CHAPTER ONE
EVIE
If there’sone thing worse than my landlord surprising his girlfriend with a shared lap dance at the worst (and only) strip club in town, it’s when I steer them into a private room to find out she’s a grabber.
Breast and bum are fair game according to the club rules and boy, does she take advantage. The lady isn’t playing with those pinches, either. Bruises are already forming on my cheeks.
No, not those. The other ones.
“Never again,” I tell Robyn as I leave the room, pulling a twenty out of my string and searching in vain for anything more. “I don’t care if they request me. Send them another girl.”
“Because you’re the booking queen now?” The duty manager arches one thinly stencilled eyebrow like she’s Cruella fucking Deville. “You don’t want the dance, fine. You’re off for the next week.”
An aggrieved sigh doesn’t budge her decision. Neither does wheedling and at quarter to midnight on a Sunday, that’s the full extent of my armoury.
“Sorry,” I manage at such a small volume it’s a surprise she hears me at all. “I was just venting.”
“Vent on your own time, which you’ll now have plenty of.” She turns back to the whiteboard calendar with our upcoming schedule, drawing a line through my name and writing Angel there instead. A girl who’s so consistently late that working with her makes the rest of us feel like we’re doing unpaid overtime.
I open my mouth to try another protest, and she points the marker at me. “Don’t push it, girl, or I’ll scrub you for the next month.”
My lips clamp together with frustration as I follow her instruction, slipping past to enter the changing room. My last stage appearance was at ten-thirty and with Robyn out to teach me a lesson, there won’t be any further income tonight.
The mirror in the changing room doesn’t have any good news for me, either. My green eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep and my reddish curls have grown so long the weight pulls them straight. I need a cut, but it’s hardly top of my priority list. There’s only enough money on the electricity meter to last out the day.
I open my locker, tugging a short dress over my G-string and pasties, then donning a light jacket for the ride home. My cash goes into the front pocket, which zips shut. I need to find a new job—bonus points for no landlords—but I don’t know another that would pay me anywhere near as well.
Even restricted to two nights, I still outearn what I used to with forty hours on checkout at the supermarket. That’s the main reason I’m still working here after a year. Theoretically, I shouldn’t have been employed until last month when I turned eighteen, but the great thing about a cash-under-the-table gig is no one blinked at my obviously fake ID.
It’s also clear no one ran my provided tax number up the flagpole. Otherwise, they’d have found out I’m eighty three… and dead.
My head is a mass of numbers as I let myself out the back door, raising a finger as a guy wolf-whistles, not bothering to turn to see who it is. As I near the bus stop, my phone rings. My brother’s number shows on the tiny screen. “Yep?”
“You left work, yet?”
Ant sounds terrible, his vocal cords breaking worse than a tenth-year. Add to that the fever he was running as I left hours earlier, and a sinking feeling engulfs me. I know where this is going.
“Just about to catch the bus.”
His voice drops to a gravelly rumble. “Could you drop by the old warehouse? This flu knocked me on my arse tonight.”
If it is flu. We both know it’s far more likely the last maintenance dose he got from the docks was so cut to shit it didn’t have the desired effect.
It’s been an age since I last collected anything for my brother. The only reason—and I stress the wordonlythree times during our conversation—is that I’m fetching something to tide him over until we work out how to access a treatment program for him again.
Not buying him poison to inject straight into his veins forfun.
He waits out my lecture, then feeds me directions over the phone that I follow to the letter.
Which is how, twenty minutes later, I end up straddled between a kayak stolen from the public jetty and the metal ladder mounted by the old docks. In the transition from one to the other, my stiletto caught in the kayak apron, and these are my best heels. I’m not losing that baby without a fight.
My thigh muscles strain as I try to pull the vessel close enough to unhook my shoe, the current surprisingly strong right here by the riverbank.
The moment I think I’ve got it, my clammy hand slips on the metal rung. My balance shifts wildly, pitching me forwards, gravity tugging the phone from my bra as I pinwheel my arms, adrenaline pumping.
A flurry of movement that ends with my phone splashing into the river while the kayak and my shoe float serenely away.
For long seconds, the loudest sound is my pulse thumping erratically in my ears as I cling to the rusty ladder. When I recover, I scramble onto the wharf, kneeling on the wood, obscenities flying from my mouth.
