Nobody's Angel
A Dark Romance. Coming Dec 2026.
Chapter 1: Lyra
The chains of my gold Agent Provocateur set catch the backstage light and shine like stars in the mirror. My hand drifts up to the pendant at my collarbone, a small oval gold locket ringed with tiny diamonds. The only thing of any real value my mother left behind.
Everything about my life is fucked, but tonight, at least, I look like a golden goddess.
Fake golden goddess.
“Cheer up, Lyra Davine!” Elise hunches behind me and rests her hands on my shoulders, meeting my eyes in the mirror. “You’re going to ruin lives tonight.”
A smile breaks through. Elise has a way of making you feel like everything is going to be fine, even when nothing in your life suggests it will be. Her loose blond curls cut a sharp contrast against my straight, dark brown hair.
“So are you, dear.” I place my hand over hers.
“Alright, bitches.” April pours three shots of tequila and shoves them at us. “Let’s go relieve some rich pricks of money they don’t deserve.”
We clink the glasses together. April and Elise have become my best friends over the last year. They’re the only people — well, the only ones I trust — who know absolutely everything about my life and my family.
I throw the shot back in one go and bite down on a slice of lime. It’s only nine, and it’s going to be a long night.
The first time DJ Pat called me up, it was a graveyard slot. Ten o’clock. The floor was dead, which means the tips were, too. Of course it was the graveyard slot. I’m new. He owes me nothing. So after that dance, I handed over every single dollar of the three hundred I scraped off the floor and asked him — very sweetly — if he wouldn’t mind putting me on again, just past midnight.
The club filled slowly at first. By eleven thirty, most velvet booths were full; by midnight, the bar was three deep and the air was sticky with bourbon and cologne and the smell of cheap plastic beads. Mardi Gras Carnival has spilled in off the street.
It was half past midnight when Pat called me back up. He stretched the song out and I walked off five thousand dollars heavier. I tipped him out and disappeared into the changing area to wait for my pulse to come down.
Elise, April, and I came to New Orleans precisely because of Mardi Gras. Two weeks flanking the parade, and any half-decent dancer who plays the game right walks out with thirty grand. None of it shows up on a W-2 or a 1099 or any other piece of paper the IRS will ever see.
Everything I make here, I get to keep. Except that it’s not me who gets to keep any of this. It’s him.
I spray Guerlain once on my neck. I bought this perfume and the Agent Provocateur set in Paris a little over a year ago — the first real gift I gave myself after I finished my undergrad at Berkeley and started my first job as a data scientist.
They were also the last gift I gave myself.
For the past twelve months, every dollar I haven’t needed for the basics of staying alive has gone straight from my bank account to his. To Kane Strider.
I swallow another shot and head out onto the floor to find my next target.
The stage is the part I actually love. The pole dancing, the crowd noise, the bills coming down like rainfall. But a twisted part of me enjoys the rest of the job, too. The game. The hunt.
There’s a pull to making a man you’ve already decided isn’t good for anyone believe he’s falling for you. Believe whatever is happening between the two of you is real. Twisted, yes. But this pathetic power is just about the only kind of power I have right now, and I haven’t figured out how to give it up.
I used to have a regular back in San Francisco, Peter. He thought we dated for seven months before he finally came to his senses and settled down with someone probably a lot more normal. Honestly, I was happy for him when he “broke up” with me, even though I lost my biggest and most reliable customer.
Men like Peter are the easiest. They sit alone. They wear that specific expression — half hopeful, half braced for disappointment. They’re safe. Or at least, safer than most. Lonely. Almost always polite. I feel a little bad for them. But I know I can’t help them, and if they knew the truth about my life, they couldn’t — wouldn’t — help me either.
The other big spenders were birthday boys, bachelor parties, and couples who want a stranger who won’t ever become their problem.
I keep my eyes moving as I walk the floor. Then it lands on me. A slow, prickling weight at the back of my neck. The unmistakable feeling of being looked at by someone who isn’t going to look away.
I turn my head, just enough, and meet his eyes.
He isn’t looking at me the way men in clubs usually look at me. He appears entirely sober and his gaze holds without wavering.
Normally, when a man maintains eye contact this long, I’d already be on my way over. But something about this one stops me. The predatory stillness of him; the edge of a tattoo above the open collar of his shirt and more ink slipping out from under a rolled cuff.
He’s at a corner booth with two other men. One of them waves off a cluster of very eager girls without bothering to glance at them.
“Go.” A voice startles me from behind. “They’ve asked for you,” Van, the floor host, says.
“Who are they?”
“Friends of the house.”
I hesitate.
“They tip well,” he adds.
I make my way over, more wary than I’ve ever been at a place like this. I don’t let it show.
“Hi, I’m Angela.” I smile, careful not to linger on him. “How are y’all doing this evening?”
“Sit.” Just the one word. The man on his left — shaved head, shoulders straining a suit, face carrying a dangerously bored expression — is already getting up.
“We’ll be back, boss.” He walks off with his counterpart, who’s a near-mirror image of him, like the club hired them in matching pairs.
I lower myself onto the booth, carefully, like the seat might tilt.
I watch the boss’ two men peel off toward the bar, then turn back with the smile I use when I don’t know what’s expected of me. A year of dancing, and this is, genuinely, new.
“You’re new.”
“Yes.”
“Do you live here?”
“Moved here not long ago,” I lie.
“Hmm.” His eyes don’t move off me, and there’s nothing in his expression I can read.
He’s striking. He looks to be in his early thirties. Not the polished kind of handsome that belongs to a Hollywood dreamboat. Something rougher. Dark hair, faintly wavy, pushed back from a sharp hairline. His eyes are so dark the pupils get lost in them, and even this close, they give me nothing back. His forearms are exposed by rolled cuffs: heavy with muscle and tan. The right one has a script tattooed along its length. I can’t read the words from where I’m sitting.
If we had met somewhere normal like a coffee shop, I might have asked for his number.
But here. With ink crawling up from his collar and two men who call him boss, plus the fact that something about him reminds me, uncomfortably, of that piece of shit Kane — I know this is not someone you fuck with.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and feel my pulse misstep. “I’m supposed to be working. Did you want a dance, or…” I glance toward the floor, telegraphing the exit.
Without looking away from me, he pulls a stack of hundreds from inside his jacket and feeds them, slowly, into my cashbox. “There. I’ve bought the next few songs. Good enough for you?”
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. Am I supposed to be offended, flattered, scared?
“Now,” he says. “Who are you?”
“My name is Angela.” I smile.
“Angela. Is that your real name?”
I hesitate. A beat too long to say yes.
No one has ever asked if Angela was my real name. Not even Peter. Normally, lying is something I do without thinking. But something about him makes lying feel like it’s being watched carefully.
“No.” I pause. “I’m Lisa.” I then manage in one fluid go.
“Lisa.” He takes a sip of something dark from a low glass. “Can I get you anything to drink?”
“I’m good. Thank you.”
“Where are you from, Lisa?”
“New York.” Another lie. “And you? Are you from here?”
“Born and raised.”
“What’s your line of work?”
“Risk assessment.”
“Risk assessment? So you’re paid to judge things better than the next guy.”
“Something like that.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “And how long have you been doing this?”
“About a year.”
“You’re good at it. You have a dance background.” He says it as an observation, not a question.
“Fifteen years of ballet.”
“I can see that. Your extensions are beautiful. Must have taken years of discipline.”
“Thank you.” I dip my head, and a real smile slips out. He noticed the line of my legs, the pointed feet, the shape of my fingers. No one ever compliments the work behind the physique, the countless hours of barre and conditioning. He must be cultured. It’s been a long time since I let anyone be the kind of man I’d notice for a good reason.
“And with the clients. You’re good at it too.” He’s referring to how I interact with the guests.
“I do okay.”
“You’re good at it because you’ve already decided you don’t need to respect them, or for them to respect you.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s not a criticism. It’s useful for the performance.”
I open my mouth to argue. Close it again.
“Is that also what you do for your job?” I ask. “Decide who is or isn’t worth your energy.”
“I decide who’s a risk, who’s useful, and who’s worthy of a promotion. The rest follows.”
“So you’re running a multinomial classification on everyone who walks past you. It must be exhausting. Unless…” I lean in slightly, “you’re looking at very few features.”
His eyes narrow a fraction, like I said something I wasn’t supposed to. “Sorry, I got carried away.”
“No offense taken.” He pauses. “I just don’t usually get my jokes transformed into this caliber of vocabulary.”
I laugh, brief and shy, but genuine. He’s refined. Sharper than the venue would suggest. If we’d met somewhere normal, I really would have asked for his number. I push the thought down before it can settle.
“And what were you doing before ending up on a stage in New Orleans?”
“Same thing in New York.”
“Why this? With those extensions and that vocabulary.”
“Money.”
“You could make money other ways.”
“I could. None of them pay thousands in cash on a Tuesday.”
“Do you have a deadline for something?”
“Student loan’s expensive and I intend on paying it off asap.”
He gives me a smile, faint, but real. It comes out for a fraction of a second and then disappears. “Fair.”
His men reappear at the booth without a sound. The bald one bends and says something low against his ear. Two words, three at most. Whatever it is changes his face. Not by much. Just a small tightening at the jaw.
He stands. Pulls another stack of hundreds from inside his jacket and sets it on the table between us.
“I don’t want you with anyone else tonight,” he says. “Go backstage. Stay there. Go home after.”
I’m left speechless. That’s gotta be five grand.
“Who are you?” The question slips out.
He pauses, just long enough to look at me once more.
“Dante.”
Nobody’s Angel is a Dark Romance coming Dec 2026.
Beta reading available. ARC coming soon.
Contact: lilystadil