She also saw the part of me that was reserved for her and her alone. The part of me that wanted to protect the innocent, that wanted to give the untouched and the unforgiven a fighting chance. She saw the part of me that still managed to care even though it had never known kindness or softness. It was the part of me she awakened when she looked up at me from the stage when she was just a kid.
I tossed the empty bottle in the recycle bin, scooped up my dirty shirt, and headed out toward the main part of the house. The guest rooms were upstairs on one side of the expansive sprawl and the master was on the other. I had some numbers to run before opening day and I was still waiting on a call from Chuck about whoever had been careless in the cooler earlier, but I was tired. Going head-to-head with Key and the sexual tension still humming in my blood made me feel lethargic.
I was surprised to see Bayla sitting on my white leather couch when I entered the living room. She was quiet and very discreet, which is why I kept her around. She was also very nice to look at and sucked cock like a champ, which had just been a side benefit of bringing her on before I knew Keelyn was going to be under the same roof. She typically knew when to make herself scarce, so I figured her appearance had to do with the woman that was back and determined to turn my entire world end over end.
“Why are you still here?”
The younger woman lifted her dark eyebrows and rose in an elegant motion off the couch. She walked toward me and took the shirt I was still holding out of my hands. I had sacrificed more than one really nice garment to the blood and grime that infiltrated my day-to-day, but this one was still salvageable.
“I’ll drop this off at the cleaners for you on my way back into town. How long should I expect your guest to be staying?”
My jaw clenched, and I almost tugged the shirt back out of her hands. I didn’t like being questioned about anything, and as far as Keelyn was concerned, I wasn’t going to try to explain that situation to anyone.
“For as long as she wants. Her stuff will be here tomorrow, and she better feel welcome. Do you hear what I am saying to you, Bayla?”
She had never struck me as jealous or proprietary before. Other women had come and gone on her watch, but Key was the first who was allowed to stay.
“I understand perfectly, Nassir. You like to pretend to be made of stone and ice, but you cannot stop yourself from trying to save tragic women. I have seen that firsthand.”
They weren’t tragic, they were innocent. When I had the means to offer someone the chance to save themselves, I never let it pass. I knew all about being on someone else’s leash and coming to heel for a master I never wanted to serve, so I couldn’t stop myself from offering the innocent a way out whenever I could. All of the people that worked for me knew there was a way out, there was no contract or intimidation, and I held that up as especially important for the women that worked for me. If they didn’t want to dance, if they tired of selling sex, I made sure they had an escape route, and I always did my very best to make sure I had a spot for them in one of the less “objectifying” areas of my business. Few took me up on it. Selling sex was easy, and with me to keep them safe and vet their clients, the women that worked for me often did so without much thought to the future. I’d offered Key more than one exit strategy over the years, but the woman was determined to save herself. She was as far from tragic as they came, and that was one of the primary reasons I could never get her out of my system.
“I’m not trying to save anyone.” In fact, whenever I looked into those cloudy gray eyes, it felt like she was the one trying to save me.
Bayla’s dark eyes shifted away from my probing gaze and I saw her hands twisting in the expensive fabric of the shirt she had commandeered.
“She must be very special.” Her voice was quiet as she turned on her heel and headed toward the front door. “I’ll see you sometime tomorrow. Let me know if you have any specific instructions now that you have a permanent guest.”
The front door clicked closed behind her and I sighed. Bayla’s possessiveness was not a complication or headache I needed to deal with on top of getting the club opened up, and getting Key into my bed. It would be bothersome and time-consuming to find someone else to take care of the house, and I had no doubt that if I kicked her out of her current role, Bayla would end up back on the streets selling herself for money. I didn’t want that to be the outcome because she was a good housekeeper and a decent woman, but I wasn’t going to let anyone or anything stand in the way of getting what I had wanted for so long.
She’d come to me too young and too broken. I don’t know if she found me because I was the lesser of two evils or because I felt familiar. There were a lot of different ethnicities and cultures at work in the Point. A lot of different voices and accents, a lot of variations of skin color, but we were all hiding and looking for something more than we had, wherever it was we originated from, so I always wondered if Bayla sought me out because I felt like a piece of home.
Prostitution was technically legal where I was from, as legal as the sex trade can ever be. However, vices and carnal desire always make man more monster than anything else, and in a place that was always in need of more money to fund a war and feed more terror, something as simple as selling sex legally turns ugly really fast. Bad men buy young girls and force them to work. That money then ends up in the hands of extremists, and girls too young to know what is happening to them are ruined forever.
Bayla suffered in silence as she was sold to a human trafficker and eventually landed on the streets of the Point. She was still in the hands of bad men and still having to do horrible things at an age when most girls are just learning to drive, but she survived. She made it, and when Novak finally went down and I moved in to take over all of his girls, she came to me first. My plan was to let them all go out on their own and be able to handle their money, but much to my surprise, they needed me. They needed the threat of my name and reputation to keep them safe out there on the streets, and Bayla was the first young woman to sign herself up for the partnership.