His Dancer To Claim

The Copper Tap smelled like spilled beer and bad decisions, and Lena Cole was perfectly comfortable in both. "Table six," Clara said, appearing at her elbow "Three wolves." And before you do the face… "I'm not doing a face." "You're about to." Clara lowered her voice, which for Clara meant she dropped from a shout to a loud whisper. "Lena." The one in the middle asked for you by name. Lena stopped moving. "He doesn't know me." He asked for the girl with the scar on her jaw. Clara touched her own jaw to show what he meant. "So," she said. Specifically." Lena looked across the bar. Three of them at the corner table. Two she noticed as muscle the moment she saw them; the special calm of men who were paid to watch rooms instead of being there for fun. The third man was why the couple at the next table had paused their conversation. He wasn't doing anything, he was just sitting there. That was somehow the problem. He was tall even when sitting down, had dark hair, and had a face with a jaw that seemed like it was made by someone who didn’t like him very much. There was a glass in front of him that he had not touched. He was staring right at her with eyes that were a strange pale amber, a warm color, but there was nothing warm in them. Lena picked up her order pad. "Table six," she said. Clara grabbed her wrist. "That's Damien Voss." The name landed somewhere in Lena's chest. She felt it but kept her face exactly the same. "Okayy" she said. "Okayy? Lena, he runs - " "I know what he runs." She gently but fully took Clara's hand off her wrist. "What are you, a tour guide?" Let go." She had a rule about wolves, and the rule was that they didn’t get anything special from her. Not more care, not more warmth, and definitely not the act of fear that every other person in Velmoor had picked up on instinct. She had long since lost that specific feeling inside herself, along with a few other things she couldn't afford to hold on to. Wolves had flat eyes and a professional voice, and just like everyone else, they only got a very small amount of her. She paused at the edge of the table. "Evening," she said, looking at all three of them one after the other, calmly. "What can I get you?" The other two wolves looked at the third one. He didn't glance at anyone, he just stared at her the same way he had been staring at her from across the room; calm and steady, like she was a sentence he was reading slowly and carefully. "Whiskey," he said. "Whatever you'd recommend." His voice was low. "Velmoor Reserve," she said. "It's expensive." "That's fine." "Your friends?" "Whatever they want." She turned to the other two. One ordered beer and the other shook his head. She wrote it down, closed the pad, and turned to go. "What's your name?" She turned back. He hadn't moved. Hadn't leaned forward or changed his expression. He just asked, as if it was a regular question in a normal conversation that she had agreed to have. "Lena" "Damien" he said. Like she had asked. "I'll have that out shortly, Mr. Damien." She heard one of the other two make a sound that was close to a laugh. She didn't look back to check. At the bar, Clara was vibrating. "Well?" "Whiskey and a beer," Lena handed over the slip. "The third one wants nothing, but bring a glass anyway." He was watching you the whole time you walked back. "People look at things." "Not like that." Clara took the bottle from the shelf with careful hands. "Lena." He comes in maybe twice a year. Nobody requests a specific waitress. Nobody." "I have a memorable face." “ You have a scar on your jaw and a bad attitude.” "Same thing," said Lena as she took the tray. "I'll be at table four if anyone needs me." They stayed two hours. The two muscle wolves drank. Damien Voss kept drinking from the same glass the whole time and didn't say a word to anyone. He just sat there watching the room with the calm of someone waiting for something he hadn't shared with anyone else yet. He watched her. Not all the time; he was too controlled to make it obvious. Every time she walked by the table, she could feel it just like you feel the sun shining through a window. Consistent and present. She did not look back., she gave him nothing. When she finally cleared their table, they were gone, and in the middle of the table where Damien's glass had been, there was a pile of money that was three times the amount of the bill. She stood there and looked at it. She picked it up and tried to tell herself it didn't mean anything and was almost starting to believe it. She was on her way home when she noticed a change in the dark behind her, the kind of air that had recently felt different, as if something big was there. She kept her pace with her key between her fingers. When she got to her building, she went inside and locked the door. She stood in the dark hallway with her back against the wood, breathing slowly until her pulse calmed down. She was not afraid of wolves. She wasn't. She went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. She took the money out of her pocket and looked at it carefully for the first time under the lamp. She placed it in the tin that was above the stove. She made her tea and sat down. After a while, she realized she had neatly arranged everything on the table; the sugar tin, the spoon, the mug, and the edge of the cloth. She decided to leave it at that and went to bed. The Red Curtain was everything The Copper Tap wasn't. Dark, noisy, cramped, with the smell of perfume and cigarette smoke, and the warmth of a room filled with people who had come to forget their usual selves for a few hours. Lena fastened the strings of her mask in front of the mirror in the dressing room. Deep red, almost black in bad light. It wrapped around her from her forehead down to her cheekbone and transformed the girl with the scar and the blank eyes into something completely different. Her hair was down, and her dress was completely different from the uniform she had worn for eight hours. She didn't look like Lena when she looked in the mirror. Good. Rosie didn't have a dead father, a broken mother, or a tin on top of the stove. Rosie had the music, the stage, and forty minutes where she could experience her body without any past memories or history getting in the way. That was the whole deal. "Two minutes," the stagehand called. She walked to the curtain. She didn't see from behind the mask and above the lights the man who had come for a meeting in one of Mr. Holt's back rooms and had, at some point, moved to a table on the main floor. Sitting very still with an untouched drink in front of him. She didn't notice the moment she walked into the light, and something on the other side of the room changed. She just danced. From a table in the dark, where the silence was so thick it felt like his pack could sense the most dangerous version of him, Damien Voss watched every single second of it. He didn't need to say a word. Her scent told her everything he needed to know.