Page 6

It's the best secret I've got, and I keep a lot of them.

"Agnes?" Sloane's stopped at my desk, all warmth and kindness, because, dammit, she's not a villain, much as I might like her to be. So annoying. "Could you move Elias's four o'clock? He doesn't know it yet, but he's going to want his afternoon."

"On it."

She gives me a smile with all thirty-two of her excellent teeth and click-clicks away. I turn to Elias Thorne's calendar, which lives on my screen, under my hands. It’s mine to rearrange, and I quietly fix his whole day for him without him ever knowing it was broken.

That's the part they really can't see. Not that I'm Diablo.

That I'm the one running the room. Both rooms.

I move the four o'clock.

And in a few more hours, I get to be somebody again.

2

AGGIE

Nobody says good night to me except Theo.

I'm halfway into my coat when he passes the front desk on his way out. "Night, Agnes. Get home safe." He means it, and he's gone before I can decide whether to say anything back. Beck left an hour ago in a cloud of chaos, his ear pressed into his cell phone. Elias is still in his office with the light on, because Elias doesn't ever stop working, at least as far as I can tell. Sloane left a while ago, of course as perfect as she was when she arrived at eight a.m.

So it's me, the cleaning cart, and the hum of a building that's already forgotten I was in it.

Good. Fine. I’m okay with it all. Really.

The subway at rush hour is a body-to-body situation, and I disappear into it, exactly how I like it. A backpack the size of a suitcase smacks me in the shoulder. A man explains crypto, loudly, to a woman who is clearly repulsed by his bad breath. Someone's elbow finds my right boob as if he couldn’t avoid it, which is not at all the case.

I hold the pole and let myself be small and gray. It’s all good. Really.

And the whole time, behind my bland little commuter face, I'm thinking one thing, my big fucking secret, on a loop. Tonight, I'm going to be a queen.

Not a metaphor. On CamALot they actually call us that. The women are Queens. The men who pay are Knights, and the whole platform is dressed up like a medieval court, which is cheesy as hell, and which I also get a big kick out of. In a few hours, I'll be in red lipstick with a room full of grown men calling me Your Highness and paying me with little crown icons for the honor.

So let the elbow have my right boob. Let the crypto guy monologue his bad breath into the void. Let the oversized backpack try and knock me off my feet. Not one of them knows they're sharing a train with royalty.

Last night, my first night as Diablo, the setup took three hours. Tonight, it takes thirty-five minutes, because it turns out, I can get good at most anything, even this. The camera goes on an actual tripod that cost me nine dollars at Walgreens. It’s a real glow-up from the shoebox and library books. I’ve placed my scarf back over the lamp, where it hopefully won’t ignite, and am wearing my trusty polyester slip, lipstick, and have positioned the viewer frame cropped just above my mouth. I’m still paranoid my teeth are not white enough, but fuck that, nothing’s holding me back now.

I set my terms—No name. No face. Nothing for free—and hit GO LIVE without hovering over the button because I'm a pro now. Apparently.

Turns out getting better at something doesn’t make the embarrassment go away.

Twenty minutes in, I've got maybe forty viewers and a rhythm. There's the guys from last night, which still stuns me, men with handles like SaltyDog and Mr_Reliable who tip me a few crowns, and treat me like a bartender they're a little in love with.

I'm mid-story, something about my landlord's chihuahua, my namesake, my muse, when I reach for my water and knock the scarf clean off the lamp. The room floods with the raw, unfiltered wattage of an overhead bulb, and the viewing window is forgotten. For one catastrophic half second, forty strangers nearly get my entire face.

I dive. Scarf back on. Heart in my mouth.

"Okay." I'm laughing now, the real one, the one that gets away from me before I can button it up. "Nobody saw that. We're professionals here. This is a very high-end establishment."

lmaooo, says SaltyDog.

10/10 recovery, says somebody.

And that's when the first one shows up.

Cha-ching.