The next hurdle was a competence test. Was I a professional here to audition for a job, or just a dumb college kid looking to make a quick buck by shaking her ass?
“I brought my own outfit.”
“Alrighty, so professional! I love it, sweetie. Now, let’s get you dressed for success.”
She led me to the changing rooms, which were covered in glitter and smelled of expensive perfume. The other dancers, all lovely ranges of body types, were busying themselves with their own wardrobes. None of them even looked at me.
I felt Jules’s gaze, however, as I stripped out of my street clothes and shimmied into the silver mesh of my barely there outfit. Part of me knew that I should have hated the invasiveness. . . but I didn’t. If anything, it offered me an odd comfort. A ghost of familiarity.
“You think you have skill on the pole, sweetie?” Jules asked, her tone as warm as homemade cookies.
I straightened my spine, letting a whisper of confidence slide through the cracks in my facade. “I do. I’ve. . . danced before. Very well, I’ve been told.”Told by you once, in another life.
Jules’s smile grew even larger. “I love to hear that note of confidence in you!” She offered me her hand and led me to the side of the stage behind heavy curtains. “A tiny bit of advice? Don’t look at the patrons. Just watch the lights and let the music move you. First time’s the hardest.” She patted my back in a motherly gesture that brought almost tears to my eyes. “Let’s see what you bring to Oubliette,” Jules said, oblivious to my nostalgia.
I inhaled sharply, pulling in the scent of leather, metal, and sweat. I stepped forward, brushing heavy velvet curtains into the darkness of the stage, there within the dark heart of the club.
Here’s to reclaiming myself,I thought, and the lights turned on.
Chapter 8
Rowan
If Violet knew how dangerous this place was, she never would have come.Harsh thoughts that competed with the lighting of the club between sets. It was taking immeasurable willpower to not storm back there and drag her ass home.
As if that would deter her.
Violet had a nasty habit of surprising me lately, and she was beginning to be a sore subject for all of the shit I was having to deal with between her dad and the wild fucking goose chase she led me on. Her existence was chaos, muddled by the choices she made that affected so many around her that she refused to accept the consequences of her actions. It was infuriating. Not to mention, I was back in an Oubliette when I had sworn to myself I would never step foot inside one after my last bout. Oh, how the fates laugh at me.
I could do a horse gag tie to keep her in check, or throw her over my shoulder and spank her like I threatened earlier.
No, that wouldn’t work. Violet was a raging storm, leaving trails of terror in her wake, and I could no longer ignore how much space she was taking up in my head, defying my neat, orderly, mapped-out logic with each breath she took. My ward and burden.
Yet when she nearly cried to me. . . I felt my hardened resolve dissipate like the smoke curling from the nearby patrons' cigars. I could handle bratty and unhinged Violet, but the broken girl who looked at me the same way Faelin had? It almost undid me.
Faelin. ..
A name from my first life that I had nearly forgotten. Memories of her wet cough and ferocious fever, followed by a failed deal that had led to my endless servitude. All of which had culminated in my failed attempt to steal that cursed book from The Library.
What a life I had lived indeed.
I pushed the thought away and focused on the issue at hand, setting my hand against the cool marble of the bar, and feeling the synergy of supernaturals resonate all around me. It was suffocating and deafening being here, knowing the monsters that lurked in the corners. I may not have the same olfactory sensors as the vampyre I met earlier, but I couldfeelandhearthe subtle differences ofthem.
In a nearby booth, two identical twins—both of them vampyres—were entwined with a woman. They spared me a glance and their matching heterochromia, one eye so brown it was nearly black and the other bright blue, was striking. Their pale bodies wrapped around the light skinned woman with a practiced grace before one twin buried his face between her thighs. He dove down with the casual possession that comes from centuries of thoughtless indulgence.
I felt the pull of their allure as it touched on those around them, oblivious or simply uncaring, as it fed their delirium that was this hell. No heartbeats, no breathing, just the wet slide of feeding. I only prayed it was consensual.
It wasn’t my fight, so I turned to survey the room more.
My sense of smell wasn’t nearly as enhanced as my hearing. However, it was still far better than a normal mortal’s, and that was how I smelled the wild musk of ashifteron the bodyguard. It made sense for the club to have a wolf as a guard dog, but it did give me pause.
He will be difficult to kill, if it ever comes to that.
My ears picked through the club’s noise, hunting truth beneath the chaos. Behind the bar, the bartender’s breathing came with that distinctive wet gurgle of what I presumed was a siren, like lungs half-filled with water that never quite drowns them. It fit with how his voice had been.
There was one demon—an incubus, possibly—who looked just as human as me and Violet laughing at the other end of the bar; I heard the pulse of his heart thrumming in an impossible rhythm in his belly. A fitting spot for a demon that fed on human lust.
The girl Jules had seemed human enough, either ignorant or simply accepting of those who walked these rooms. The girl whom Violet overheard whispering about needing more bodies was most likely laying bait. Setting lures for unsuspecting girls who were ripe for feeding. I was curious to know how far depravity fell in these walls,orhow those that are supposed to remain hidden seemed to refuse the natural cycle of things.
