O: I’ve spoken to the others. They’re in.
Orion and I had traded numbers before I’d left, and the message arrived just as I got out of the shower. I guessed a guy wasn’t worried about texting too soon when it was a fake relationship at stake.
Me: So, the cocktail party at the Sullivan compound tonight?
O: Don’t worry about that. The season calendar? That’s for academy girls. You’re a Rhodes.
Oh, that was a thing now? I looked around at my room, which wasn’t that different to when I was a teenager, just less posters of boy bands.
Me: K. Where would a Rhodes go?
O: (devil emoji) Apothecary
Me: …
That was what he would have seen as my thumb hovered over my phone, ready to reply, but with what? Apothecary was a well-known club. Well, notorious rather than famous. Drugs, strip shows, live bands, BDSM displays. It was like a modern-day Hellfire Club and very, very exclusive. No one knew who owned it, but I was willing to bet Orion did. I sure as hell wasn’t going to find the right kind of alpha there. If anything, it was the hunting ground of the very overbearing, abusive dickholes I’d had nightmares about. But…
Me: What do I wear?
And then he wrote the magic words.
O: Whateva you want
OK, I was fucking sold. A night of voyeurism, seeing how the other half lived. I could do that and dress up in Madam Colette’s beautiful creations in the morning. I texted back my acquiescence, putting my phone on charge before taking a disco nap until the sun set.
Tap, tap, tap on my door.
“Cyn, George has texted me to see if you’re going to the Sullivan thing tonight? I have him on retainer, but we need to keep him informed,” Mum called through my door.
I groaned, blinking, then saw that I’d slept the day away, but thankfully, I woke with no hangover. I was fresh and ready to play.
“Not going to the Sullivans,” I said, sitting down at my dressing table. I’d scrubbed all evidence of the makeup artist’s work away and now snapped open my own case of war paint, pulling out my best winged eyeliner brush. “O’s invited me to one of his friend’s clubs.”
“O?” She opened the door a crack, then saw I was wrapped in a robe. “Orion?”
That hope, that lightness in her tone. I clung to that like I did my powder brush, painting my skin paler, then my eyes darker. I worked until I looked like the perfect caricature of an omega, all big dewy eyes as I applied tiny diamantes to my eyelids and pale, bloodless flesh.
“Yep.” I opened my phone messages and checked to see what the transport plans were. “He’s picking me up here in an hour.”
“I’ll ring George then,” she said, eyeing my regalia. Some of that relief was dissipating, that line back again. “I don’t feel comfortable with you going out without a chaperone.”
I bit back my response. Georgy boy was just as likely to ditch me and get a blow job in a stall at a place like Apothecary, but in the end, that would probably work in my favour. George was cool. He was put in a shit situation and he made the best of it and he was nothing if not loyal. He’d chosen to chaperone me at each Omega Ball, even when I shunned the rest of the non-compulsory events.
“OK, did you want him riding in the car with Orion and me, or is meeting us there sufficient?” I asked the reflection in the mirror.
“Meeting there should be fine.” It wasn’t. I watched her thumbs hover over her phone in indecision. My mother was ice cold in the boardroom, with nerves of fucking steel. Something like this shouldn’t derail her. “The Ratcliffe boy will have a driver, won’t he?”
And therefore a de facto chaperone.
“I suppose so. Can’t see him driving himself.”
“And those clothes.” She watched me pick out a well-worn pair of black jeans, my romper stomper boots, and a silky black sleeveless top that had a choker neckline, the broad band fitting tightly around my neck, clipped together with press studs. “Cyn, I bought all those new pieces from Madam Colette.”
“Which I will wear in the morning, I promise, Mum. I’m going to a club. As fabulous as Col’s creations are, they aren’t club clothes. I’ll look like an idiot if I wear pearls and a twin set.”
Which was exactly the right thing to say. We were new, new, new money, and so that made us both powerful and insecure about where we fit in this new world. I didn’t care, but Mum, she did. So she watched me tease out my hair until it was a riot of lazy brown waves and then nodded, answering the phone when George rang back.
“He said it’s fine, he’ll meet you there,” Mum told me when she ended the call.