Chapter 1 The Girl with a Price Tag

POV: Lila Monroe

The mirror on the car window gave me back someone I recognised but did not particularly like. Steady eyes. Clean lip colour. Collar sitting right. I adjusted it anyway, not because it needed adjusting, but because my hands needed something to do before I walked through that door.

Davis was already inside. He had texted twice in the last twenty minutes, which told me he was either nervous or showing off for someone, and I needed to figure out which one before I sat down.

I pushed off the car and crossed the lot.

The restaurant was the kind of place that had no prices on the menu and candles that cost more per hour than most people earned. I had been here four times before, always with different clients, always in different borrowed clothes. Tonight it was a green dress from my roommate and heels that fit almost perfectly.

The hostess smiled at me, I smiled back and she led me through to the main floor.

I found Davis at a corner table. Mid-thirties, soft jaw.

He stood when he saw me, which was always a good sign. It meant he was performing too, and people who were performing for someone rarely made trouble.

"You look," he started.

"Thank you," I said, before he could finish.

I sat down and opened the menu I had already memorised and let him talk. He talked about his work, which I listened to just enough to ask the right questions. He talked about a conference the following week. I made a note of it somewhere in the part of my brain I kept for this and let the rest of me stay quiet.

This was the part I was actually good at. Not the dressing up, not the restaurants. The staying quiet while looking like I was completely present.

Forty minutes in, I was deciding between the salmon and doing nothing when I felt it.

I did not look up right away. I picked up my water glass, took a slow sip, and let my eyes move the way I had taught myself.

He was two tables across and slightly behind Davis's left shoulder, which meant he had a clean line of sight.

Dark hair. A jacket. Younger than I expected from someone sitting at that particular table, because the man across from him was the kind of older that came with lawyers and board memberships.

I put my glass down and turned back to Davis, who was saying something about a merger, and I nodded in the right place.

I ran through the possibilities in the time it took Davis to finish his sentence. Someone who knew one of my previous clients. Someone who had found the forum. A friend of a friend who had heard something and was now curious. None of those were disasters. All of them were manageable.

I was very good at managing things.

By the time the main course arrived, I had managed to stop thinking about him.

That was a lie. I had stopped letting myself think about him, which was different, and the distinction mattered because one of those was discipline and the other was something I did not have a clean word for yet.

Davis's second drink made him louder. He leaned back in his chair and said something to the couple at the next table.

I smiled at the couple and brought Davis back to me with a question about the conference, and he turned, happy, and the evening stayed even.

It stayed even until dessert arrived and Davis, proud of something I had not caught, leaned slightly forward and said, just under the ambient noise of the room but not nearly under enough, "Best three hundred I ever spent."

The couple at the next table did not react. The waiter was already turning away.

His eyes came to mine.

I looked away first. That was a mistake and I knew it the moment I did it, because looking away first told him something.

I got through the rest of the evening. I said goodbye to Davis outside and stood alone on the cold pavement telling myself it was fine, it was nothing.

Then footsteps came up behind me and a voice said, "How much does a semester cost?"

I did not turn around yet.

I needed just one more second to decide what kind of trouble this was.