Knight waved to the bartender. “Another Johnnie Blue.” The blended scotch was sixty dollars a pour at the hotel bar, but Knight had no qualms about letting Carlyle Insurance underwrite his bender, given the money he would soon be bringing in.

A slender Chinese woman in a backless designer cocktail dress sat down next to him, casting him a seductive look. Knight suspected she may have a boyfriend back home somewhere, but she was a wealthy young player like him, and they were the type that never truly belonged to anyone.

“What brings you to Hong Kong?” she asked, rotating her stool ever so slightly toward him.

Knight’s drink arrived. “Business.” He gave the scotch a swirl to melt the ice, then took a sip. His eyes fell on the lights outside, which were getting blurrier with each drink.

“What kind of business?”

Knight had successfully conducted the seduction so many times that the act of reciting it was beginning to bore him. He launched into it on autopilot, his thoughts still elsewhere.

“I can put a dollar value on anything,” he told her.

The woman leaned in, as they all did. “Even me?”

The Johnnie Blue hadn’t offered the escape he sought. Perhaps the soft embrace of a beautiful stranger would. It would be easy enough to get her back to his room—or hers. Soon, he would assign a dwindling dollar value to her. She would try to convince him she was worth more, and he would have her under his control. “Even you.”

“So can I,” she told him.

Knight smirked into his drink. That was a new one. “Oh, yeah?”

The woman leaned in close, whispering in his ear. “Two hundred for my hands. Five hundred for my lips. One thousand for everything.”

Knight laughed under his breath. Though he couldn’t argue with the specifics of her appraisal, paying for sex would deny him its true satisfaction—the conquest.

“How about I just buy you a drink?” he offered.

The woman forced a smile and walked away, leaving him alone again with his drunken toxic thoughts.

As one drink led to another, the bar began to empty out, but he kept his perch.

“I’ll have what he’s having.”

Knight recognized the voice and turned to find a familiar face.

“Well, look who it is! Secret Squirrel himself.” Knight was glad to see Kevin Davis. He didn’t know why; he just knew that he was.

“How’d you know I’d be at the bar?” Knight asked sarcastically.

“I checked your credit card purchases,” Davis replied without irony.

The bartender set a glass in front of Davis and filled it with scotch. Davis took a pained sniff and then forced down a sip of the burning brown liquid.

“What’s driving you to drink all of a sudden?” Knight asked.