“He doesn't sell girls, Patty. He's got the club, those girls party willingly.”
“These aren't girls he's selling, Corado.”
It makes my stomach roll. Tony is digging his own grave. I've seen the money laundering, the drugs, even the dancers using their bodies. He's told me to get rid of people. But he's played it smart since I've come back into the family. There's no one thing people could pin on him, not fucking one. He lets everyone else do the dirty work, he just implies what he'd like.
But is he capable of child trafficking? Of biochemical weapon purchasing?
Yes, yes he probably fucking is.
Tony is a sick, sick fuck.
When I was fifteen, my mother let me spend the summer with Uncle Tony. It was the summer after my father was killed. Tony thought I needed to learn how to be a man, learn not to grieve for something that already happened. He took me to a woman with a thick bush who let me come inside her while she smoked a cigarette. Then she got me so high I ended up having to spend a week in a hospital. It threw me in the center of his constant hurricane.I take care of my family. It's what I do. I’ll give him a job, a good career, working for me,he told my crying mother. He’ll never want for anything in his life.
"Corey. What are you going to do? What are you going to do to me?"
"I'm going to make you disappear, Patty."
I take Patty to a place only I know of, this way nobody will ever get hurt with the information of where I hide the bodies. No one questions me. They'd stop breathing if they did.
Chapter 2
Corrado
It's just past ten when I pull up in back of the club. As I close the door and walk over the gravel I hear the music. There's no rush to get inside. They're playing some slow song and I know it's nobody I want to see up on stage. There's only one girl I ever watch. Only one. The others are all rotted, watered-down eye candy.
Making my way into the club, the balls of my feet tingle with the vibration of the music. The smell of beer, cigars and sweat fill the room.
I nod at Junior who stands watching the back door. The place is packed. Of course, no one in the city does a strip club like Tony does. No one.
"Hey, Junior, what's doing?" I ask, giving his a pat on the shoulder.
"Hey, C. The big guy is getting ready for the card game in the back tonight," he laughs. "Conchetta is away for the week, guess he wants to wet his dick a few times before she comes home." He brings his hands across his chest. "You wanna go in, he ain't busy. Just taking care of some business with my pops."
I shrug. Whatever. No rush.
"Hey, Junior, this morning I caught your pops making pancakes for Tony," I say, laughing and punching his arm.
Shaking his head, "Yeah, Carmine told me he threw pancake batter at you. It's fucking crazy the way Tony gets when Connie's not around, right?"
We laugh together as the music pumping through the speakers changes. My eyes scan around the room. That strange carnival music-box beginning, it gets me instantly hard. The first synthesized chords to “Bad Girl” by Girls Love Shoes echoes across the room. The stage lights up and my muscles tense in anticipation. A shadow moves behind the lights, darkness dancing like pure sex.
Thick black hair slides over her tan skin, arms and legs, curves and muscles a heady mixture of soft and hard. She's nothing like the other girls, she’s dressed in leather and lace, fishnets and skulls. No tassels or glitter for her.
You can tell by the rest of the club that this dancer is different just by the temperature of the room. The first click of her heels against the floor—the first sounds of the music-box bells, and the temperature rises—every damn time.
A heady thick feeling grows in the room, a sense of density. A slow buildup of white-hot static electricity charges through the air. It hums across your skin, tightening your flesh. You can see the men leaning forward, clutching their hands over the cool glass of their drinks. Business suits in the back edge closer with their sweaty palms grinding over the front of their pants. Even from Junior standing right beside me with his lingering eyes that somehow seem to caress her legs, her stomach, her breasts. As if she’s drugging us with her flesh, her sweet poison seeping into our skin. Infecting. Devouring. The other girls pale in comparison, vanishing into background music and disappearing like some needless extra key at the bottom of a junk drawer.
Her stage name is Felony, which I think is the best damn name for a stripper I ever heard.
Tony says the real name she gave him was Mallory Knox, but I call bullshit on that name. I Googled the hell out of it, but the only thing that came up was a character from some movie made when I was like two.
The first time I saw her, she came strutting into the club like she should own the place. She was beautiful. Piercing blue eyes, waves of thick black hair. "Dove sei stato per tutta la mia vita?" Tony yelled.Where have you been all my life?
We stood facing each other as Tony spoke to her, and I watched as her eyes slowly slid over to meet mine. It felt like someone had slammed a serrated knife into some empty place in my chest and gutted me right down to my dick. My eyes locked on her mouth as she spoke to him, she needed a job. A friend had sent her. And suddenly she was the only thing that was there, there was nothing—no one else in the room but her. Everything else just went and disappeared on me.Dove sei stato per tutta la mia vita?
She doesn't know I watch her every night she dances here. She’s become my little secret obsession, and I want to know more about her. I know she's not here for the money. I know, because she never does extra. She never does a private show. Even though everyone asks her to. She's not a washed-out mess like most of the other girls here. A filthy fishbowl of troubled souls. Each with their own personal tragedy. Each one worse than the last.
Girls come to work here because they’re broken. If you’re not broken, a place sours you, this existence emotionally mutilates you, slowing your blood and chilling your heart. All the little girls that once thought there was so much in their life to look forward to, come here to drain and wash out after whatever tragic daddy issues they've met with have destroyed them.
