Eva had been working at Sinners for three years. In three years she had accumulated a working knowledge of the supernatural world's social architecture, who was powerful, who was dangerous, who was both and who was merely performing one while actually being the other. The Blackwood brothers occupied a category she'd privately thought of as weather events, things you didn't negotiate with, didn't provoke, and were grateful when they happened somewhere in your general vicinity rather than directly to you.
Feared was the word people used. Feared like it was an understatement searching for something stronger.
"All three of them," she said flatly.
"Yes."
She looked at the desk surface. She was doing math she didn't want to do.
"Eva." Kenneth's voice was gentler than his usual register. "I want to be clear that you have the absolute right to decline. I've told them you don't do exclusives. This offer is being extended because they are who they are and I'm obligated to pass it on. But you can say no. You can walk out of this office and the answer is no and that's the end of it."
"And if I say yes?"
"Then I draw up a contract. Legal, detailed, with terms that protect you. You'll have documentation of every obligation and limitation. Nothing happens outside of what you agree to in writing."
She was quiet for a long moment. The bass pulsed through the walls.
"Go home," Kenneth said quietly. "Think about it. You don't have to decide tonight."
Eva stood. Smoothed the front of her jeans with both palms, the automatic gesture of someone buying themselves a second to think. She walked to the door. Her hand closed around the handle.
She thought about her mother's face.
She thought about the number.
She thought about the Blackwood brothers sitting in that VIP lounge above the floor, and what it meant that they wanted her specifically, and all the ways this could go wrong.
Then she thought about the scan results, and the treatment that currently existed only as an impossibility.
"I'll think about it," she said.
She opened the door and walked out, and she didn't let herself run.
But it was a close thing.
The night air hit her outside the club's staff exit like a physical thing...cool and sharp, New York in the way that New York always was at this hour, alive and indifferent and enormous. Eva stood on the pavement and breathed it in. One breath. Two.
Her phone was in her hand before she'd made a conscious decision to take it out. Matilda's number. She stared at it for a long moment, knowing her mother would be asleep by now, knowing even if she wasn't asleep there was nothing she could say that wouldn't cause worry.
She put the phone in her pocket.
Two million dollars.
She started walking toward the subway, her heels loud on the pavement, her mind already doing the thing it always did when she was alone at night — running numbers, running scenarios, running outcomes. It wasn't a choice she'd made yet. She told herself that. She told herself she was going home to sleep and in the morning it would be clearer, one way or the other.
She told herself that the image of three men she'd never seen, sitting in a lounge above her stage, was not the reason her hands weren't quite steady.
She told herself a lot of things on the walk to the train.
She was very good at that.
Two million dollars, said the part of her that lived closest to survival, closest to her mother's face on that hospital pillow.
The Blackwood brothers, said the part of her that had learned, in twenty-three years, that nothing that costly ever came free.
She went home. She sat on her bed. She looked at the papers on the kitchen counter from across the apartment until the numbers blurred.
At 2:47 in the morning, Eva Santos made a decision.
She would say yes.
God help her.
She would say yes.
***
At 4:16 AM, she walked to her window and looked out at the city....New York at its quietest, the brief window between the nightlife dying and the morning shift waking up. Somewhere out there, in a mansion she'd never seen, three men were waiting for her answer.
The Blackwood brothers.
Feared. Dangerous. The kind of men who broke women and didn't lose sleep over it.
And she was going to say yes.
Because her mother was dying and two million dollars could save her and there was nothing, nothing Eva wouldn't trade for that.
Not her dignity.
Not her safety.
Not six months of her life with three predators who'd looked at her like they'd already decided she belonged to them.
Eva pulled out her phone and typed an email to Kenneth before she could change her mind.
Subject: Re: Contract Offer
Time: 4:31 AM
Kenneth,
I'll sign.
Let them know I accept their offer.
- Eva
She hit send before her courage failed.
Then she set her phone face-down on the counter and walked to her bed and lay down fully dressed because undressing felt like too much effort.
She'd just agreed to six months with three dangerous men for two million dollars.
She'd just saved her mother's life.
She'd just sold herself to predators.
All three of those things were true.
Eva closed her eyes and waited for regret that didn't come....just exhaustion and resignation and the grim satisfaction of knowing she'd done what needed to be done.