Chapter 5: The Vice Currency

The penthouse sat twenty-two floors above the river, all glass and low lighting, the kind of place that rented by the night to people who didn’t want their names on anything. Emily stepped out of the elevator in a black dress that stopped mid-thigh and heels she hadn’t worn in years. Alonzo’s man at the door nodded her through without a word. Inside, the circle was small—four men she had already met at the warehouse, two women who handled cash and phones, and Alonzo himself near the windows with a drink in his hand.

She moved through the room the way she used to move through a precinct after midnight: unhurried, listening more than she spoke, letting people fill the silence. When one of the lieutenants started talking numbers on a new stretch of blocks south of the old rail yard, she asked the right follow-up—who was already collecting, who was getting pushed, what the weekly take looked like before anyone skimmed. The man answered because she had already been on the desk in the warehouse. That fact sat in the room even when no one said it out loud.

One of Alonzo’s closer men—the shorter, thicker one from the warehouse—caught her wrist as she passed the bar and pulled her into the hallway that led to the bedrooms. He didn’t ask. He backed her against the wall, hiked the dress, and fucked her standing up while the low music from the main room covered the sounds. Emily kept her hands on his shoulders and her eyes open, taking it the way she had taken it on the desk, letting him finish inside her before she straightened her clothes and walked back out like nothing had happened. Alonzo watched her return. He didn’t comment. He just raised his glass half an inch.