Shadows Over the Backroom

by Ellis Carrington

Heat 3 / 5Novella · 12 chapters28,603 words2h 4m read~3h 11m listen

The Backroom Club never sleeps — it only changes its secrets. As night manager of Blackridge’s most elite underground venue, she has spent years learning which shadows to stand in and which doors to leave unlocked. She knows every off-books number, every favor owed, every body the velvet curtains have quietly swallowed. Control is the only currency that keeps her alive.

Then Xavier Hale arrives at three in the morning with cold eyes and colder orders, and the night stops feeling like hers. The Blackridge enforcer has audited whole crews out of existence. He is not here to balance books — he is here to find a reason to use someone. And when the single brass ledger key vanishes from the kitchen’s magnetic strip while he is watching her every move, Blackridge’s rules make the answer brutally simple: by dawn, either she or Xavier takes the fall. One of them will not walk out of this hotel.

Trapped behind locked service corridors with a skeleton crew, sleet sealing the alleys above, they have no choice but to hunt the truth together — through camera blind spots, off-books cash rooms, and secrets that reach far higher than either of them was supposed to see. Every harsh accusation lands a little too close. Every moment of forced proximity costs her a little more of the distance she cannot afford to lose.

MafiaEnemies To LoversMorally Grey