Chapter 2

"Listen carefully, Nina."

"Every guy who ever touched you. Every time you slept with someone. I know all of it."

"And I still put my ring on your finger."

"You know what that means?"

His voice was low.

"It means I, Dante Moretti, love you. Love you enough to accept even the ugliest parts of you."

My tears splashed onto the back of his hand.

He looked pleased. He pulled me into his chest, chin resting on the top of my head.

"Good girl. Stop crying. Nobody in this family will ever bring that stuff up again. Not if they wanna keep breathing."

He held me tight. I could feel his heartbeat against my cheek.

I closed my eyes in his arms with one thought pounding in my head —

Not one word of what he said was true.

I never turned tricks.

But yeah — I had walked into that kind of place.

Seven years ago, I was eighteen, sleeping on a hallway bench in the hematology wing of St. Mary’s Hospital for forty-seven nights straight.

My mom, Rose Shaw. Acute leukemia.

The day of the diagnosis, the doctor pulled me into his office and told me the bone marrow transplant plus follow-up care would run about two hundred grand.

Two hundred grand.

My dad died when I was six. He left us a leaky little house and about eight thousand in the bank.

I got through high school on scholarships. My entire savings was forty-two hundred bucks I’d earned making smoothies over summer break.

I begged at social services. Begged the Red Cross. Begged on every crowdfunding site I could find.

I scraped together sixty-three thousand dollars. A drop in the bucket.

Then someone slipped me an address.

88 Gold Street. A place called The Velvet Room.

I didn't know it then, but it belonged to the Moretti family. Downstairs was a jazz lounge. Upstairs was a whole different world.

I went.

Madame Rosa took one look at me and asked my age.

"Eighteen."

She handed me a tight cocktail dress and walked me up to a VIP room on the third floor.

"Pour drinks. Smile. Chat."

She leaned against the doorframe and lit a cigarette.

"That’s it. A skinny thing like you? Nobody’s paying for extras anyway. Five hundred bucks a night. In or out?"

I was in.

Not a hooker. A hostess.

Pouring drinks. Lighting cigars. Getting yelled at. Getting force-fed shots. Getting groped. Getting talked to like garbage by guys with pinky rings and guns tucked in their belts.

But I never sold my body. Not once.

In forty-seven nights, I worked thirty-nine shifts at The Velvet Room.

One night a drunk guy pinned me to a couch.

I kneed him in the groin. The floor boss docked me three days' pay.

"You don't like it? Walk," she said. "There's a line of girls outside dying to take your spot."

I didn't walk. My mom's surgery couldn't wait.

Off shift at 2 a.m., I walked forty minutes back to the hospital, got three hours of sleep on that hallway bench, then got up at six to make her oatmeal.

Once I had eighty grand, plus the sixty-three thousand I’d already raised, I scraped together enough for the first surgery payment.

The day the bone marrow match came back positive, I cried in a hospital stairwell for a solid twenty minutes.

Then I washed my face, went upstairs, and told my mom, "Guess what — the school scholarship came through."

And Dante Moretti? He met me in that same hallway.

He was visiting his grandfather in another wing. He walked past hematology and saw me curled up asleep on the bench.

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