Her words seemed to freeze the bottle girl, who tried to cover it with a too-wide smile. “Of course not. God forbid.”
“How old are you, anyway?” Isabel asked. She raised a brow. “Old enough to be in this club?”
Juliet blushed. For a model, she was practically middle-aged. “Eighteen.”
Across the table, Scout’s eyes softened. “You’re just a baby.”
“My mom used to say I was an old soul.” In fact, she’d cited that when signing Juliet’s emancipation paperwork.You’re an old soul—you’ll be fine.
“Hon, I ask this with love.” Miranda leaned across the table. “But is that dress Mossimo for Target 2016?”
Juliet’s eyes widened. Her blush was scorching. Miranda’s eye was good—brutal, but good.
“We can do much better than that for you,” Miranda promised. “Just wait.”
“Her hair’s gorge, though,” said one of the women farther down the table. “Do you think I could get Franco to re-create that shade of red?”
Cybele stroked her fingers through Juliet’s hair, and Juliet was struck by the strongest sense of déjà vu, like she was back at a sleepoveras a girl, a friend brushing out her hair. It had been a long time since anyone had touched her outside of work. With care.
“Who does your color?” Cybele asked Juliet.
There would be no end to her blushing tonight. “Um… no one.”
“All right, ladies,” sang the bottle girl. “Be right back with those bottles and mixers. Hang tight.” Juliet watched as she trotted down the stairs. Then the instant the server left the VIP section, the strangest thing happened.
The smile melted from her face, replaced by a look of panic.
Chapter 12Grey, the Detective
PRESENT DAY
As soon as she was out of sight, Grey flattened her back against the wall and squeezed her eyes shut. She could hear other members of the staff hurrying past her, but no one stopped to ask if she was all right. That was better, anyway, because Grey needed a moment to calm her heart and order her thoughts.
When she’d looked across the table to find Scout Sage, of all people, sitting in her section, the wildest possibility had sprung to mind:She’s here for revenge. Scout’s head of security had told her the now-disgraced Detective Ellis and Grey had been working to nail her for criminal conspiracy. She’d found out where Grey moonlighted and had come to confront her—scream at her for violating her privacy, threaten her,hurther, even.
The worst part would be blowing Grey’s cover.
“Hey,” said a gruff voice. When Grey opened her eyes, the manager of the Serpent Room hovered nearby, hand raised uncertainly, as if he were considering touching her shoulder. “You good, Hollis?”
Grey Hollis was the name she wore here. It was imperative that no one knew she was a cop. The staff at the Serpent had already proved how unwilling they were to talk to law enforcement.
“I’m fine,” Grey assured him, picking herself off the wall. “Just needed a second.”
John was a tall, burly man with bushy eyebrows and a matching beard, both of which had remained unchanged since at least 2016. Grey knew because he was the single remaining employee of the Serpent Room from Alice’s time. The rest of the people Alice hadworked with had long since moved on, as bar staff were wont to do. Working through them one by one, Grey had memorized the names and faces of every witness from her sister’s file and had found each of them in their new lives.
John lifted those bushy eyebrows and shot a glance toward Scout’s table. “Those girls giving you a hard time? They’re usually pretty well behaved. Lots of giggling and whispering. But I can pull you off their table, give it to Jenna—”
“No,” Grey snapped, then softened her voice. “Just a migraine. I get them sometimes.”
John remained hovering for a moment. In her first few months at the Serpent, Grey had worked to build a friendship with him. They’d been downright chummy until the day she asked him about the disappearance of two girls from the club over a decade ago, presenting herself as a true-crime junkie with a thing for cold cases. He’d clammed up immediately, told her he didn’t remember much, and now he kept his distance.
The Serpent had gotten in trouble after Alice and another employee, Daisy Chapman, disappeared, when it surfaced that Daisy had applied under a fake name and address, and the club had never run the necessary background check that would’ve caught it. They’d been slapped with a fine from the California Labor and Workforce Agency, but that was the only punishment they saw. The club hadn’t even changed its business practices, or else Grey couldn’t have gotten away with lying about her own name so many years later. The mystery of who Daisy Chapman really was—what she’d looked like, where she’d come from, if there were people out there grieving her—was just one more question swirling in the black hole of her sister’s life.
“If you say so,” John said slowly, still scrutinizing her. He gave her these searching looks sometimes, which made Grey worry he was seeing Alice’s face in hers and putting the pieces together. “In that case, treat those girls well. They’re regulars. But also, don’t be afraid to bump them from that table if a bigger name comes in.”
Grey nodded. “Got it.” She could do this. Neither Scout nor the members of her entourage had seemed to recognize her on the firstgo—she’d read no cunning in the faces of the women whose photos she and Ellis had spread over their diner table and studied.
But if theywerehere for a confrontation, she would face it. That was what she was trained to do.
