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Jade stays silent for a moment, making me nervous. Silence isn’t normally in Jade’s repertoire.

“Jade?” I prompt again, feeling a skittering of anxiety in my veins.

Finally, the dancer sighs. Like a huge, weight-of the-world-on-her-shoulders sigh. “Look,” she begins, “I know you’re not going to like this, but what do you know about the mob?”

Chapter 3

Andi

“The MOB?” I practically shout the word, I’m so shocked.

“Shh,” says Jade, “No need to shout. I can hear you just fine, for goddess’ sake.”

“You can’t just ask me what I know about the mob out of nowhere. What do you know about the mob?”

“Quite a lot,” she says calmly.

I’m dumbfounded at her response. Quite a lot?

When I don’t say anything, Jade just sighs again. “Look, being a performer in this city, we meet a bunch of . . . shall we say, colorful characters, right? I mean, that’s how you met Colton.”

I nod tightly, not liking to be reminded.

Jade turns down a street I don’t know. I realize that she is taking a totally nonsensical route to my apartment, and I appreciate it. If Colton can follow me on foot, there’s nothing that says he can’t in a car. Or have one of his PI goons do it for him.

After Jade makes yet another turn, she says, “Well, you met your ex . . . and I met mine. Remember when I was seeing Mr. Scary?”

When I first came to the jazz club, Jade was seeing someone everyone called Mr. Scary. It was before we were really friends, so I didn’t know much about him. He was as big as our bouncers and wore his hair in a military cut. He held himself like someone who is used to dealing with trouble, and he never smiled. He also had a strange tattoo in the shape of a broadsword on the side of his neck. No one knew what Jade saw in him, and there was a lot of relief backstage when he stopped coming around.

“Yeah,” I say hesitantly, “I remember Mr. Scary.”

“Yeah, well, what you wouldn’t have known, being from out of town, is that he was connected.”

“Connected?” I ask. “Do you really have to speak like we’re in The Godfather?”

“Yeah, because that’s how they talk. He was a high-ranking member of the Fraternity.”

Now I laugh a little. “The Fraternity? Like kappa phi whatever?” Not that I’d been to college, but I’ve watched TV.

But Jade doesn’t laugh with me. “Not a fraternity. The Fraternity. French mob.”

“The French have a mob nowadays?”

Jade shakes her head. “Don’t laugh at it, babes. It’s not a nowadays thing, it’s an always thing. A since-before-the-Italians thing. And they are the scariest motherfuckers out there.”

Jade never swears. Not really. Usually, it’s her made-up, silly swears or little curses. I’ve never heard her say motherfuckers. It sobers me.

“If that’s the case,” I ask, “why haven’t I heard of them? I’ve heard of the Mafia and Bratva and whatever, but not this Fraternity. There are no movies or TV shows about them.”

“Those other groups have lost a lot of their power. Sure, they’re bad business, but not talk-about-us-and-we’ll-cut-your-tongue-out scary. The Fraternity is full of complete psychos and monsters. And they like being unknown, in the shadows. Even Hollywood won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.”

My blood chills as she talks. “What were you doing dating someone like that?”

Jade shrugs. “I like a little danger. Didn’t know that I was dating a lot of danger until I was in super deep. When we broke up, I had to sign the NDA of all NDAs just to get out. But that’s neither here nor there. My point is, they could solve your problem.”

I start with shock. “You want me to get in bed with psychos and monsters, when even you wanted nothing more than to get away from them? Have you lost your mind?”

“Look,” Jade says bluntly, steering around a roundabout, “you already got in bed with a psycho monster, and now you can’t get rid of him. He’s got the cops in his pocket, and even if you did move, there’s no guarantee he wouldn’t follow you. At best, he’s stalking you and at worst . . . well, he probably will escalate. You’re stuck. But the one thing I know is that monsters can be scared off by other, worse monsters, and the Fraternity is as bad as they get. But they have a code: they don’t turn on clients unless a client turns on them first, and they don’t hurt women, unless they can’t help it.”