But that wasn’t the worst of it. When he guessed I was involved, he’d followed me straight to Lou’s place. He knew we were in it together. I’d led him right to her. And because he was an asshole but not an idiot, he had enough of the pieces about the Lady’s agency to make real trouble. Lou hadn’t taken pictures. He had no reason not to go to the police. Unless we paid him one hundred large. He’d smiled as my jaw dropped. I had been the office manager—I knew what he made each year. It wasn’t even a drop in the bucket to him. But he might as well have asked me for a plane ticket to Mars, the sum was that far out of reach for me. And he knew it. He didn’t need the money. He just wanted to remind me what power really was.

He’d won. Again.

What choice did we have? I’d asked Lou. None, she’d told me. The only option was to fess up, come clean, fall on the mercy of our boss. She’d handle it for me—after all, before that moment, the Lady hadn’t even heard my name—but whatever terms the Lady set, I owed her.

The expense, Lou explained to me, hadn’t been only the bribe. It had been the protective measures the Lady was now taking. Before, Lou and Jackal had worked freelance, picking up cases from the Lady and coordinating over drinks or other public spaces. But the Asshole had figured it out—what was to keep him from threatening to go to the police again, even now that he had his money? The Lady’s arrangement with the police predated me, predated even Lou, but even they couldn’t sweep it under the rug if he made a big enough stink, got to the right person, an honest cop.

Enter: Perfect Alignment Massage. The Lady had bought the ailing business, done the bare minimum to convert the space. Now we had a legitimate cover, even paid taxes, the whole shebang. Girls? Of course we had girls coming through our doors. Los Angeles needed a lot of secretaries. We were doing the fine, upstanding work of placing them. Check the books. All in order. Every last penny accounted for.

Lou put a good face on it when we moved in. “This makes us respectable,” she told me. “It makes us more of a team.” We could call it Jo’s Place, she’d joked, since really I was responsible for the office in the first place, in a roundabout way. If only that wouldn’t attract too much attention, too many questions from passersby. Jo’s Place? A massage parlor? What exactly was offered . . . ? If only they knew.

At least the Lady hadn’t made me foot the rent bill on top of the bribe.