"What is it?" I demand.
"Woman at the door. Says she's here for Sasha Vinzlee." He pauses. "She's got blood on her, boss. Her hands. Her dress. Her hair."
I close the laptop.
"Bring her in through the service door," I say. "Don't touch her. Don't let anyone else touch her. I'll be at the north end of the corridor in two minutes."
I'm there in ninety seconds.
Sasha Vinzlee. I know that name. I know it because the man she's related to. Markus Vinzlee runs a mid-level operation in the east of the city. Not an ally. Not quite an enemy. The kind of man you maintain careful distance from. Close enough to monitor, far enough to deny association.
The kind of man whose niece should not be connected, in any form, to a woman arriving at my club with blood on her.
I hear them before I see them. Oleg's measured footsteps. And beneath them, quieter, the click of heels. An uneven rhythm. Not drunk. Something else.
They come through the service door, and I have perhaps four seconds before she sees me.
I use them.
She's small. Blonde hair, partly unraveled from some kind of arrangement, hanging loose at one side in a way that looks less like a style choice and more like something happened to it. Blue dress, short, the kind of thing a woman wears when the evening is supposed to mean something. It’s torn at her hip with a small dark splatter over the sequins that would be barely noticeable in the dark.
But the blood is visible now in the low corridor light, on her hands, which she's holding in loose fists at her sides. A dark smear clumping a few strands of her hair together, which is the detail that tells me the most, because that kind of transfer requires proximity. Requires contact. Requires being close enough to something that bled.
She is not bleeding herself. That much is clear.
She's not crying either.
That's the thing I register first, the thing that recalibrates everything else. Women who arrive in shock cry, or they don't, and the ones who don't are often more damaged than the ones who do, because the ones who don't have gone somewhere inside themselves that doesn't easily open back up. She is very still in a way that tells me her body has taken over because the mind has temporarily vacated the premises.
Then she sees me.
Her eyes are bright blue. Wide and wild. They move over me slowly, trying to determine threat level with the limited resources available. I watch her look at me and decide, not consciously, that I am not the worst thing she's encountered tonight. Which is information.
"Thank you, Oleg," I say, without shifting my gaze from her. "That'll do."
He nods before retreating back down the corridor. The door clicks shut. The corridor is very quiet. The distant subterranean pulse of the music on the other side of the walls, regular as a heartbeat.
I don't move toward her. I stay where I am, keeping my hands still, and giving her the full weight of my attention without moving through the space between us.
"What's your name?" I ask.
She swallows. There's a slight delay, like the question had to travel a long way to reach her.
"Mia." Her voice is flat and stripped of inflection, like she is using everything available just to keep herself upright. "Mia Lawson."
Not a name I know. Not a name from any world I move in. I look at her, the dress, the shoes, the ruined hair, the careful way she's holding her hands, and I think: civilian. Everything about her says it. People who belong to this world, even peripherally, carry a certain awareness of exits and angles. They clock a room differently. She is not clocking the corridor at all. She is simply standing in it, with the slightly stunned quality of someone who has been dropped here from a very great height.
Whatever happened tonight, she didn’t go looking for it.
"How do you know Sasha Vinzlee?" I ask.
"She's my best friend." Her eyes track to mine and hold. Steadier than I'd expect. "She texted me earlier. Asked me to pick something up from her uncle's house on my way here." She stops. Something shifts in her face, a fracture, fine as a crack in glass, there one second and then controlled.
She doesn't say anything else.
She doesn't need to.
I keep my expression exactly as it is because this is precisely the moment where expressions must remain still. The blood. The house. The best friend’s uncle. I run the sequence in my head in the time it takes to hold her gaze and nod once, slowly, and the sequence arrives at a conclusion that is both obvious and significant.
