She's slight. Blonde hair that was tied up nicely and is now half loose from where he grabbed it. A sparkly blue dress that Sasha picked out, saying: this one, Mia, you'll look gorgeous. Her arms are wrapped around herself, her dress is torn. And there, very clearly, even in the dim and flattering light from the sign above, the blood staining her hands, part of her dress, and even strands of her hair.
I stare at her.
She looks like a before-and-after standing in the same body. Like two photographs overlaid. The girl who got dressed tonight with a flicker of hope about meeting someone new, the girl who blow-dried her hair and found the matching earrings and thought maybe, the way you keep thinking maybe even when experience has given you no particular reason to. And this other girl, the one in the glass, who doesn't know what she is now.
My heart kicks too hard, once, and then settles into something too fast and too shallow.
I need to go inside. I need to find Sasha.
I look down and force my hands into loose fists and then I take a breath that doesn't go all the way down. I take a step forward and think: one thing at a time. Just one thing.
The bouncer is watching me.
He's large in the specific intentional way of men whose size is professional. But it's not his size I notice, it's the quality of his attention. He's not looking at me the way the rest of the queue looks at me. He's looking at me the way you look when something doesn't fit. When the pattern is off. His eyes move from my face to my arms to my hands and back.
I keep walking.
"I'm on the list," I say. My voice comes out flat and strange. "Sasha Vinzlee. I'm her guest."
He doesn't look at the clipboard.
"Are you hurt, miss?"
The question stops me. I blink at him.
"I'm fine."
"Your dress—"
"I'm fine." Too fast. I hear it. "I just…I need to find my friend. She's inside."
He takes a slow step toward me, and I take one back without meaning to because suddenly the idea of being touched, of anyone touching me or making contact with my skin, sends a spike of something animal up my spine. He sees it. His hands come up. Careful. The way you move around something that might attack when it’s cornered.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he says, and the gentleness of it is somehow worse than if he'd been sharp. "Can I see your hands?"
"No." The word comes out clear, for the first time all night. "No. I need to find Sasha. I'm her guest. Please."
"Okay, Miss." He's already reaching for the earpiece I didn’t notice until now. "Come with me."
With him. Through a side door I hadn't noticed, into a corridor that smells of cold stone and pine cleaner. My heels click against smooth concrete. The music dies to a low throb behind us. My dress sticks against the small of my back.
I follow, because my legs are still working even though my brain has gone somewhere very far away, and because in some dim and distant part of me I understand that whatever comes next is already inevitable.
Iosif
Oleg's voice comes through the earpiece at twenty-three minutes past ten.
"Boss. Got something for you."
I'm in the middle of a forecast review. Numbers on the screen, projections through Q2, the club's legitimate revenue sitting next to the operational costs I report to no one.
"Send it to Leon."
"Leon's not here." A pause. "And I don't think this is a Leon problem."
That makes me look up from my laptop screen.
Oleg has worked this door for four years. He’s not a man who reaches for drama. He doesn’t escalate without cause. When he says something isn't a Leon problem, what he means is: this is not a problem that gets solved with blunt force. Leon is exceptional at blunt force. Leon is less exceptional at the other kind of problem, the kind that requires you to read a room, read a person, and make a decision in the space of a few seconds that will determine what happens for weeks afterwards.
