Chapter 7 7. The Inferno

Hazel

There was no way I could get myself invited to this club’s grand opening. But it's astonishing how invisible a woman in a black shirt and an apron becomes.

I'd learned that much waitressing through college — years of carrying trays past people who looked through me like I was made of glass, and I was counting on it now. Standing in the loading alley behind The Inferno at midnight that night with my hair scraped back, no makeup, a borrowed black button-down, and a lie ready in my mouth.

Getting hired for the night had been almost insultingly easy. A grand opening this size ran on temp staff, cash under the table, no questions. I'd found the staffing thread earlier, texted a number, given a fake name, and been told to show up at midnight and not be stupid. The floor manager, looking annoyed, with a clipboard and headset, looked at me for exactly one second, and decided I could carry a tray, and waved me through the service door into the noise.

And God, the noise.

The Inferno earned its name. They'd built it to look like a beautiful nightmare. Three floors ringing a central pit, everything lit in reds and golds that moved, that breathed, so the whole club seemed to flicker like something burning. The bass came up through the soles of my feet. Bodies everywhere, gorgeous and glittering, the kind of money that never announces itself because it's never had to. I lifted a tray of champagne from the service station. A girl with an empty tray gets noticed, but a girl with a full one gets waved past, and I stepped into the fire.

Watch. Listen. Learn. That was the whole plan, and even at the time I knew how thin it was. But a thin plan carried out was still more than a thick one abandoned, and I'd had enough of being protected by dead men's wills and living men's warnings. So I moved. On my own.

The first floor was noise and money and nothing. Dancers, drinkers, a DJ throwing his hands at the ceiling. I circled it twice, and the only thing I learned was that the whole glittering churn of it had a current. And the current ran up.

Because the important people weren't dancing.

I picked them out slowly. Men who moved through the crowd without touching it. Men the bouncers straightened up for. They didn't stay on the floor with everyone else; they drifted, in ones and twos, toward the back of the club and a wide stair that curved up to the third level — and at the foot of that stair stood two men with folded hands and slow eyes who let some people pass and turned others, politely, gently, back into the party.

The VIP floor. Or whatever the Ivanovs called it. That was where the night actually was.

I watched the stair for twenty minutes, refilling glasses I didn't need to refill, and I learned the rhythm of it. The guards checked faces, not credentials, and they knew who belonged. A waitress with a tray might be a face they didn't have to know. It was a thin plan, maybe. But there was a bar on the third floor; I could see the bottles catching the light up there. And a bar needed stock.

I loaded a tray properly at the service station, a bottle of the good vodka in a bucket of ice, a cluster of clean glasses, the whole thing balanced and purposeful, and I climbed the stair toward the two men with folded hands, and I did not slow down, because the surest way to be stopped is to look like you expect to be.

"Bar's dry up top," I said, bored, in the flat exhausted voice of someone on hour four of a double shift, and I lifted the tray an inch as evidence, and I kept walking.

For one endless second neither of them moved.

Then the nearer one flicked two fingers, and I was through.

The third floor was another country entirely. Quieter. The music dropped to a pulse you felt more than heard. And it was darker, lit in deep reds, with low couches arranged in loose circles and men sunk into them like kings holding court.

Fewer women were up here, and the ones present weren't carrying trays. I kept my eyes down and my tray up and I started a slow circuit of the room as though I were looking for the bar, which I half was, and I let my ears do the work.

Snatches. That was all it was at first. Fragments surfacing out of the low tide of conversation, Russian and English braided together, deals and jokes and complaints. I drifted. I poured. I made myself part of the furniture.

And then, from a circle of couches near the back, under a haze of cigar smoke, a name surfaced out of the noise and stopped my heart mid-beat.

"—Ellington."

I didn't turn my head. I'd learned that much from a lifetime of eavesdropping on my father through study doors. I adjusted my grip on the tray and drifted a half-step closer, refilling a glass no one had asked me to refill, and I listened with my whole body.

An older man, heavyset, with rings on his fingers, was doing most of the talking. Another sat beside him, younger, listening intently.

"—still nothing signed," the heavy one was saying. "The old man is gone and still he makes us wait. Even dead, that one is difficult." A low laugh, humorless. Ice moved in his glass. "The daughter is back, they tell me."

Every hair on my body stood up.

"She is no one, Mikhail." the younger man said. "Just some student. She does not even know what she is sitting on."

Mikhail Ivanov. I recognized the name from the files. He was one the leaders of the Ivanov family, looking to buy my father’s company.

"She is sitting on it," the Ivanov man said, and there was an edge under it now, "which is more than I can say for us. A hundred days. Then it all goes to auction, and we bid against the Italians like beggars, for something that should already be—" He stopped. Waved a ringed hand, scattering smoke. "It did not have to be this way. If the old man had simply—"

"He would never have sold. You know this."

"No," Mikhail Ivanov agreed, quieter, and something in that single word turned the floor to ice under me. "No. He would never have sold. Which is why—"

And that was when the hand closed around my arm.

This grip felt wrong. Too hard, too impersonal, a hand that had done this before and didn't care.

"You're late," the man said. Bald. Earpiece. Accent thick and bored. "Where were you? They're starting."

"I'm sorry — I think you have the wrong—"

"Girls go in through here." He was already moving me, steering me away from the couches, away from the two men and the sentence I would have given anything to hear the end of, toward a set of black doors set into the far wall with a man posted on either side. "Move."

"Wait, no. I'm staff," I said, and heard my own voice climb, heard the fear come into it, and hated it. "I'm a waitress — look, the apron — you've made a mistake—"

"Apron." He snorted, reached over, and pulled the string at my waist so it fell away in his hand. Then he looked at me — really looked, a man doing arithmetic — and whatever he saw made him nod, satisfied. Small. Slight.

“Dark hair. Frightened. And young. It’s no mistake," he said. "Pretty too. Good. They pay more for the frightened ones."

They pay.

I hadn’t had a chance to realize what he meant when the black doors opened. Beyond them was a smaller room, low and hot and red, a raised platform at one end lit like a stage, and men — only men — seated in the dark below it in rows, drinks in hand, faces turned up and patient. At the edge of the platform stood another man with a microphone and an easy smile, mid-sentence, and the number he was saying was a price, and the thing being priced was a girl standing on the platform with her chin up and her eyes wet and her hands cuffed in front of her.

There was a line of them along the wall. Waiting their turn. Some crying. One completely still, which was worse.

The bald man's hand tightened and moved me toward that wall, toward that line, and I understood with total, freezing clarity exactly what I had walked into, exactly what my stubbornness had bought me.

“You have no idea what you're walking into.” Caden said once.

No. No, I hadn't.

I opened my mouth to scream, and a second hand clamped over it before the sound could leave.

— End of Chapter Seven: To Be Continued. —