Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 70524 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70524 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Alissa Maravilla has spent her life playing it safe. She gave up her dream of being a professional musician for the steady, predictable world of nursing at a Chicago hospital. No risks. No chaos. Just straight lines and sensible choices.
Until she meets Maddox Hathaway.
The moment Alissa steps into his enigmatic haberdashery, she feels the shift—his piercing gaze, his effortless charm, his debonair style. Maddox is temptation wrapped in silk and sin, and when he invites her into his world, she can’t resist.
Aces Underground isn’t just a private club. It’s a descent into desire—a place where inhibitions shatter and the air hums with tempting possibilities. With Maddox, Alissa discovers a darker, more intoxicating side of herself—and she’s ready for more.
But beneath the seductive allure, Aces Underground has secrets. Secrets that whisper of danger. Secrets that could consume them both.
And Alissa is about to find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
ALISSA
Straight lines.
Everything in my life is a straight line.
The hallways at St. Charles General Hospital, where I work. The lines on the charts I read. The heart monitors on the sad occasion that we lose a patient.
Even my commute to the hospital is a straight shot down the Red Line. Five blocks east from my apartment in Uptown Chicago. Ten stops from Uptown to the Loop. Five more blocks west—away from Lake Michigan—and I’m there.
All straight lines. All right angles.
My mother would have loved it. She was obsessed with keeping everything in order. Her final descent into her eternal home was a straight shot down, six feet even. Her grave plot was thirty square feet, her coffin a perfect rectangle.
Straight lines, no curves.
Even the people I work with at St. Charles are straight lines. Not literally, of course, but in their personalities. They’re all perfectly nice people, for the most part, but they’re about as interesting as a bowl of paperclips.
And that’s an insult to the paperclips, if I’m being honest.
Today has been a pretty uneventful day. Time itself flows in a straight line, each tick of the clock a direct track toward our own perfectly crafted graves. The mundaneness should terrify me, but it doesn’t. Perhaps Heaven—or wherever we go once we’re done on Earth—has a little variety.
Then again, the pearly gates are always depicted as what? Straight lines. Bars of iron, perfectly vertical up and down to keep sinners from entering.
I have no one to blame but myself. I’ve conducted my own life in a straight line. Childhood to high school to university to grad school. I majored in music, to my mother’s chagrin. My instrument of choice? The flute, of course. The straightest line you can find in the orchestra.
Of course, from there, I assumed my life would continue on the straight path I envisioned. I’d audition for a few orchestras, get some callbacks, and eventually land a full-time position. Probably not with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—they’re one of the best orchestras in the country, even the world—but certainly with some regional orchestra somewhere. There are dozens of them in the US alone.
But one by one, each audition yielded a big fat nothing. The path I had laid in front of me was broken. And I panicked.
So I ditched my dream and decided to pursue nursing.
This time the line wasn’t broken.
I got my associate’s degree, passed the national exam, and became an RN. Got the job at St. Charles soon after, where I’ve worked for the last five years.
It’s…fine.
I don’t hate it.
I’m making a difference. Probably more of a difference than I’d be making as a flautist, where I’d be playing for the city elites who are only there because they’re expected to frequent places like the symphony and the opera, not because they actually enjoy the music.
And Chicago has all of the hoity-toity fine arts in spades.
I still gig on the weekends every so often. I’ll get a call from a local church for a service or even a wedding. I’m pretty good at the flute—I mean, I do have two degrees in it—and it’s nice to pick it up every so often, even if it’s just for a measly fifty bucks.
But those gigs are getting rarer and rarer. Every year the universities pump more music graduates into the talent pool, and the young ones are always willing to take a gig for less money. The classical music industry idolizes youth. The younger you are, the more likely you’ll be labeled as a prodigy, and people will take more of an interest in you.
I’m nearly thirty now. An old hag by their standards.
Of course, I threw away the dream of working full-time as a musician a long time ago. The path wasn’t straight enough for Alissa Maravilla, the woman who needs everything laid out nice and pretty before she’ll even consider dipping a toe in.
“You okay, Liss?”
I blink. Dinah, my best friend in the hospital, is poking my shoulder.
I look at her, paste a smile on my face. “Yeah, just lost in thought, I guess.”
Dinah furrows her brow. “Concerned about one of your patients?”
“No more concerned than normal.” I rub at the back of my neck. “Just… I guess I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night.”
That’s a lie. I got eight hours. The same I get every night. In bed by ten, wake up at six. Like clockwork. I don’t even have to set an alarm.
Dinah raises an eyebrow. “That’s a rarity for you, Liss. Something on your mind?”
I shake my head. “Nothing at all. I just zoned out.” I bite my lip. “You know how it can be here. It hasn’t been a particularly exciting day.”
Dinah smirks. “I’ll take that as a good thing. No one has died.”
“Well of course I’m happy about that, Di.” I roll my eyes. “But it’s just… Do you ever wonder if you chose the right path? If maybe you should have taken a risk, tried something that wasn’t a guarantee?”