Read the first 3 chapters of Serafina!

My new sapphic romance, Serafina, is now on pre-order! Read the first 3 chapters to get you in the mood :)

Chapter 1 – Serafina

I sit in an armchair facing the door, the way my father used to.

This suite is beautiful, but I'm already getting cabin fever. The interior is soft and indulgent: thick rugs on top of pale marble, a sofa deep enough to drown in, fresh flowers, and classical paintings on the wall. I'm not supposed to stand near the windows. The curtains are as heavy as coats, drawn before I got here and not opened since. On my nightstand is a red button to press if I'm ever frightened.

There's a TV, some weights, and a yoga mat in the corner. I have a tablet they've stripped down so I can't open emails, messages, or forums. There's no way to reach a single person, other than a direct line to the two concierges who work solely for me. One during the day, and one during the night.

I don't know what time it is, and I don't care to check. Days blur into nights and whatever is happening outside, in here it's the same dim light from the two lamps I leave on. I haven't slept through a night in months. Not even now, with the best protection money can buy outside the door, bought by people who need me alive.

The vanity is stocked well, with beauty products, face masks, even the little lamp for setting gel nails with a row of colors, bases, and top coats beside it. There are hair products, a flat iron, and a fancy blow-dryer. All of it laid out for me to do myself, since no hairdresser or manicurist is getting past the man in the corridor. Most of it is untouched since I have no one to impress. Today I didn't even bother getting dressed and I'm still in my robe.

Back in Calabria there was a salon at home every Thursday, a girl, Renata, who did my nails and knew everything about everyone. There was gossip, there were lunches, there were my cousins, all of us by the pool for whole afternoons. But there was also a tall wall around our estate and an army of men at the gates. In a way that felt like a prison too, just one I called home.

I get up and dial one on my room phone. It rings straight through to Reba, the night concierge. I call her more than I need to at night. The tea's an excuse; I just want to look at her for a minute.

Reba immediately picks up. "Mademoiselle," she says.

"Some chamomile, please."

"Of course. Won't be long."

I put the phone down and rush to the mirror. I look like my mother at thirty-one — more every year. The same small frame she had, the same dark eyes set too wide, the straight nose, the full mouth. My black hair, cut in a bob and left alone, has gone wild since I haven't straightened it in days. My skin looks dull; the absence of daylight does that, and there are shadows under my eyes nothing in that drawer will lift.

I run a brush through my hair, a tissue over my face, then dab on some lip balm before she arrives.

Outside, I hear the cart. It stops, then the sounds of it being gone over — the lift of the lid, the clink of the pot, a low word or two. Security checks it every time, and her with it, even though they cleared her and told me there's nothing to worry about with the concierge. They don't take chances. Marco, the guard, knocks twice and says it's room service.

I open the door and Reba comes in with the cart. She's American — I figured that out the first night, from the vowels — and I never get tired of looking at her. The staff all wear a dark suit, the jacket cut close, and a white shirt open at the throat. She's tall, lean, androgynous-looking and comfortable in herself, with short dark hair pushed back. The watch is a man's, the shoes are flat and polished. I've wondered what she wears when she's not here. Jeans, I've decided, and a faded tee, somewhere with the sun on it. I've had a lot of time to wonder.

"Your tea, mademoiselle." Reba sets the tray on the coffee table and lays it out — the china pot, one cup, a dish of honey, and two amaretti I never order and always eat.

"Thank you," I say.

"You're most welcome." She smiles politely. "Anything else?"

I try to think of something. A different pillow, ice, a word about the AC — anything that keeps her in the room another minute. Nothing comes. Nothing that makes sense anyway.

Before I think better of it, my eyes go over her, down and back up. Most nights she ignores my stare, but tonight she looks back at me instead and it's the first time she's ever met my eyes head-on. Her gaze is curious: a tiny frown between her brows as she tilts her head. It goes through me like nothing has in years. My face goes hot and my hands don't know where to be. I want to hold the look and I want to run from it and both are happening at once.

I glance down at the teapot, embarrassed that I'm thoroughly shaken by a look alone. "No," I say. "That's all."

Reba lets herself out and I close the door behind her, exhaling with my forehead pressed against it. Then I pull myself together, pour the tea, stir in the honey, and sit back in my armchair.

Looking is the only thing I've ever been allowed. I figured it out young, before I had the word for what I was — that I could watch, as long as I was careful. A look and then away, my face back in order before anyone caught me.

There was a girl named Giulia. Her family knew my family, and they summered in the villa on top of the hill behind our estate. For three or four years she was just there as my friend, in the pool, on the lounge chairs, at the long lunches that ran until dark. I was sixteen the summer it stopped being nothing. I'd started to notice her breasts and how her top lip curled when she smiled and I wanted to be near her all the time. I know she felt it too because we became inseparable.

We were up in my room one afternoon while the house slept off the food and the heat, and she kissed me, or I kissed her, I've never been able to settle on which, but for about a minute it was the only thing that had ever made sense to me.

Then my mother opened the door and I'll see her face for the rest of my life. It wasn't disgust — it was fear. She got Giulia out of the house without a sound, then came back and held my face in both hands and made me swear on the Madonna, on her own mother's grave. Never again, Serafina, swear it. And I swore it, because she was shaking, and because she didn't have to finish the sentence that started with if your father, and if your brothers. She forbade me the only thing I'd ever wanted because it was the only way she knew to keep me safe.

I never saw Giulia again. Her family stopped coming the next summer and nobody said why. I kept the vow after that, not out of obedience but because the fear had gotten into me and stayed. So it went on being what it always was. Looking. A woman across a room at somebody's wedding. A friend of a cousin. A stranger in an elevator whose perfume I could still bring back if I tried. That's my entire life of wanting, start to finish.

But everything about my life has come apart, and the vow was my late mother's, made to keep me alive in a world that would have hurt me for it. That world is gone now, or I'm gone from it.

Tonight a woman looked back at me the way I looked at her and I didn't worry about my father's men, my brothers, or the army of loyal eyes that used to report everything back. The men in the corridor don't care who I look at; I could want every woman who comes in and it would mean nothing to them. Their job isn't my soul, it's my pulse. All they need is for me to still be breathing when this is over.

Chapter 2 – Reba

I bring the car up from the garage under the hotel and pull out into Monaco a little after seven, the day concierge upstairs now and suite eleven handed over. Seven to seven, seven days a week, three months straight. No French contract would allow it, but I'm not contracted by the French. I'm placed by a company that doesn't put much in writing, and my paycheck is the reason seven days a week sounds like a fair trade.

Monaco is just waking — a street sweeper hisses its way down the Boulevard des Moulins, a café owner cranks up a shutter, two delivery vans pass, and a man is walking a small dog. The mountains come down close behind the town, and the towers are stacked up the slope wherever there's rock to hold them. The light is only just over the top, coming down the fronts of the buildings while the streets are still in shade. I drive out through the middle of it, the road dropping to the coast.

The road runs right along the sea, out of the principality with the rock face close on my left, the water wide and bright on my right. Monaco goes small in the rear-view mirror, the road bends, and then it’s nothing but coast.

My car's a rental, a little French hatchback that smells of the last driver's cigarettes. It does the one thing I need it to, which is put twelve minutes between work and my bed.

The sun rises fast; in summer here it doesn't wait around. It's a good clean morning, the water that hard bright blue it goes before the heat softens everything, the sky empty, the gulls up and flying over the rocks.

I turn off for Cap Martin and drop down through the pines toward the water, and park nose-in against a low wall with the sea over the top of it.

Inside, I peel off the suit and stand under the shower until the night's gone off me, then pull on shorts and a T-shirt. I'm staying in a modest studio with not much other than a bed, a closet, a small dining table, and a strip of kitchen along the wall. My two suitcases are still unpacked at the foot of the bed and I suspect the drawers will stay empty for the duration of my stay. It's spotless, at least. That much the army put in me. The made bed, the wiped counter. I could afford better but I don't need much and I love the views here — the rocks, the pines, the villas tucked back in the trees, the village stacked up the hill and the sea going out flat and silver to the edge of everything.

After two years in Vegas, landlocked in all that desert and neon made me restless. Growing up in California with the Pacific at the end of the street, I never stopped missing it, so when I was offered this job on the coast, it felt like a refreshing break.

First, tea. I fill the kettle and set it going, and while it heats my work phone buzzes on the counter, which means it's Silas, my boss. I pick up.

"How's it going down there?" he asks. "Client happy?"

"Seems to be. She's easy. Doesn't ask for much."

"Excellent." He clears his throat, and I picture him at the other end. Silas has a long gray beard, a gray ponytail, and he's built like a door, ex–private security. He ran protection for years before he figured out the real money was in supplying people rather than being one, so now he runs The Agency. He staffs the people who can't just call a normal one: the PAs, concierges, drivers, bodyguards, and fixers for clients who need them vetted thoroughly and bound to silence. They're hired by families who won't have anyone in the house who hasn't signed their life away, celebrities and the studios minding them, the odd royal household. And then there's the government work nobody puts a name to — a contract that just says a federal agency and a per diem. Like this one.

"Has she requested anything illegal?" he asks.

"No, and it's unlikely she will."

"Good." A pause. "And if she does ask for something outrageous — as long as it's above board — well, you're in Monaco. Whatever it is, somebody on that rock sells it, so keep up the good work. You're there to run the client discreetly, same as always."

I roll my eyes. "I know the job, Silas."

"I know you do. That's why you got it." Almost warm, for him. "Right. I'll check in in a few days." He hangs up before I can say goodbye.

I pour the tea into a thermos and take it with me. The coast path runs right along the cap below the studio, cut and stepped into the rock, railings where it drops to the sea. I follow it a few minutes to a shelf of flat rock where the pines give out on the one open stretch the villas haven't fenced off. Since I arrived, I've not seen another soul on it.

I go down barefoot, picking my way over the warm stone. The water's too wild for a swim today — it's coming in hard and white, breaking against the rocks and throwing itself up in sheets. I sit close enough that the spray reaches my legs and enjoy the morning. My days are simple here and my job is easy and only asks one thing of me — that I keep my mouth shut — and there is no one better at that than I am.

I don't normally take work home, it's my job not to. See nothing, hear nothing. For two years before this my nights were busy in Vegas, fixing for the members of a private underground club. The job was getting people things that were difficult and last-minute. A magnum of '82 Bordeaux, tracked down before midnight. A discreet doctor at three a.m., a table at the restaurant that had been booked solid for six months, or a scotch they'd stopped making before I was born. This Monaco job is so simple it's ridiculous. All I have to do is cater to one woman in one room, who is the most undemanding client I've ever served, and she's still managed to mentally follow me up the hill.

Why? Because I got a vibe from her. A sexual one, and my instinct is rarely wrong.

I've had women look at me like that plenty of times on the job. Members at the club who decided my help was worth a second glance. It never meant much, because there was always a room full of people around it. But there's no crowd in suite 11. It's just her and four walls, and I'm the only face she sees that isn't attached to a weapon.

The lonely woman who never sleeps and whose name I don't know and have no business of knowing is queer, it seems. And she's taken an interest in me, likely because she’s bored out of her mind.

I'd get bored too, locked inside a golden tower. The hotel is Monaco's finest, so discreet it doesn't even have a name. A place like that is built for people who don't want to be seen. There's no front desk, no lobby to cross, no elevator that serves the whole building. Each of the floors has its own car, keyed so it stops nowhere but its own landing, straight from the underground garage. A person can go from a car with tinted windows to the suite without crossing a single public inch of the hotel.

The staff are split the same way. I don't share a corridor or a break room with the rest of them. There's a small room off her landing — mine, and the day concierge's when it's hers. We don't mix with the people running the other floors and each pocket of the building is sealed off from the next. They wouldn't go to so much trouble for three whole months unless somebody, somewhere, is looking very hard for her.

I call her mademoiselle, and she calls me Reba since it's on the tag pinned to my jacket. The accent is Italian, and what fascinates me is how little she demands. I've worked for the filthy rich, and she has none of that entitled quality in her. Whoever she is, nobody taught her to act like the world owes her anything. And she's beautiful. Thirty, maybe, with the kind of expressive face you notice. Stunning, and worn thin with whatever she's running from.

Chapter 3 – Serafina

Day eight. I draw a diagonal through the little square on the calendar, and look at how much is left between now and the fifteenth of September.

Time moves slowly when you're afraid. I always thought fear was a fast thing, but mostly it's slow. It stretches the hours, because you're awake for most of them, flinching at every unfamiliar noise. There's no real sleep to cut the days into pieces. My days and nights run on, one long gray stretch.

I'm hungry because I've been holding off on ordering dinner until Reba's shift started. That's what I've shrunk to. Tea is quick — she pours it, asks if there's anything else, and she's gone in under two minutes. But dinner means a tray with covers on it, and she has to lay it out: the cloth, the plate, the glass, the silverware. All of that takes more time.

It's pathetic. A grown woman timing her meals around a concierge. Going hungry an extra hour so a stranger will stay four minutes longer laying out food.

But the distraction of Reba is better than what my head does when it's left alone, which is circle. Round and round the same ground — what I'm going to do, and the fact that there's no version of the fifteenth where I walk out of it still belonging to where I came from. They raised me to protect my own, whatever it takes. That it's better to die than be the one who breaks the code of loyalty. I don't have a choice — it's me or them, those are the only two doors, and one of them I don't come back through. Knowing that changes nothing about how it feels though. The feeling doesn't answer to logic, it just sits there and calls me the worst kind of traitor.

I'm wearing a white dress. Summery, the kind of thing you'd wear to lunch on a terrace. It's out of place here, in this room with the curtains drawn. I've done my nails, applied a bit of mascara, and I'm straightening the last strand of hair when I hear her voice outside.

My stomach's tight, and it isn't hunger anymore. It's last night. She caught me looking and she knows I have a thing for her. A woman like that doesn't miss anything.

Two knocks, and Marco says it's room service. I smooth the dress down and tell myself to act normal, whatever that looks like.

"Good evening, mademoiselle." She wheels the cart in when I open it wide.

"Good evening," I say, closing it behind her.

She starts laying the table — the cloth first, then the plate, the silverware squared off, a glass, and a selection of covered dishes. I stand a little too close, pretending I might be useful, and watch her hands work, the steel watch sliding on her wrist.

"Vitello tonnato," she says as she starts lifting the covers. "Burrata, with figs. The culatello and bresaola." She sets down the cold plates, then the warm ones. "Tagliolini with truffle and Milanese. Half portions of everything. I'll leave the warm dishes covered to keep the heat in." The bread goes down last, in a basket lined with a cloth.

"Thank you. It smells delicious," I say.

"Good." She glances up, and there it is again, her eyes on mine and not moving away. I feel it everywhere, down to the soles of my feet. Then she looks back to the cart like nothing happened, and pours the sparkling water, and after it a glass of red, Barolo, the bottle already open and breathing on the lower shelf. "Anything else I can do for you?"

"I don't suppose you could have a few friends sent up," I joke. "And maybe a board game?"

She straightens, and there's the smallest curve at the corner of her mouth. "The board game I can manage, but the friends might be above my pay grade."

"I know. It's just very quiet in here," I say. "That's all. I forget the sound of my own voice."

Her gaze moves over me — my face, then lower, a half second at my cleavage before she pulls it back up. She clears her throat with a tiny shake of her head. "I can take care of most things, provided it's been signed off by your security team. That's what I'm here for," she says, to the table rather than to me. "Books, as many as you can read. Jigsaw puzzles, if you're the patient type. Plants." A pause. "A cat, if you wanted the company. Though a cat's a commitment, and you'd have to think about after, so maybe that's one to sit on. But it would help with the…" She stops and locks her eyes with mine again. "The quiet."

Reba means loneliness, she just had the grace not to say it to my face.

"Yeah," I say as I take a seat at the table. "I'll think about it." Before she can find a reason to leave, I add, "You don't sound like you're from around here. American?"

"Born and raised." She straightens a fork though it's already perfectly straight. "I only came over for the job. It's temporary."

I nod. "Do you like it here?" I watch her weigh it — whether answering is part of the job or a step off the edge of it. "Sorry," I say. "I didn't mean to make it personal."

"You didn't. I mean, I don't mind." Reba gives me a polite smile. "And yes, I like it. It's beautiful and I love being by the sea."

I try to picture Reba on the beach, out of that suit.

She looks at the curtains. "In case you're wondering, it's been a beautiful day out there. Clear sky, hardly a cloud. I'm sorry you didn't get to see it."

"It's not forever." I shrug and swallow down the lump in my throat. I really do miss the sun, and I've still got so long to go. "I'm not here against my will."

"I know." Reba shuffles on the spot and I suspect she's getting uncomfortable with the small talk.

"Apologies, I'm keeping you from your job."

Reba lets out a quiet laugh and shakes her head. "You are my job, mademoiselle. You're the only reason I'm here at all, so you're not keeping me from anything."

"Oh. Of course." I knew that, but hearing her lay it out so plainly makes me feel a little embarrassed. "I forgot. That must be boring for you, too."

"I'm not complaining." She smiles, properly this time. "I've got my ways of passing the night while I wait for the phone to ring."

Her gaze goes to the nightstand — the phone, and her eyes fall upon the red panic button beside it. Then she moves toward the door. "So don't hesitate," she says. "Anything at all, any hour. That's what I'm for, mademoiselle."

"Sera." I'm not supposed to give anyone my name, not even my nickname, but it's out before I can think about it. "Please call me Sera. I haven't heard my name in so long."

"All right," she says. "As you wish, then. Sera. Enjoy your dinner."

Like this sample? Serafina will be out September 4th and is now on pre-order.