Page 7 of The Devil Wears Nada

It's not a normal cha-ching. The number floating up the chat has too many digits, and I lean into my screen like an idiot to count the zeros. Two hundred crowns. From a handle I have never seen before: NoComment.

No message. No hi. No show feet. No buy crypto. Just the money, dropped the exact instant after my laugh, like the laugh is the thing he paid for.

"Oh," I say, genuinely thrown. "Um. Wow. Thank you, NoComment. That's—that's really⁠—"

Cha-ching. Another hundred. Still not a word.

I don't even get to be weird about it, because the whole room changes temperature the way the office does when Sloane walks in. Then the scrolling messages on my laptop get strange. Not bad strange but still strange.

HouseMoney: there she is.

HouseMoney: the famous laugh.

HouseMoney: worth every crown.

And a tip lands that makes NoComment's look like a tryout. I can’t fathom the number because I don't believe it myself. HouseMoney is LOUD, all-caps energy, running the chat like he’s my manager or something, telling my regulars to make room for the grown-ups. SaltyDog is thrilled. Mr_Reliable has thoughts.

Then, quieter, a third.

KindRegards: Don't let them rattle you. You're doing great.

And a tip that manages to feel like the kindest of the three, if a tip can be kind, which it turns out it can.

Three new accounts, or should I say Knights, now stacked at the top of my little Round Table like they own the place, out-tipping my entire room of regulars combined, in just ninety seconds.

I should be delighted. I am delighted. My brain's doing frantic calculations and I’m purring at the sheer scale of it.

But underneath the delight, way underneath, something small and cold taps me on the shoulder and asks a question I'm too green and too broke to stop and actually answer.

What guys show up, all three, the same night, together, throwing money like this at a nobody with forty viewers and a chihuahua for a stage name?

Cha-ching, says HouseMoney.

I put the question down. I pick the money up. I get back to work, and I give the three of them the show of my short, stupid camgirl career.

But there’s something I never planned on.

Three men are hanging on every inch of me, paying like they’re in love, and somewhere around the third slow turn, I stop faking it and start actually feeling it, a low, warm pull, deep and unhurried, the kind I usually only find alone with the lights off. I'm kneeling in a nine-dollar slip, lit by a lamp that may catch fire, running on no sleep, and I’m, no shit, a little turned on. Not by them, though. By this. By what it does to a room when I decide to move slow. In a way that feels good to me.

I don't know what to think about all that, so I just keep going.

By the time I sign off, I've made more in one night than Ardent Capital pays me in two weeks.

I sit on my crappy comforter with the laptop warm on my knees and three strange handles glowing at the top of my board, and think, Whoever you are, gentlemen. Welcome to the court.

Long may I reign.

The day after I make two weeks' salary in one night, I still have to show up and photocopy things, answer phones, and just generally fade into the background.

I'm back behind the front desk at Ardent Capital in my boring best, sitting on a secret the size of North America. Three secrets, actually, consisting of three handles glowing at the top of my CamALot Round Table, three Knights who threw money at me like confetti and vanished before I could figure out what they were buying. Diablo fell asleep grinning. Agnes showed up to the office in beige.

But that's Diablo's problem. Agnes has calls to route. Schedules to manage. Deliveries to sign for. And invisibility to maintain.

Beck Cross arrives with a whoosh. He's on the phone; he’s always on the phone, running all the things he runs, where he charms the person on the other end and the whole room at the same time, a model of slick congeniality. "No, no, you're the genius; I just sign the checks," he laughs. He winks at Sloane. He finger-guns the intern. He drops a "morning, gorgeous" on the espresso machine.

He’s tall and good-looking and knows it. Dark hair, big smile, sleeves rolled up over decent arms. And yeah, I look. Hell, everyone looks. But that's the thing about Beck; he turns it on for the whole room. Me, Sloane, the intern, the espresso machine. When a man flirts with anything that has a pulse, you know none of it's about you.

The man is, objectively, stupidly handsome with a face that never once had to try because it was blessed by the gods of good looks. And for exactly as long as it takes him to cross the lobby, standing in Beck Cross's blast radius feels like the sun came out specifically for you.