“I met another Salta,” Enne told them. “She’s dancing now.” Demi was still onstage, somehow wearing even less than she had before. The raunchy music and raunchier moves made Enne flush. Still, she had to admire Demi’s technique. She was very graceful.
“Maybe Levi could’ve gotten you a job here.” Jac slapped Levi on the back.
Levi looked away hurriedly and took a sip from his already empty glass.
Jac turned to her. “Too much for your sensibilities, missy?”
“I’m not a prude,” she countered, even if the suggestion made her cheeks flush furiously.
Jac snorted. “Could’ve fooled me.”
She pointed at Levi’s tie. “You weren’t wearing that earlier.”
“I like it,” he said.
Reymond rolled his eyes. “I shouldn’t leaveanyof you alone in cabarets.”
“Go easy on us,” Levi said, slipping his arm around Enne’s shoulders, forgetting that she was sore. She cringed, but this time, didn’t feel like pushing him away—drunk Enne didn’t so much mind that smirk of a smile. She resisted the urge to lean into him and scolded herself—maybe Levi was the only person she knew in New Reynes, but that didn’t mean they were familiar.
“Besides,” he said, unaware of Enne shifting with sudden embarrassment under his arm, “we got what we came for.”
Demi’s act ended with her brandishing sparklers in both her hands, her leg propped against a barstool, her slip scandalously riding up. The audience—their table included—cheered, and the four of them decided that was their cue to leave.
But Enne hadn’t gotten what she’d come for. As they made their way up the stairs, she scanned the faces in the crowd one last time. Lourdes was nowhere to be found.
DAY THREE
“All stories about the city are true.”
—The City of Sin, a Guidebook: Where To Go and Where Not To
LEVI
Levi was still nursing a slight headache the evening after their night in the Sauterelle. The vomiting had stopped sometime that morning—right before making himself a Walk of Shame, the city’s supposed hangover cure. A dull ache above his brow bone lingered throughout the day—while he leaned against his shower wall, letting the hot water trail down his shoulders and back, trying to remember exactly how he’d made it back to his room last night. While he collected his paycheck—two hundred volts—from Vianca’s secretary. While he sat on his couch, painting, wondering when Vianca would return from her hopeless campaigning so she could pay him out of his desperate situation.
Eight more days.
He now had two thousand, three hundred volts toward his ten thousand. The only others he could count on were the five hundred volts from the Irons’ collections this week. Everything else, he’d have to earn at the gambling table. Or beg out of Vianca.
Or help Enne find Lourdes and claim his payout.
He was pondering the address Dice had given him the night before when he heard a knock on the door. Levi shoved the napkin in his pocket and rose to answer it.
Enne waited in the hallway. She was dressed in her regular clothes, but her face was flushed—likely from rehearsal, Levi realized. He narrowed his eyes. She’d been nearly as drunk as him last night, but looking at her now, you’d never know it.
“Where’s your hangover?” he asked as she marched past him. “That’s unnatural.”
“I drank water when I got home, like my guidebook suggested.” She inspected him, her lips pursed. “You look terrible.”
“Exactly what kind of guidebook is that, anyway?”
She pulled it out from her purse and examined the back cover. “I don’t know. I bought it in Bellamy.”
“Why do you have it with you now?”
“It has a map.”
“I know where we’re going.”
