“But it wants another one. It wants it now. You’re the first appointment I took in three days, and I took it with no referral because I’m desperate and couldn’t reach any of my core clients. I didn’t want to, but this thing ... it’s killing me.”
Are these Sophie’s and my missing men?
Seymour and Talbert?
The cases that brought me to Paige’s doorstep in the first place?
Maybe better to sit on that piece of news for the time being.
Grant forced himself to sit up. “I should make some calls.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Do you understand what’s happening here?” she asked.
“No.”
“So what makes you think someone else will? You’ll just get them, or us, or everyone killed.”
Paige struggled to her feet.
“Where are you going?” Grant asked.
“My little black book.”
Grant managed to stand. He reached into his inner pocket, took out his phone.
“Are you crazy?” Paige said.
He was already scrolling contacts for Sophie’s cell.
“Grant, did you hear what I said?”
“What exactly do you propose we do here, Paige? ‘Cause I’m at a loss.”
“Call a client.”
“Come on.”
“It doesn’t kill them.”
“You don’t know what it does. Taking more people into your room isn’t a solution.”
“I’m not looking for a solution, Grant. I’m just looking to survive the night. I just want this pain to stop.”
“Paige—”
“Do I look well to you? If I don’t get someone upstairs tonight, I won’t be alive in the—”
Paige bent over cradling her stomach.
“Paige?”
As Grant moved toward her, she turned and ran.
He limped after her, shouting her name, and as he passed under the archway into the kitchen, he spotted her hunched over the toilet in the bathroom, puking her guts out.
He stepped inside and stood behind her, holding her hair back as she retched into the toilet.
Wasn’t the first time.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re gonna feel better after this.”
She shook her head. She was spitting now, her back heaving up and down as she clambered for a decent breath.
She said, “Hit the light.”
Grant did.
The inside of the toilet bowl and everything in the vicinity was dotted with specks of deep burgundy, and over the pungent reek of bile, Grant caught another smell.
Copper.
Blood.
“I’m calling nine-one-one,” he said.
“No.” Her face was still in the bowl. “They’ll try to take me to the hospital. I can’t leave the house.”
“You just vomited blood.”
“Help me get cleaned up.”
“Paige—”
“It’s either me or someone else. Do you get that yet?”
“We can’t go down that road.”
“We’re there.”
Paige sat up and fell back into the wall. She said, “It’s that white knight complex that killed your friend. Listen to me for once. Please. You and I are not in control here. I call a client, they come over, I get better. If you bring people to this house, they’re going to die. Let me handle this.”
Grant looked down at the gore in the toilet. Hard to believe that his sister, small as she was, had that much inside her. Sprawled on the bathroom floor, sheet-white and still dripping with rain and sweat, she looked like a full-on heroin addict.
“All right,” he said. “Until I figure out what we’re dealing with.”
“Give me your phone.”
“Why?”
“So I’ll know you’re one hundred percent with me. So I don’t have any more surprise guests showing up at my door.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“After that stunt you pulled with Don?”
“I’m not giving you my phone.”
“Why? Planning on making some calls?”
“It’ll make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
He tugged his phone out of his pocket, dropped it in Paige’s lap.
“Thank you,” she said.
She tried to stand, but her arms didn’t have the strength to push her onto her feet.
Grant reached down and pulled her up by her hands.
“You know, there’s an upside to this approach,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Now that you’re here, you can see what happens to my clients after I black out.”
Paige left the bathroom, and Grant stood at the sink, holding his hands under steaming hot water while he scrubbed every last speck of blood off his hands with a furious focus.
He finally shut off the tap and looked up into the mirror.
He flinched.
Don stared back at him—his face frozen in that moment of grimacing purpose just before he’d opened his throat. His lips didn’t move, but Grant heard his voice as clearly as if his friend had been standing beside him, whispering into his ear.
You don’t know anything.
You don’t know anything.
Chapter 11
Grant changed into dry clothes—loose-fitting jeans and a T-shirt belonging to one of his sister’s clients. He helped Paige clean the wet floors, the bloody upstairs hallway and downstairs bathroom, and generally return the brownstone to the jazz-brimming, candlelit brothel that had greeted him ninety minutes prior.
When the doorbell rang, Grant slipped into an empty closet beside the wet bar, pulling the door closed as Paige moved into the foyer.
She’d skimped down into something so lacy and see-through he could barely bring himself to look at her. But she’d somehow managed to work magic with makeup and foundation, upgrading her appearance from heroin addict to the sexy emaciation of a Paris runway model.
Muffled sounds reached him through the closet door.
Hinges creaked in the foyer.
An exchange of voices, barely discernible, but low and seductive.
Approaching footsteps moved into range, followed by laughter.
Grant heard the clink of ice dropping into empty glasses.
A cork sliding out of a whiskey bottle.
Liquid pouring over cracking ice.
Paige and her client stood at the wet bar, three feet away.
“You look tired, baby,” she said, her voice pure saccharine.
“Here’s to hoping you can fix that.”
Grant’s stomach twisted.
“Cheers,” the man said.
“Save any lives today?”
“No, actually. Car accident. Couldn’t find the hemorrhage in time.”
“Sounds like a bad day at the office.”
Grant had been fully prepared to despise whoever entered this brownstone with the intention of fucking his sister, but as he eavesdropped from the closet, he couldn’t find the rage. He’d stood in this man’s shoes countless times. Paid for sex with women who were undoubtedly sisters of other men. Whatever brotherly anger he felt was doomed to be laced with hypocrisy.
“I don’t know how you do it, Jude. Life and death every day.”
“The good days make it worth it. Also, they pay me a fortune which helps my fragile ego. How you doing, Gloria?”
“Aces.”
“Yeah? ‘Cause you’re looking a little peaked, as my grandmother used to say.”
“I’m fine. It’s just—”
“Eleven o’clock at night.”
“Exactly.”
They moved away from the wet bar and Grant heard the squeak of leather as they sat down on the sofa cushions.
In the darkness, he reached down, palmed the doorknob.
Waited for their voices to start up again, then turned it slowly.
When the latch had cleared the housing, he nudged the door open half an inch.
He couldn’t see them directly with the door blocking his view, but he could watch their reflection in the big mirror that hung over the fireplace—his sister cuddled into the embrace of a handsome man twenty years her senior. Even sitting, Grant could see that he was tall and endowed with the kind of longish, wavy-gray locks that were made to be windblown behind the wheel of a topless 911.