But the account was deleted—no, deactivated—just over a year ago. Which means she kept it but doesn’t want anyone to know about it. The database includes the handle but not the content. It’s gone.
I set the phone down on my chest, staring at the ceiling.
Who the hell is this woman?
Not the desperate, cornered creature I thought I was dealing with.
Not just some random server who happened to catch my eye.
The shower stops. I pick up my phone again, closing the background check app before she emerges. Whatever her story is, I want her to tell me herself. I want to see what she chooses to reveal and what she hides.
The bathroom door remains closed. I can hear her moving around inside.
Seventy-five thousand followers. Then nothing. Complete disappearance from public view. Now she’s in my pool house, naked in my bathroom with no clothes to put on, playing a game of demerits and rewards for a chance to change her life.
Why?
What happened in that deleted year?
22
I’m standing in Giovanni Bavga’s showerwith water hot enough to scald the memory of his hands off my skin, and yet here I am, replaying every touch like it’s the director’s cut of a movie I shouldn’t be watching.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I press my forehead against the cool marble tile. The water pressure is perfect because of course it is. Even his shower is an overachiever.
It’s not the sex I regret. Sex is just bodies doing what bodies do. Physics and chemistry and a sprinkle of bad judgment. No, what’s making me want to crawl out of my skin is that somewhere between him shoving me against a door and reciting poetry about wisteria in that voice that sounds like expensive whiskey, I started tolikehim.
Like. Him.
Giovanni Bavga, who makes grown men piss themselves. Giovanni Bavga, who keeps a notebook of my mistakes. Giovanni Bavga, who probably has bodies buried under those wisteria vines.
And I’m standing here with my heart all a flutter because he knowspoetry.
God, I’m such a cliché. Every dark romance protagonist ever. “But he haslayers, you guys!” Yeah, layers of criminal activity and manipulation tactics. The man collects women like trading cards, and I’m just the latest limited edition holographic pull.
I reach for his fancy body wash. It smells like him. I hate that I noticed that.
This isn’t my first rodeo on the Bad Decision Bronco. I’ve been here before, riding high on the rush of being wanted by someone dangerous, telling myself it’s different this time.
My ex—no, I won’t dignify him with a name, not even in my thoughts—he wrote the playbook Giovanni is following. The rules. The punishments. The rewards. The way he’d swing between cruelty and tenderness until I couldn’t tell which was which anymore.
I remember the day he laid out his expectations, bullet-pointed like a corporate memo. “If you break these rules, here’s what happens.” And like an idiot with a PhD in self-destruction, I nodded and said, “I understand.”
Giovanni’s demerit notebook might as well be written in my ex’s handwriting. I knew this the moment I picked it up from the seat in his Lambo. I understood what this was.
But it’s different, you guys! Because Giovanni is playing a game. And… it comes with rewards.
How. Fucking. Pathetic.
The shower spray hits a tender spot on my hip—Giovanni’s fingerprints. Tangible evidence of my spectacular judgment.
Twenty-one days until I’m completely homeless. Five demerits—this seems to be a number we keep circling back to. Thirty-one thousand dollars dangling in front of me like a carrot on a stick.
And all I need to do is not fall for the mobster.
Simple, right? Just like “don’t touch the hot stove” is simple until you’re freezing and it’s the only warmth in the room.