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Just for a second. Just long enough. Something flat and sharp moves across Beck Cross's face, something I have watched him aim at rival bidders, but never, not once, at me. Then he catches me catching him, and the grin snaps back on like a light, and he's gone.

I know these men the way I know my own name. And I know exactly what I just saw cross Beck's face, even if I can't let myself say the word for it.

Because there's no reason on earth for Beck Cross to care that sweet Theo brought the receptionist a coffee.

Unless.

And there it is again, the question with the little beak, pecking, pecking, pecking.

I finish my call and find my coffee gone cold.

8

BECK

There’s one thing I'm actually good at, under all the noise. I can walk into any room and know, inside of thirty seconds, exactly what every person in it wants from me.

It isn't a trick and it isn't a guess. It's the only real talent I've got. Elias reads a contract, Theo reads a mood, I read the want, the specific, secret, possibly embarrassing thing a person is hoping to get out of the guy across the table, usually before they've admitted it to themselves. Then I decide whether to hand it to them or just let them keep wondering if I might. I have built a very large, very charming life on one boring truth, that everybody wants something, and the man who sees it first owns the room.

So will somebody kindly explain how I ended up flat on my back at two in the morning, in an apartment I paid too much for, wanting a woman I cannot buy, cannot close, and cannot get out of my motherfucking head.

Let me back up. The arrangement was my idea. Everything's my idea. It’s what I do.

When Elias cracked and told me about the girl on the website, our girl, front-desk Agnes, taking her clothes off in the dark for strangers, I did what I do. I saw the want. His, obviously, poor bastard; fourteen months of his schoolboy crush were written all over him. But hers too, the second I watched her work. This was a woman in a hole, who’s running a very smart operation to try and climb out of it. The fastest way to help a person out of a hole is to be the one holding the ladder.

So I built the ladder. Buy all her time, every slot, every night. No other man gets near her, her money problem quietly disappears, and the three of us get to keep the only interesting thing any of us has stumbled onto in years. Clean. Elegant. Very me.

I told myself it was strategy. I told myself it was even a little bit kind. What I did not tell myself, because fuck that, is the true part, which is that I didn't build that ladder to save her.

I built it so nobody else could have her.

And for a couple of weeks, it did its job. Three of us, one screen, splitting her the way we split everything, because that's what Elias and Theo and I do. We're partners. We share the wins and losses. It's the whole foundation we stand on. Watching her together felt like another deal we'd closed. A good one. A very goddamned good one.

It doesn't feel like that anymore.

Somewhere in the last few nights, it curdled, and I know the exact moment. It was the night she made us wait, made me wait, running her camgirl room like she'd been born holding the deed to it. She told three of the richest men in the city precisely when they were allowed to breathe. Nobody tells me when to breathe. Nobody. And this broke, brilliant, faceless woman looks into a camera and makes me work for it, and I have never in my overpaid life wanted anything the way I want her.

This should embarrass me and it does. Everybody wants something from me, whether it’s the money, the deal, the room, the grin. I've spent forty-one years being the thing people want and feeling nothing about it, because wanting is leverage, and I'm the one who holds the leverage. Always.

She flipped it. She doesn't want a single thing from me. She thinks I'm a CamALot handle and a credit card, some stranger named HouseMoney with more money than sense. She takes my crowns and hands me back nothing but instructions and that laugh she keeps almost-not-letting-out, and I am, for the first time in longer than I can remember, the one left standing in the room, wanting. Her. Not the win. Her.

And Beck Cross does not stand in line.

That's the whole trouble, because right now, there's a line. It's me. It's Elias, who's gone so quiet lately it's deafening. And it's Theo, who tips like he can save her. Three of us. All in. All gone for the same woman and too smart or too chicken to say it out loud, because saying it out loud breaks the arrangement, and the arrangement is the only thing standing between us and the exact mess that ends friendships and firms.

I built a machine specifically engineered to guarantee I'd only ever get one-third of the thing I now want all of.

Genius. Truly. Somebody give me an award.

The thought I keep having at two in the morning, the one I keep shoving back in the drawer, is she plays us like she knows us. The way she reads the room, the way she times a line, the way the quiet woman we walk past every single day can drop something that lands like a blade in exactly the soft spot none of us shows⁠—

No. Stop it. That's paranoia and my third glass of scotch talking. She's a clever woman in a hard spot who got lucky with three clients, and she has no earthly idea who we are. That's the entire point. That's what keeps it safe.

I almost believe it.

I don't sleep. I lie there and think over what I want, what it costs, who's standing in my way, and for the first time in my life, the answer comes back ugly, because the two men in my way are my partners and the closest thing I've got to friends, and the thing I want is a woman not one of us can have without lying to her every day of our lives the way we have been.

But I want her alone. That's the ugly bottom of it. I want one hour of no sharing. No Elias or Theo.