Chapter 1a: Blood on the Pole
Ava's POV
The music never stops at Eclipse.
That's the first thing you notice — not the money, not the men with their hungry eyes and their loosened ties, and definitely not the way the lights turn everything red and gold like the inside of something burning.
It's the music.
It's slow and relentless, pulsing through the floor, through the soles of your heels, up through your bones until you stop feeling it as sound and start feeling it as heartbeat. A second heartbeat. One that belongs to the club and not to you.
I'd been dancing here for eight months.
Long enough to know which regulars tipped well and which ones grabbed with their sleazy fingers. Long enough to know that Tony — the club's owner, the man whose name sat on the lease and whose hands sat in far dirtier places — kept two sets of books and one very short temper. Long enough to have borrowed ten thousand dollars from him on a night when my tuition bill and my desperation had collided in the worst possible way.
I told myself it was temporary.
I told myself a lot of things, even though I knew they were all lies.
The dressing room smelled like hairspray and ambition going stale. I sat at the mirror between Destiny and Camille — both of them generous with their setting spray and their opinions — and dragged a mascara wand through my lashes with the practiced calm of someone who had learned not to think too hard before a shift.
My lashes were naturally long, so I almost never fix extensions.
"You've been told to resume at the private room tonight," Destiny said, pressing her lips together to blot her gloss. She was twenty-four and had the kind of beauty that made men stupid and women careful. She'd been at Eclipse three years longer than me and knew her way mostly around here. "Tony's putting you in the Monarch Suite."
I met her eyes in the mirror, curiosity flashing through my mind as i did a mental scan of most of our VIP guests. "Who's the client?"
Destiny shrugged, but it was the careful kind of shrug. The kind that meant I know something and I've decided not to tell. Ugh, she could be such a b***h sometimes.
"VIP," Camille offered from my other side with a pretty, alluring smile. She was the youngest of us, nineteen and still under the impression that Eclipse was a stepping stone and not a trap. I liked her too much to say otherwise. "Tony said dress up. Like, actually dress up."
I nodded as I inhaled sharply and looked at my reflection.
I stared intently at the reflection of a twenty-one years old student in Pre-med, theoretically — one semester from completing my second year, if I could scrape together the rest of my tuition before the registrar's deadline.
I had honey brown eyes that my mother had always called too bold and my father had called beautiful before he'd died and left me alone with a woman who resented me for having his face. The images breezed through my mind as I swallowed hard.
The image of his smile, us at the park holding hands, what was left of the wreckage of the car accident that claimed his life, after which my mom held a party at the house weeks after and even invited her fuckboy gym instructor which she later married...
I pushed the thought down as a dark feeling tried to surface at the thought of that woman.
My father's funeral had been four years ago — a grey Tuesday in November, the kind of cold that gets into your teeth.
I'd stood beside my mother Lydia in a black dress that was slightly too short because it was the only one I owned, and I'd watched them lower him into the ground and understood, somewhere beneath the grief, that I was now entirely on my own.
After grieving for two weeks, Lydia had began dating within a few months and easily remarried within eight months. And she was married to none other than the predator, Victor Hale, a gym instructor, with his square jaw and his wandering hands and the way he looked at me that made me feel like something that needed to be covered up.
Of course if I had to choose between him and the bear, you'd easily know what the answer would be.
Eventually, I moved out at eighteen, worked two jobs through my first year of college and kept my GPA above 3.5 through sheer spite.
And then the financial aid fell through, and the bills stacked up, and Tony had been there with his smile and his solution. He saw how dedicated I was to my work, how
"Of course I'll help you. You'll have to pay just ten thousand. And it's an easy payment method, and no pressure, sweetheart." Tony had easily said with a smile.
That bastard, the interest had made a liar of every word!
"Who do you think the client is?" I asked foolishly, knowing better than to do that. Because at Eclipse, we'd been trained to follow instructions to the tee.
"You'll see them when you get there. All I can tell you is, they're loaded...and you should mind your business when you go in there." Destiny gave me a look that said I shouldn't ask any more questions and I rolled my eyes.
'Damn Tony is the reason why I'm still here. Fuck.' You say through gritted teeth.
