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Ace, even when he brought Cruz--and half what Ace usually left tucked under her jewelry box. Money never seemed to matter to him, and it had taken Cruz a while to understand that Ace had a far more valuable currency to trade.
    Cruz couldn't offer her a tattoo, but he'd count three hundred a bargain if it kept him out of his rooms and clear of any awkward apologies. "I'll stay, if you don't mind."
    She arched one eyebrow. "Jesus Christ. What did they do, fuck right in front of you?"
    Only practice kept him from flinching, and he took a drag from the cigarette to cover his momentary discomfort. Exhaling, he watched the smoke drift upwards. "You're blunt. I don't know if that's refreshing or irritating."
    "If you want me to stroke your ego, too, it'll cost you way more." But she grimaced. "I could've warned you, though. Ace and Rachel. That's some sort of crazy, epic shit right there."
    "That's what everyone says," Cruz agreed, turning to study her more closely. Jeni worked shows at the Broken Circle, but she wasn't an O'Kane. A position like that gave someone a good vantage point for observation--familiar but invisible. Trusted, but not intimate. "If they're so epic, why haven't they been a thing forever?"
    Jeni's eyes locked with his. "You'd have to know Ace. More importantly, you'd have to know what he used to do before he joined up with Dallas."
    Most of Eden knew of Ace, though fewer people would associate Alexander Santana with Dallas O'Kane's tattoo artist. "I know some of it. He slept with a lot of prominent women in Eden and broke up a few marriages when their husbands discovered the paintings he'd given them."
    One corner of her mouth ticked up in a rueful smile. "Slept with them? Sure, he did--after they paid him. He was a high-class whore, sweetheart, and those proper Eden ladies chewed him up and spit him out."
    Maybe it should have surprised him, but it was only a more pragmatic assessment of what most people in Eden thought--that Ace had seduced those women into being his patrons, trading sex for access to a comfortable life and high quality art supplies.
    That had been scandalous enough, in part because his rumored lovers had already made similar bargains with their husbands. In Eden, it was a woman's place to exchange infrequent access to her body for the comforts of a secure life, making Alexander Santana a disruption to the natural balance of power.
    Cruz rolled over to stub out the cigarette as a few more pieces of the puzzle slipped into place. "Jared and Gia. That's how he knows them?"
    "Yeah. They all had the same mentor, Eladio."
    "And the good ladies of Eden don't chew Jared up?"
    "He can hold his own." Her smile faded. "He's not like Ace. He's not looking for love."
    Ace would be the first to turn the words into a joke, one about how artists fell in love every day before noon and got their hearts broken by dinner. Cruz could never tell how much truth lay beneath the words, and that bothered him. Once upon a time, assessing motivation had been easy for him.
    Or maybe it had only seemed that way because he'd always been objective.
    "Rachel probably knows," he murmured, rolling onto his side so he could study Jeni's expression. "She's from Eden, too. Those sculpted paintings he used to do are infamous."
    She hesitated. "I don't know Rachel very well, just from around the club and backstage, but she seems pretty open. I think maybe she can't read Ace because she doesn't get how much he's hiding. She expects everything to be on the level, and it's not."
    "But you know Ace?"
    "Enough to know he plays it off, but he's got some fucked-up shit going on."
    Cruz caught a strand of her disheveled hair and wrapped it around his finger. "If you were me, what would you do?"
    She held his gaze. "You want pretty words to make you feel better?"
    Pretty words wouldn't make him feel better. "I like you blunt."
    "Then I'd run like hell. Get as far away from both of them as possible, before they could break my heart." Jeni