Eris doesn't like the starting hours. She doesn't like how empty the pit feels at nine, so she usually goes up to the penthouse until ten, then goes down and gets to work. She likes to get night sellers out of the way by eleven o'clock, and then she can do whatever she likes. The cops assume the deals happen at two, three in the morning, but Eris is too organized to let that happen. She doesn't sell to addicts; she sells to the smaller dealers. That's why the cops want to take her out—take out Nyx, take out half the drug movement in the city.

Eris pulls the Maserati into her parking space at nine-thirty-three, with twenty-thousand dollars of fentanyl, cocaine and ecstasy in the trunk. Peter is unloading the car immediately, and Eris almost—almost—gets to the stairwell to the penthouse before Nikolas pounces on her.

"Your other boyfriend is here," he says. "And I'm tired of running away from him. He's been asking for you for the last half-hour."

Eris glances over to the foyer. Through the glass, she can see Adam at the counter, talking with his hands. He looks over at her, then his face relaxes with relief. He makes a get-over-here-right-now gesture.

Eris passes by Nikolas and walks into the foyer. Kayla is on hostess tonight, taking fees and sending whoever wherever. She gestures to Adam as Eris walks in.

"He left his car here. I told him the policy, but he says he knows you. Says you can confirm it's him."

Eris doesn't look at Kayla, but she's impressed with how well she's playing the chirpy-girl act, since Kayla is anything but chirpy.

"I can, in fact, confirm that is Adam," Eris says. "You can let him into the parkade."

Adam turns to her, annoyed. "I've waited hours for you. They wouldn't call you, wouldn't give me your number—"

"You can have my number, Adam," Eris says.

Adam grits his teeth, and his knuckles turn white over the side of the hostess counter. "It's enough, Eris. Your policy makes no sense, your employees have no hierarchy—nobody here has any clue how or where to reach you, and you've made me hours late for work."

Eris knows he's late for work, obviously. He won't get to the station until after ten, meaning that if he had planned the buy for today, he won't be able to do it anymore. If any of Eris' buyers had called to say they have to move to tomorrow, Eris would've known they were cops. If Adam always planned the buy for tomorrow, which must be the case since no one called and moved, then at least Eris has narrowed down the suspect buyers and confirmed nobody tonight will be of issue.

"It is policy, Adam," Eris says to him. "I'm sorry you're late for work—"

Adam waves his hand, and it gets awfully close to Eris' face. To her utter embarrassment, she flinches slightly. He notices, but neither of them acknowledge it.

"Come on, Eris," he snaps. "You've been fucking with my head for the last twenty-four hours, and we both know it."

Eris watches him speak. He's talking about her flirting, the incident on the couch. He has no clue why he acted the way he did. He has no clue just how much Eris has been messing with his head.

"I was out today, Adam; I wasn't being deceptive. Yesterday was on you."

"Like hell it is. You're trying to get me off your case. If my supervisor knows what happened, then he'll move me elsewhere. Is that it?"

Not quite.

"I'm not responsible for the things you did," Eris replies.

"I think you might be," Adam says, lowering his voice. He knows he was drunk, but he also thinks it's utterly unusual that he doesn't find Eris nearly as ethereal and sensual as she looked last night.

"What was it?" Adam asks.

"Aphrodisiac."

Adam laughs. He's got a lovely smile in Eris' eyes, but this one is malicious in nature, and she finds that it suits him a little too well. He takes the ticket to the lot off the counter and shakes his head.

"You drug me countless times, you play your best game, and all I do is kiss you for a few seconds," he says. "You know, Eris, most women don't need drugs to seduce a man."

Eris notices how the green of his irises have a ring of yellow near the inside. "Call me unique, then," she replies. His resistance to her has nothing to do with her looks or seductive ability.

"You think you can blackmail me now with this? Threaten to tell my boss so I'll get off your back?"

Eris reaches forward, places one gentle hand on his arm and says, "I'm not telling a soul, Adam. Relax. Go to work. You're late." She steps around him and leaves the foyer.

Adam watches her leave. If she didn't do it to blackmail him, then he doesn't understand why she did it. She's not interested in him—she has some sort of agenda. Before he can sit in this foyer any longer and debate it, he heads to the lot. Brief today, buy tomorrow. Eris in jail by Sunday.

Eris left the foyer, but she watches him start up the Mazda and drive off from the window of the penthouse. Right as Adam pulls out, a delivery truck of alcohol comes in through the back entrance.

Eris smoothens out her turtleneck. Two tonight, three tomorrow. She'll play it by ear, by gut. She'll know who the cops are. She glances at herself in the mirror, smoothens out a little crease by her eye, and leaves the penthouse.

The liquor is being unloaded by Peter, so Eris comes around the side of the truck and knocks on the door.

It opens, and Leonardo steps down from the driver's seat. He's a burly man, with tattoos and a buzzcut. He glances at Eris, then looks her up and down.

"You look good tonight," he says, his accent thick. Eris left Greece the same year Leo left Italy, and yet she has no accent.

"You owe me forty when they're done. Give it to Nikolas and have him tell me when you leave."

Leonardo reaches out to grasp her shoulder. The men in the industry are always doing that—Eris is the woman, so they can push her around. Peter, who is now loading up bottles that are labelled as tequila but do not contain tequila, glances up at the situation.

"I was hoping we could have a little discussion tonight," Leonardo says, his fingers curling into her shoulder.

Eris rolls his hand off, glancing at Peter, who shoves away the pallet in his hands to take a step closer. He has that look in his eyes—the one Eris dragged him out of the south end upon seeing—that implies he could kill with his hands and sleep fine at night. It doesn't matter that Peter is hardly a violent person by nature; it only matters that he looks the part.

"What's the problem, Leo?" Eris asks as Leo eyes Peter.

"Invite me inside," Leo says. "We'll have a drink."

Eris doesn't like that. Leonardo is the biggest buyer she has, but she suspects he wants to get out from under her wing. Eris is the only one in the business that has contacts as big as the airlines, meaning she's the only one that gets in bulk shipments, and Leonardo doesn't like that.

"Why don't you come inside, Leo?" Eris asks. "We'll have a drink."

Leonardo smiles warmly at her, but his teeth are yellow. He follows her in through the back door, down the stairwell to the pit. Eris orders him a margarita—because she knows that'll piss off his obsession with being macho—and herself a martini. She opens the door to the private lounge and closes it behind him.

"Cops were at my place a few days ago," Leonardo says, making himself at home on the couch. Eris eyes his frame, those thick muscles in his shoulders. She touches her earpiece so Nikolas will be able to hear the conversation; Leonardo may be the bigger man, but Nikolas once knocked him unconscious with a single punch.

"Of course they were," Eris answers. "They have a buy planned for tomorrow, and they're trying to divert my attention."

Leonardo hums. The waiter comes in, drops off their drinks and leaves. Leonardo takes a sip of the margarita, then makes a face. He puts it back down. "Cops are planning a buy and you didn't shut it down already?"

"I have it handled," Eris says. She doesn't sit down with him.

"Or you're enticing the cops so you can publicly humiliate them. Sounds like something you would do."

"I have it handled."

"Which buyer's the cop?" Leonardo asks.

"That's not your concern."

Leonardo looks up at her, then pulls out a cigarette. He lights it in the cup of his hand and takes a breath. "I have cops up my ass, Eris. They're offering pleas if I give you up."

Eris imagines the carcinogens whirling about in the air from the cigarette, which are banned at Nyx. "To take me down would be to shoot yourself in the foot," she says.

He smiles, taking another drag. He knows she's bothered about the cigarette, knows she's currently calculating—down to the second—the time it will take her lungs to replace the damaged cells.

"I'd rather get shot in the foot than in the head," he says. The moment he found out about Eris' law degree, he'd immediately struck a deal with her. She could deal with the cops, but he could still push her around with force. Unfortunately, he'd underestimated two things: Her awareness regarding her own weaknesses, and her ability to coerce her champion-fighter boyfriend into committing assault crimes.

The longer Leo worked with Eris, the deeper he got in and the more power she had. He wanted out of her game and back to the one where the bigger guy won the fight. Bring in his own shipments and stop relying on her.

Eris knows that's his plan, of course, and it wouldn't be good for her. Leonardo owns a liquor store in the south end, which would never be able to launder the kind of profits Nyx does, but competition is competition.

"You know what you are, Leo?" Eris asks, watching smoke drift from his mouth. "You're the small fish. You always have the opportunity to take a plea so the cops can fry something bigger. I understand the water might look better in my pond, but you'd drown in it."

Leonardo smiles a yellow smile. "You know, Eris, I truly do admire the way you took this business by the balls. Pretty underdog like you getting all the big men on their knees—it's fascinating. But you took the fun out of drugs. No violence, no blood."

Eris swallows the bile in her throat. She tastes smoke in the air. "You have a girl, don't you, Leo? She's probably a fan of my boring business model."

"She is, actually," Leonardo replies, shrugging. "But you know women. They don't know what's best for them."

Eris takes a step forward, impatient. The martini on the table hasn't been touched. "You stand to lose more by competing with me than I would by losing you."

Leonardo leans back on the couch and puts his feet up. "Well, sure. I don't want to compete with you, but I think putting a bullet through you and your boyfriend would take out the whole problem."

Eris gives him a haunting smile. "There's piranhas on this side of the pond, Leo," she tells him.

"Who, cops? I know how to get them off my back better than you. You, who does a U-turn instead of going city-center in a chase."

Eris feels her gaze narrowing. "You know how to outrun them. I know how to chase them."

That, Leonardo finds is true. On the rare occasion that Adam has paid even a fraction of his attention to Leo, there have been close calls—anxiety ridden nights where he isn't sure what the cops know. Eris is always ahead of them.

"Tell me who the cop buyer is, Eris. Prove to me that you really do have this under control, and I'll let this go for now."

She looks him in the eye. "College kids. Brit Cavanaugh and the dessert delivery." Eris has one-third of a chance that she's right.

Leonardo examines her gaze, trying to decide if she's fibbing. But her gaze is iron-like and still. He puts out the cigarette, finishes the margarita, which he admittedly enjoyed, and stands.

She watches him carefully.

"Alright, Eris," he says. He used to call her an assortment of names—girl, kid, babe—when he first got into it with her, but somewhere along the way, he stopped.

He stops on his way out of the room, standing terrifyingly close to her. He leans in close and says, "I'm balls deep in this with you, Diakos. Deep as hell. You're smart, and I know you can keep us safe. But the moment your obsession with that cop turns dangerous, I'm out."

She says nothing, shows nothing.

He leans closer, his breath smelling of cigarettes. "I should rephrase. I won't be out; you'll be out. You, your oblivious boyfriend, and your little hookup. The whole trio." He flicks his fingers. "Out like lights."

She smiles but doesn't show the teeth. Leo has never seen her smile with teeth. "You know, Leo, I forgot to say congratulations," she says.

Leonardo doesn't know what she's talking about.

"The baby," Eris clarifies. "I've heard it's a boy."

Leo narrows his eyes back at her. His girlfriend, Nessa, hasn't told him she's pregnant. Probably because she plans to tell him that night, when he gets home.

Eris leans in to match him. Leonardo is taller than her, even with the heels, but for a moment, it doesn't feel that way. "Don't forget to lock up the medicine cabinet," she says. "Put covers on the outlets. And hide the guns, of course." She blinks once. "Wouldn't want a gruesome accident."

Leonardo isn't very intelligent, but he knows threats. He glances back at the cigarette. For some reason, he has the slight fear that leaving his DNA behind in her club is a bad decision. He has no clue how she gets the information she does. He has no clue how she does anything.

"Night, Eris," he says as he opens the door.

Leonardo has left her in the room alone, but she still answers him, "Good night, Leo."