Prologue
The Tomcat boys—that’s what the aristocrats’ daughters called us. The prosperous and the notorious. Young, drunk, untouchable. To them, we were catnip: attractive, captivating, mysterious. The perfect scare tactic to spike daddy’s blood pressure just enough to score a bigger allowance—on the condition you promised to stay away. Then we’d charm that very allowance straight out of your hand and into our pockets.
None of us needed the money. But it always felt sweeter wasting yours than spending mine.
Plain Hollow girls, desperate for substance, hurled themselves at us like sacrifices. Anything to prove they were special, that they could transform one of us into a man of dignity and valor. Look, daddy. He changed for me. I matter.
You show off your thigh-high suede boots, crossing your legs just to brush against mine—cheap tricks from a cheap girl. You clutch my arm, terrified that if you let go another girl might catch my eye and you’d be nothing more than cigarette smoke—enjoyed, then forgotten.
Your games, childish as they are, still work. You chain the other girls with jealousy, forcing them to leave me to you alone tonight. Smarter than trying to leash me—you’ve seen what happens to girls who thought they’d tamed us. We were never tamed. We were just playing nice.
If you’d tried, would I have humiliated you? Left you to the execution of your friends’ laughter? Just as you once snickered at theirs? You never dared to find out. Instead, you paraded me like a prize, pretending I was yours. But we both knew the truth: one snap of my fingers, and you’d collapse into a puddle of mascara and tissues. One rejection, and you’d lose all the significance you’d built for yourself that night.
Without me on your arm, you’d be revealed for what you are: the emperor in new clothes.
