She turned from him without awaiting a response and lost herself in the crowd. Nate hoped she was going to take his message to Angel, but she might just as easily have been making a beeline for the exit to spend her unexpected windfall.
Surprised by how strongly he wished he could just leave Angel’s and never come back, he reluctantly made his way to the bar to wait.
Nate was dangerously close to being a morose drunk.
He’d been sitting at the bar for the better part of an hour, and the longer he sat, the more convinced he felt that Petal had taken his money and run. Not that he could blame her. If he’d been in her shoes, he’d have been outta there in an instant.
How had he never noticed before how depressing Angel’s was? Sure, the Executive and Employee tourists were having a blast, getting drunk, doing drugs, enjoying the shows, and getting laid. And sure, some of the dealers and hookers probably got off on the power games they played, enjoyed being viewed as dangerous predators or seeing the sexual hold they had on such powerful people. But most were just doing their jobs, with about the same enthusiasm as a factory worker, dreaming of quitting time and hoping they were pulling in enough cash to make ends meet.
His disenchantment with the club had led him to drink more than was wise. Not that he had any choice but to order drinks while he was sitting at the bar, but that didn’t mean he had to actually
He’d gotten himself into such a nasty, broody mood that he was barely aware of the people around him as he sat hunched over his drink at the bar. He finished off the shot of insanely expensive chocolate vodka he’d ordered, barely tasting it. Nadia was not going to be happy with him for spending the hard-won dollars on liquor he didn’t really want, but maybe if he kept ordering the most expensive drinks, he’d eventually attract Angel’s attention even if Petal hadn’t bothered to take his message to her. And maybe he’d even have a few dollars left over with which to bribe Angel.
“Another!” he cried out loudly to Viper, waving his empty shot glass in the air and then turning it upside down before plopping it back on the bar.
“Fine vodka is meant to be sipped, you know,” said a voice from behind him, and Nate froze with his hand still holding the shot glass.
It showed how dangerously careless he’d become that he’d allowed the very woman he was looking for to come up behind him within touching distance without having noticed. Moving slowly, because there was something sly in Angel’s voice that jangled his nerves, Nate turned around.
Debasement was full of exotic, unusual-looking people, but even among them Angel of Mercy stood out. Nate wasn’t sure how old she was, but if he had to guess, he’d say somewhere in the vicinity of fifty. Her hair was a natural (he presumed) steel gray, cut in a six-inch-high Mohawk that made it look like she had a rotary saw coming out of her head. There were deep wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, and she had the wattled neck of a much older woman, but her boobs were high and tight (almost certainly fake), and she always displayed her cleavage to best effect. The spiky dog collar she wore around her neck might have looked vaguely submissive on anyone else, but on Angel it was a mockery. If there was anyone in the world less submissive than Angel of Mercy, Nate didn’t want to meet them.
Angel’s face was devoid of the tattoos and face paint that were so popular among the Basement’s younger crowd, but her body was a different story. The henna-colored designs started just under her collarbones and crawled down her body and arms in bands and spirals. Nowhere near as colorful and elaborate as some of the other body art Nate had seen in Debasement, Angel’s tattoos were nonetheless some of the most striking: a series of repeating, tribal-looking patterns that somehow managed to fit together perfectly, like a monochrome Persian rug woven by a detail-oriented master.
“Angel,” he said with a polite nod, while not taking his eyes off of her. “So nice to see you again.”
She smiled at him, then gave the guy sitting next to him at the bar a pointed stare. The guy was a drunk twentysomething Employee, but he wasn’t so plastered he couldn’t read the very obvious hint in Angel’s eyes, and he hastily vacated his barstool. Still smiling, Angel took a seat. Viper put a shot glass filled with viscous, crimson liquid on the bar before her. Nate had no idea what it was, and had no inclination to find out as Angel lifted the glass to her lips and drained it. It left a thick coating on the sides of the glass. Clearly, it was supposed to look like blood, but Nate was ninety-nine percent sure it wasn’t. It was the remaining one percent that made him decline when Angel arched a brow at him and said “Want one?”
“I think I’ve had enough to drink already,” he said, and wondered if he was slurring a bit. His head did feel a little fuzzy around the edges, and he hadn’t been keeping careful track of how much alcohol he was taking in. Kurt would never have let him be so careless.
“Suit yourself,” Angel said with a shrug. “I heard you wanted to talk to me. How can I be of service?”
There was a strange glitter in Angel’s eye, and Nate didn’t like the hard edge in her voice. She was possibly the most intimidating woman he had ever met, and Nate had always had a healthy respect for her, but on the few occasions when he’d talked to her in the past, she’d always seemed perfectly pleasant. She wasn’t a kiss-ass, but she did treat her well-heeled customers like honored guests, going out of her way to make sure they were having a good time, the better to make sure they kept bleeding dollars all over her club.
With the way Nate had been throwing around dollars tonight, he’d have expected her to give him the royal treatment, but she was looking at him with thinly veiled scorn. The sense of hostility Nate was picking up from Angel made him distinctly uncomfortable, but without Kurt here to help him navigate the dangerous waters, he had to just suck it up and do what he came to do.
“I’m looking for the Bishop,” he said, using Kurt’s street name. No adult in Debasement used real, honest- to-goodness names. They went by their first names as children, until they’d “earned” their street names. Many Basement-dwellers—Kurt included—didn’t even
Angel threw her head back and laughed, the sound loud and raucous enough to draw a few stares. Nate felt the blood heating his cheeks, but he wasn’t sure what he was embarrassed about. Or what Angel found so damned funny. He ground his teeth to keep from saying something stupid and waited for her to stop laughing at him.
Angel’s laughter eventually died, though razor-sharp amusement still glittered in her steel gray eyes. “You stupid fuck,” she said, smiling like she was making friendly conversation. “Half of Paxco wants a bite of that boy. Unless you’re the Chairman in disguise, there’s at least a dozen people who could make it even more worth my while to help them find him.”
Something uneasy slithered down Nate’s spine. Nate’s first trip to the Basement in his alter ego as the Ghost had happened the week after his eighteenth birthday, and he and Kurt had been to Angel’s once or twice a month since then. Never had Angel shown the slightest hint that she might know who he really was. But there was something disturbingly sly about her words and the way she was looking at him.
Angel couldn’t possibly know, could she?
But no, that was impossible. If Angel knew who he was, she’d either be trying her hardest to get him out of her club before something bad happened to him and she got blamed for it, or she’d have sent word to the biggest, baddest power players in Debasement and gotten them into a bidding war for the right to kidnap him. He wasn’t sure anyone in Debasement had what it took to hold him without being destroyed—he wouldn’t put it past his father to firebomb an entire block to punish anyone who dared attempt a kidnapping—but there were certainly some who would love to try.
He was drunk and paranoid, Nate told himself. The only reason he was sensing something “off” about Angel was because Kurt wasn’t here with him to act as a buffer.
“You’re a mercenary,” Nate said, “but there’s more to you than that.” The Angel of Mercy moniker was mostly sarcastic, but Nate had always gotten the impression there was a hint of truth in it. She might not
