. Black jeans. Boots that can run.
A hoodie under my thrift-store peacoat. I take the T to Dudley and walk the last six blocks with my shoulders back and my hand on the pepper spray in my pocket.
Fake it till you make it. Or till they bury you.
The same door. The same kid. He won’t look at me. “In,” he says.
I step inside. The door locks behind me. The apartment feels different. No music. No smoke. Just Dante, sitting on the couch with my empty envelope in his lap.
“Riley.” I can’t read his smile. “Sit down.”
I don’t sit. “Where’s my money?”
“Invested.” He spreads his hands. “Market took a hit. You know how it is.”
“There is no market. You said you’d triple it.”
“And I will. But investments take time. Years, maybe.” He stands. He’s taller than I remember. Broader. He moves with terrifying calm, his face unreadable. “Meanwhile, you got debts. I had to pay my boys to flip it for me, pay for security. Interest.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I gave you ten k.”
“True, and I was investing it, I heard about your little auction that got busted up, and then I got to thinking.” He steps closer.
“Pretty, young, virgin.” His eyes crawl all over me.
“You know what that’s worth long-term? More than ten grand.
More than thirty. You’re an annuity, Riley. A retirement plan.”
My hands curl into fists. Audacity is a weapon, Mikhail said. Don’t dull it by pointing at yourself.
I use it.
I spray the pepper spray into Dante’s face.
The crack of his backhand is louder than a gunshot. My head snaps sideways. The floor rushes up and slams into my cheekbone. White pain cracks through my skull. I taste copper. Blood. Heavy footsteps. He’s standing over me.
“You stupid bitch,” he breathes. “I’m gonna enjoy using you before I turn you over to my friends.”
My hands scrabble for something, anything. A glass ashtray. My nails. I will claw his fucking eyes out before I let him—
The door caves in.
Not opens. Explodes. Wood splinters. The frame shatters. A boot withdraws, and then Mikhail Kutuzov fills the doorway like a nightmare unleashed.
Black coat. Gray eyes. Gun in his hand.
Two men behind him. Then three. Then the room is full of Russians—hard jaws, harder eyes, dark clothes that swallow the light. The kid who let me in is on his knees with his hands behind his head. No one made a sound. They move like smoke.
Dante freezes.
Mikhail looks at him. Then at me. His expression doesn't change. His silence is more terrifying than shouting.
He shoots Dante in the kneecap.
The sound swallows the room. Dante screams and crumples, grabbing his leg, blood jetting between his fingers. Mikhail steps over him the way you step over a puddle. Walks to me. Crouches.
His eyes are flat, winter gray. Blizzard gray.
“I gave you ten thousand dollars,” he says in a voice that is soft steel. “And a way out. What part of stay out of my world confused you?”
I stare at him. The pakhan who shut down my auction. Here. In Roxbury. Saving me again.
“I don’t need saving,” I say. The words are slurred. My head is ringing. My cheek aches.
He extends his hand. I take it. His grip is warm, rough, and unyielding. He pulls me to my feet, and my legs betray me. I buckle. He catches me, one arm around my waist, and I hate how small I feel. How fragile. How safe.
“Search the place,” he says to his men. It sounds like rocks grinding together. “Find her money, then throw out the rats.”
In the SUV, I shake. Not from fear. Fear can wait. It’s adrenaline, pure and vicious, coursing through me like bad dope. My teeth chatter. My fingers twitch. I press my palms between my knees and will myself still.
Mikhail sits across from me in the back of a black Escalade. The leather here doesn’t crack or rustle. It has a fresh, clean, slightly lemony smell, as if it’s recently been cleaned and detailed. The partition is up. We’re alone, if alone means separated from Dmitri and the driver by tinted glass.
A muscle jumps along his sharp jawline as he stares me down, his lips pressed into a bloodless line. Anger flows in hot and cold waves. Not because he saved me. He’s angry because I almost got myself killed.
“Do you have a death wish?” he asks.
I look at him. Perfect suit. A watch that only movie stars can afford.
Skin that has never known a Boston winter without heat.
“Easy for you to say.” The words crack like a whip.
“You’ve never been hungry. Not really. Not the kind of hungry where your stomach eats itself, and you drool over a stranger’s fast-food bag in the trash.
You’ve never been homeless. Never had to choose between a roof and a meal and still failed at both.
Never had to walk into a room and sell the only thing you own free and clear because it’s that or fade into nothing. ”
My chest heaves. Tears burn my eyes, but I don't release them. These men will not break me. Tears are for girls who have someone to wipe them away.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” I finish. My voice is raw meat. “To have nothing. To be nothing.”
Silence.
Mikhail stares at me. Glacier eyes. But a fault line shifts underneath. A crack so deep I feel the cold wind blowing through it.
I see it. I don’t understand it. Is he going to hit me? Or throw me out of the moving car. Instead, he turns his head. Looks out the window at Boston sliding by—the Common, the harbor lights coming on as the city prepares for sleep.
“Dmitri,” he says to the driver after pressing a button. His voice is lower. Rougher. “The penthouse.”
“What?” I sit up straight. “No. I don’t want—”
“You had your chance to do this your way.” He doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t need to. Its finality stops my protest. “Now we do it mine.”
“How did you know where I was?” The question tears out of me. “Were you following me?”
He says nothing. Just holds my gaze until I look away.
I protest. I threaten to jump out. I call him every name my foster mothers taught me, and a few I invented.
He ignores me. The Escalade glides through the Financial District, past the harbor, up to a glass tower that touches the clouds.
Doormen in uniforms that rival Buckingham Palace welcome us.
A private elevator. Steel and marble and quiet so deep it’s deathly.
The penthouse.
I’ve never been this high up. My ears pop as we rise.
My heart pounds a warning against my ribs.
I’m dirty. Bloody. Wearing clothes from a thrift store’s sales rack.
I don’t belong here. I’m a mud smudge on a white canvas.
The doors open. Floor-to-ceiling windows.
The city spread out like a quilt made of diamonds and darkness.
Boston. My city, but not my city. From up here, I can’t see the shelters.
Can’t smell the dirt and grime. Can’t hear the gunshots in Roxbury.
It’s beautiful.
It’s terrifying.
A woman with salt-and-pepper hair steps forward. She presses a warm cloth into my hands, cleans the blood from my face, and disappears before I can thank her. Or tell her to fuck off. I’m too stunned to decide which.
The bedroom they give me is huge, almost as large as he is. The bathroom is marble with rainfall showerheads and towels plush enough to drown in.
I scrub Dante’s touch off my skin until I’m almost raw. Then I put on the robe folded on the chair. Silk. Charcoal gray. Too expensive.
I can’t sleep.
I pad out into the main room, drawn to the glass like a moth. The view steals what’s left of my breath. I stand at the edge of the world. My palm finds the window. Cold. Solid. Real. Behind me, the air changes.
I see him in the glass. Mikhail. Standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame, arms crossed.
He changed his shirt. The sleeves are rolled up, showing forearms corded with muscle and ink.
A watch glints. His hands are in his pockets, but I know what they can do.
Pull triggers. Break bones. Lift me from the floor.
Our eyes meet in the reflection.
I wait for him to speak. To tell me the rules. The price of my rescue. The price he'll eventually ask. Men like him always collect.
But he says nothing.
He just watches me with those arctic eyes. And for a second—barely a breath—I see something unguarded. It passes. Stone returns.
He stalks closer, his eyes tracking my reaction, “Relax,” he says. I wasn’t even aware I had tensed. “Sleep, in the morning we’ll talk.”
“Talk about what? How you kidnapped me?
"Let’s talk about making a deal.”