"Nope. Just in your pants."
A long silence follows. "In the ranks of The Cabal, the rewards scale up as you rise. Starting out, Si and I were errand boys. Messengers. Lackeys. We did the dirty work, but not the violent dirty work, the actual dirty work. Deliver food to the lieutenants, take messages too sensitive for phones or whatever. Clean toilets. Clean up after parties. Make sure hookers got paid. We got paid for the work, but the only reward was the money."
"Okay?" I'm not sure where he's going with this, but I can't deny I'm interested.
"Then we got promoted to grunts. When a hit went down, we were the guys in the backseat of the SUV spraying with Uzis. Front of the line—first to die, last to get paid. No training, just disposable resources. The pay was better—high five figures a year, plus we'd get a tiny cut of drugs and access to the women."
"The women?" I ask.
"The Cabal is heavily involved in sex work. And yeah, that includes human trafficking. Silas and I…it made us sick. We avoided those details if we could. But mostly it means brothels and escorts. High-end shit." He shrugs. "Access to women meant we were allowed to avail ourselves of the women, of which there was a fuck-ton, all the time. Cabal soldiers and higher-ups and such like to party: work hard, play hard, right? So, hookers were everywhere. As long as you paid, grunts could be part of the fun. We didn't make enough that we could afford the girls too often, because like I said, Cabal doesn't run cheap girls and grunts make shit, comparatively speaking…I'm talking five grand for a night, at least, baseline."
I roll my eyes. "I know what escorts make, Saxon." At his sudden silence, I laugh. "No, not because I was one. I thought about it, though, and almost became one. But the dressmaking took off at just the right moment, and I didn't. I knew a bunch of them, though."
"You familiar with Starry Night Engagements?" He asks.
I freeze. "Yeah. My friend Suze worked for them. She was the one who told me I'd make serious bank with them."
"Be glad you didn't. It's a Cabal operation. The girls make bank, yeah, and a lot of them do end up able to retire from the business after a few years. But they're the lucky ones. Others…not so much."
"I know what happens to the unlucky ones," I murmur. "All too well."
"Well, anyway. I do have a point with all this."
"Carry on, then," I say, ignoring the fact that I'm terribly, scarily, worrisomely comfortable just settled and cozy in Saxon's arms, on his lap, cheek against his chest.
"Once you get promoted to soldier, you go through training. It's fuckin’ brutal. Like Marine Corps Basic but without the guidelines or restrictions on what they can do or say to you. It's brutal. But the pay is scaled, so you get more money, like six figures to start, plus the perks…the perks are the real good stuff. You get a key of whatever drug you want each month. Free. Just a perk. You drink for free at any Cabal-owned bar or club. And you get a coin. It's brass when you first make soldier. Means you get one night a month free at any brothel or with any escort. Rank up, it's bronze, two nights. Rank up again, silver—seven days." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a metallic coin about the size of a silver dollar; I take it, and it's remarkably light.
"That's palladium," he says. "It's an all-access pass. Gives the bearer anything he wants across any Cabal business."
I examine the coin; it features three words in what I believe to be Latin: "Morituri te salutant."
"Anything? Unlimited?" I ask, flipping it over; the reverse side features a complicated logo comprised of a diamond within a rectangle, the diamond broken up into a pair of triangles, one upside right and the other upside down—mirrored basically—and then within each of those another reversed triangle, the whole creating a geometric impression of an hourglass.
He hums an affirmative. "Unlimited. Only a handful of others exist like it."
"And what's your point in showing me this?"
He doesn't answer for a moment. "I never used it. I never needed to. Never wanted to. I don't do drugs, except the occasional joint. And I never liked the idea of taking advantage of the working women by exercising my privilege of freebies."
"That's noble of you, Saxon, but I still don't—"
"Working women were the only kind I ever knew, for that whole period of my life. I never took freebies, I always paid them their worth. Eventually, I developed a sort of…relationship, I suppose, with a few of them. Rachel, Kayla, Abigail, and Susanna. Suze. Your friend, I think. Small world, right? Well…I'd do them favors. Little things. Rachel had a kid, and I'd deliver presents to him for her—she was keeping him hidden from the Cabal. Kayla had a drug problem, and I helped her stay sober so she could get out of the business. Abigail was saving her money to start a bakery, and I'd help her with the money stuff, investing and saving and such. Suze…" He trails off.
"Suze had a brother and sister she was taking care of. She said she had a guardian angel who made sure they had food and got to school when she couldn't." My nose tingles and my eyes sting. "That was you?"
"Guardian angel…fuck that shit." He sounds so bitter. "They wouldn't take my money so I found ways of paying them back for the…services…they provided."
"I see." I try to find the thread connecting this to where it started—me blowing him.
"I cared about them. They were good girls given the shit end of the stick in life, just trying to make it. We talked. I liked talking to them, liked being around people who weren't…like me, or worse: killers, addicts, assholes, and fuckin'…just the scum of the earth. But they knew my bosses and theirs were keeping tabs on them, and me. They were working girls. Their time was money. So I couldn’t just hang out with them. It had to be work. But they were my only…relief from the life I was living."
I think I see where this is going. "And you didn't feel right fucking them, so…"
"They'd go down on me." He sounds…tense.
"So you're an expert in receiving head, is what you're saying?" I hate how bitter I sound.
"No." he brushes his thumb over my lips. "I’m saying I know very goddamn well the difference between doing that because you feel like you have to or as just part of the process of gettin' it on, and…when it means something."
