Chapter 29. Red Silk and Razor Smiles
1176 Words
Power always smelled like rot beneath perfume. You just had to get close enough to taste it.
The café was a husk of a place stitched together with cigarette smoke and yesterday’s lies, where daylight limped in and never stayed. Men hunched over chipped mugs, muttering bets that sounded like prayers to deities that had stopped listening. Sandra slipped inside like a shadow with lipstick, heels whispering promises the room didn’t trust.
He sat where the rumor said he would: second booth from the back, a mountain of flesh poured into a suit that cost more than the lives he brokered. Rings made his fingers glint like small, polished weapons. A gold watch hugged his wrist—time counting down other people’s choices.
Sandra approached with the sway she’d practiced in broken mirrors, hips sketching smoke, chin tilted just shy of defiance. The wig itched under her skin—short, blunt, lacquered cherry red—but it turned her into someone men like him thought they could own.
She let him look.
His eyes roved over her with the bored hunger of a man who had already eaten and still wanted dessert. Then his mouth split in a grin that had nothing to do with humor.
“Well,” he drawled, voice tarred by nicotine and easy cruelty. “If it isn’t my lucky day.”
Sandra smiled the way a hidden blade does. “Depends who’s doing the counting.”
He laughed—a low, wet roll—and flicked two fingers at the booth. “Sit, sweetheart. Let me guess—new in town, looking for doors that only open if you knock with the right kind of knuckles?”
She slid into the seat across from him, legs crossing in a ripple of silk. “Something like that,” she said, letting her voice settle into velvet. “I heard you hold keys.”
His grin sharpened. “Keys, doors, kingdoms. Depends what you think you deserve.”
“I’m not here to buy,” she said, leaning just close enough for the red bob to brush her cheek. “I’m here to belong.”
That word hooked him. His gaze sparked—the kind of spark that starts fires in the wrong forests. He licked his teeth, tasting her ambition. “Brave,” he said. “Or dumb. You know what happens to girls who walk into this world with both eyes open?”
“They stop pretending.” She smiled, and her heart didn’t stutter on the lie.
He studied her long enough for silence to curdle. Then he laughed again, darker. “I like you. Got bite under all that pretty.” He slid a silver case from his jacket, tapped out a cigarette, lit it, and exhaled smoke that haloed his head like a crooked crown. “But bite won’t save you if you flash it at the wrong owner.”
“Who says I’m flashing?”
He grinned wider, and in that grin Sandra saw the real ledger: his profit written in cages and bruises. He was the kind of man who could make cruelty feel like a service, who shook hands with devils and called it networking. Clyde would have admired the efficiency. Stefan would have envied the discretion.
“Free advice?” he offered, tapping ash into a chipped tray. “If you want to be seen, there’s a party tomorrow night. Private. Men toast futures there. Girls like you decorate the glasses.”
Sandra kept her pulse leashed. “Where?”
He smirked. “You know the kind of address you don’t say out loud.”
She let curiosity tilt her head, a controlled invitation. “Who’s the host?”
“Doesn’t matter. Who’s attending does.” He took a slow drag. “Eric will be there.”
The name hissed through her veins like venom. She kept the smile. “Eric?”
“Don’t play smart with me,” he said, amused. “Golden boy with a taste for redheads and trouble. Word is he’s shopping for something rare. Likes his toys unbroken and loud. Likes to watch them snap.”
Sandra’s stomach iced, but the mask didn’t crack. “Sounds like a man who knows what he wants.”
“And takes it,” he said, voice dipping into something wolfish. “But hey—maybe that’s your kind of sky. Maybe you want to be property with a view.”
Her nails bit her palm under the table. She let a low laugh curl out, husky and false. “Maybe I just want to be remembered.”
“Good answer.” He reached into his jacket and slid a rectangle across the table—black card, gold lettering, edges sharp as gossip. An invitation that gleamed under the café’s sickly light. “Address on the back. If you have to ask which door, you don’t belong.” A beat. “Dress code’s simple: be the sin he hasn’t confessed yet.”
She let her fingers graze the card like it might bruise. “And the price?”
He leaned back, smoke writing snakes in the air. “Make him remember your name. Or don’t. Either way, you won’t leave the same.”
The space between them thickened with teeth. Sandra slid the card into her purse, the heat of it burning through leather into bone. “Then I should pick a name worth remembering.”
“Oh, I’ll remember you,” he said, smiling like a gallows salesman. “Girls with red hair always think they’re the fire. Try not to be the smoke.”
He started to rise, then paused, weighing one more coin to throw. “One last note. The boy likes to play rough. He calls it taste. If you can’t take a joke, you won’t last a drink.”
Sandra’s smile reappeared, perfect and cold. “I don’t drink for free.”
He laughed, stubbed the cigarette out, and scooped up his case. “Tomorrow. Nine. If you’re late, you’re furniture.”
She stood, smoothing silk over armor made of skin, and left without looking back. The wig’s scarlet tips brushed her jaw, whispering lies she refused to believe.
Outside, the night had settled into bruised velvet. Rain went to lace on the streetlights, each drop a bead on a wire. Sandra paused beneath a guttering neon sign and pulled the card from her purse.
Black as a secret. Gold letters that bit the eye. The address was printed in a cipher rich men liked to pretend was subtlety. She didn’t need subtlety; she needed access.
She breathed once. Twice. Long enough to let the mask slide, to feel the ache under her ribs where anger had been sleeping with its boots on. The reflection in the window stared back: red hair, red mouth, bones wearing a stranger. She studied that stranger and decided she could live with her for a night.
“You wanted a war,” she whispered to the glass. “Here it is.”
- Writer
