“I’m not trying to save anyone.” In fact, whenever I looked into those cloudy gray eyes, it felt like she was the one trying to save me.

Bayla’s dark eyes shifted away from my probing gaze and I saw her hands twisting in the expensive fabric of the shirt she had commandeered.

“She must be very special.” Her voice was quiet as she turned on her heel and headed toward the front door. “I’ll see you sometime tomorrow. Let me know if you have any specific instructions now that you have a permanent guest.”

The front door clicked closed behind her and I sighed. Bayla’s possessiveness was not a complication or headache I needed to deal with on top of getting the club opened up, and getting Key into my bed. It would be bothersome and time-consuming to find someone else to take care of the house, and I had no doubt that if I kicked her out of her current role, Bayla would end up back on the streets selling herself for money. I didn’t want that to be the outcome because she was a good housekeeper and a decent woman, but I wasn’t going to let anyone or anything stand in the way of getting what I had wanted for so long.

She’d come to me too young and too broken. I don’t know if she found me because I was the lesser of two evils or because I felt familiar. There were a lot of different ethnicities and cultures at work in the Point. A lot of different voices and accents, a lot of variations of skin color, but we were all hiding and looking for something more than we had, wherever it was we originated from, so I always wondered if Bayla sought me out because I felt like a piece of home.

Prostitution was technically legal where I was from, as legal as the sex trade can ever be. However, vices and carnal desire always make man more monster than anything else, and in a place that was always in need of more money to fund a war and feed more terror, something as simple as selling sex legally turns ugly really fast. Bad men buy young girls and force them to work. That money then ends up in the hands of extremists, and girls too young to know what is happening to them are ruined forever.

Bayla suffered in silence as she was sold to a human trafficker and eventually landed on the streets of the Point. She was still in the hands of bad men and still having to do horrible things at an age when most girls are just learning to drive, but she survived. She made it, and when Novak finally went down and I moved in to take over all of his girls, she came to me first. My plan was to let them all go out on their own and be able to handle their money, but much to my surprise, they needed me. They needed the threat of my name and reputation to keep them safe out there on the streets, and Bayla was the first young woman to sign herself up for the partnership.

I never wanted to be responsible for the well-being of anyone else, never wanted that kind of responsibility, but the old adage that sex sells is very true, and ultimately I couldn’t walk away from that kind of money. It was shocking how much it mattered to me that girls got taken care of, that they got paid for services rendered, that they had the final say in what they would or wouldn’t do. I wanted them safe regardless of where their paychecks came from, so when any of them came to me after being knocked around or with a complaint about an uncooperative client, it made me furious. Far more furious than any of the men that tried to screw me over or take me down on any given day.

Grumbling under my breath about how complicated every single situation I got myself into always seemed to be, whether it was by my own making or someone else’s, I pulled my phone out of my pocket as it started to vibrate.

Chuck’s number flashed across the screen and I swiped to answer it while climbing up the stairs in the opposite direction of where everything inside me wanted to go. She was here. She was in my home. I had finally tasted her, inhaled her, and welcomed her. I felt like I could breathe again after suffocating for months without her.

“You have a name for me?” Forgetting to put champagne on the shelf might seem like such a simple, insignificant screw-up to most. To me it was almost unforgivable.

When someone was offered a chance, given the opportunity to be part of my business, they needed to shine. I was not a second-chance kind of man.

“Yeah. I looked at the tapes. It was a kid. One of the new barbacks. Took the cases in the cooler and got distracted by a pretty girl. You have a bunch of them wandering around that club and they aren’t wearing very much.”

“That’s no excuse.” I pushed my hand through my hair and headed off toward the bathroom attached to the master.

Chuck laughed drily. “I kind of figured you would say that, boss.”

“Have him in my office in the morning.”

“He’s really just a kid, Nassir. The punishment needs to fit the crime.”

I popped the button on my pants and reached in to crank the shower on as hot as it would go. Sometimes I thought if the water was hot enough, it would finally make me clean. So far there had never been enough heat. I was still just as dirty and tainted as I had always been.

“You suddenly questioning my methods?”

It was really, really quiet for a long time. So long I thought that maybe Chuck had hung up on me. I knew sometimes what I did was too extreme for him, that sometimes I reminded him of Novak, and it turned his stomach. To stay on top in a place like the Point, you had to leave an impression, even if it was just on a silly kid that got distracted by a nice ass in a short skirt. That was the next generation coming up to run these streets, and I would be damned if they weren’t molded by my own hand and my experience.

I wouldn’t force my vision on them. I would never ask them to fight my fight. I would never ask them to believe in anything that didn’t matter to them, but I would teach them to be careful. I would teach them to watch themselves. I would teach them to identify a threat and to react accordingly. I would teach them how to survive the same way I had learned to survive.

“I might’ve questioned you before your girl came back, but now that she’s here, I doubt you’ll be as fucking unhinged as you’ve been. I had no idea Key was your own personal Jiminy Cricket.”

I had no clue what he was talking about and I told him as much. He laughed again and filled me in over his chuckling.

“It’s an old cartoon about a boy that isn’t real but is given life because his creator loves him. He has a magical cricket that is his conscience and tries to show the boy right from wrong, guides him into making good choices. I had no idea that all these years Keelyn was the thing that was keeping you tethered to being a real boy. Without her around, you became something else, wooden and inhuman.”