“Long live the King!” one woman shouted, hefting a bottle of champagne in the air. “About time! I’m freezing my tits off.”
She and the other intruders started to press toward the door. Kingsley held up his hand. “What the hell are you all doing here?”
“It’s your birthday, right?” the woman with the champagne bottle said. “We’re here for the party.”
He recognized her. Her name was…something that started with an R? Manhattan socialite—she’d tried on kink like a new outfit and decided she liked the way it looked on her. He recognized a few other faces, men and women who’d frequented his clubs in the past. Kat, the daughter of the ex-governor. Tate, her high-functioning alcoholic boyfriend. Another girl wearing only a red, white, and blue bikini under her coat. In the old days, he might have saluted her flag. Tonight he just wanted to tell her to wrap up before she contracted hypothermia.
“Mon roi?” Against orders, Juliette had come out of the sitting room and now stood by him. “Who is it?”
“Oh,” Roxy said, eying Juliette’s round belly. Kingsley instinctively moved in front of Juliette. “No party this year, I guess?”
“No,” Kingsley said to Roxy, to Kitty, to Tate, to the city itself. “The party’s over.”
Chapter Two
After the revelers had left, Juliette laughed at how scared they’d been of a few drunks at their door. She kissed him on the lips and went up to bed. Kingsley promised to be up soon. First, he had to check all the locks.
He wandered from room to room, not only checking that the front, back, and side doors were locked, but the windows, too. Never before had he locked the doors of the townhouse, believing it a sign of fear and weakness. His old arrogance shamed him. The woman he loved was pregnant with his first child.
He was almost tempted to hire bouncers to guard the door. After checking the locks, he returned to the sitting room to make certain the fire was out completely. How could he live with himself if he let the townhouse catch on fire with Juliette inside? Was this paranoia? He wished. But no, just weeks ago, secrets from his past had finally caught up with him. Søren and Nora had nearly paid with their lives. At night, as soon as he closed his eyes, he was back in that room, ears ringing from the loud claps of gunshots, and there was every chance in the world he would not survive to hold his newborn baby.
Everything changed in that room. And everyone came out of that room a different person from the one who’d walked into it. Especially him. The man who went in never locked his doors. The man who came out checked the seals on the windows to make sure not even an ant could crawl inside his home.
A mirror hung over the fireplace, gilt-framed, antique, and he caught a glimpse of the King that looked back at him—dark olive skin inherited from his Italian grandfather, dark eyes. Not a single gray hair, not a single wrinkle despite this being his forty-seventh birthday. Thanks to his good genes he didn’t remotely look his age.
Ah, but he felt it. Here he was, creeping toward fifty and yet still kicking drunks off his stoop at midnight.
Roxy had looked at him like he’d grown a second head when he’d opened the door. It was his attire—no suit, no boots. Instead, he had on dark brown trousers, a black pullover, and the glasses he wore when reading. He looked, in a word, vanilla.
A year ago, he might have cared. Maybe even a few months ago. But the moment Juliette began to show, the moment when her pregnancy became real and not hypothetical, was the moment he stopped giving a single fuck about anyone and anything but her, the baby, and the few people in his life he considered family.
Nora. Søren. Griffin…
The list was short and getting shorter all the time. The dogs were gone. Sadie had been killed, and Dom died not long after. Old age. Brutus and Max were living with Calliope in the Hamptons. He’d lied to Juliette, saying since the dogs were so old, he wanted their last months to be spent somewhere they could run and play by the water, not cooped up in the townhouse. But the truth was, the first time he’d seen one of his enormous Rottweilers jump up on Juliette, nearly knocking her over, he couldn’t get them out of the house fast enough.
God, he needed a drink. Except since Juliette wasn’t drinking, he’d also cut back.
The dogs living with Calliope? Staying home on his birthday to snuggle up with Jules and read? No wine? He knew becoming a parent entailed making sacrifices. So far, they’d all been surprisingly easy. He couldn’t help but wonder what harder, more painful sacrifices were to come?
He placed his glasses on top of his book on the side table. Juliette had left her iPad behind, and he picked it up to take to her upstairs. He tapped the power button, curious to see what she’d been reading. The screen came to life and displayed a photograph of one of the most beautiful houses he’d ever seen. A red-brick mansion with white columns and a grand portico. Elaborate, almost tropical landscaping. He read the caption: “One of many mansions on St. Charles Avenue, seen from a New Orleans streetcar.”
It was a page from a travel guide to New Orleans. No surprise, as he was taking her there the day after Christmas for a two-week “babymoon,” which was like a honeymoon. Supposedly. He had never heard of such a thing until Griffin had told him it was de rigeur now to take one’s pregnant wife or girlfriend on a last big vacation before the first baby came along. Sounded painfully bourgeois to him, but when he mentioned it to Juliette, her eyes had widened. She’d said at once, “Could we go to New Orleans?”
As he flipped through the pages of the book on her iPad, he saw massive ancient trees dripping with Spanish moss, old mansions, brightly-painted houses, Christmas lights hanging in palm trees, and French words everywhere—Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), banquette (sidewalk), Vieux Carré (Old Square, the French Quarter), and bien sûr—laissez les bons temps rouler (let the good times roll).
He wished they were leaving right now.
As he started up the stairs, his phone began buzzing in his back pocket. He pulled it out and saw he had a text message from Leo, one of the bouncers at The 8th Circle.
Guy ODed outside on the sidewalk. Ambulance on the way. Orders?
One of ours? Kingsley replied. If the man were a member of the club, he would head over there right away.
Never seen him before.
Kingsley told Leo to keep watch over the man, to keep him warm until the authorities arrived. And he should try to keep everyone inside the club until the police and EMTs were gone.
These calls were coming more and more often—poor souls overdosing in the bathrooms of his clubs, in the alleys behind them. Opioids were almost always the culprit. It seemed like a lifetime ago he’d found Griffin Fiske passed out drunk on the floor of one of his clubs. A more innocent time. Booze and coke were child’s play compared to the au courant drugs people were on these days.
Kingsley knew these calls would keep coming. And people would keep showing up at his door, expecting an invitation into the non-stop orgy that had been his life for so many years.
When he said the party was over, he’d meant it.
But how did you un-invite an entire city to a party they’d thought would never end?
Second Movement