“I’m fine,” I said, as usual.
He didn’t argue or call me out on my lie. He just reached down, picked up my bag, and held it out to me. I took it automatically. Our hands didn’t touch.
“Those men,” he said. “They will come back.”
“I know,” I agreed, a quick nod emphasizing my agreement.
“Not tonight. But they will come back.” He studied me a moment more. The grey eyes were unreadable, but they were somehow made me feel studied. “You cannot go home.”
“I don’t exactly have a lot of other options.”
“You have one.” He paused, as though weighing something. “Come with me. Somewhere safe, for tonight. In the morning,you decide what you do next.” He said it like he just stated a fact; there was no pressure in his tone.
I binked up at him. My heart was still hammering. My wrist hurt. Down the block, a group of tourists were taking photographs in front of a casino marquee, laughing about something, entirely unaware that my life had just collapsed into a single dark alley.
Every sensible thing I knew about the world said,“You do not get into a stranger’s car at two in the morning. You do not accept help from a man whose hands put another man on the ground in under four seconds. You do not mistake danger wearing a good suit for safety.”
But sensible had gotten me here, hadn’t it? Sensible had gotten me a doubled debt and a hand over my mouth and a car door opening onto nothing.
“Okay,” I said.
************************
The hotel was nothing like anywhere I’d ever been.
It was not a casino hotel. There were no ringing slot machines, no carpets printed with aggressive patterns, no smell of smoke and alcohol. This was something quieter and more absolute. It featured a private elevator that required a key and floors that didn’t creak. A suite that opened onto floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the city, the Strip laying out below us like a circuit board lit from within.
I stood in the middle of the living room and didn’t sit down.
He set his jacket over the back of a chair and worldlessly moved to a bar cart near the window. He poured two glasses ofsomething amber, setting one on the coffee table in front of me without pressure or ceremony. Then he sat in the chair across the room and looked at me with those still, exposing eyes.
Aside from the fact that I felt vulnerable, the air between us felt like it was charged with something like adrenaline.
I sat and picked up the glass, because my hands needed something to do, and I didn’t drink from it.
“They call themselves loan brokers,” I started. “When I first came to Vegas I needed to make rent for three months straight—I was in between jobs, and someone at the club told me about a service that gave advances. Private lending. Fast approval, flexible terms.” I heard how naïve it sounded, even then. Especially then. “The interest rate was in the contract. I just didn’t—” I stopped. “I didn’t really understand what compounding meant. Definitely not the way it works when the people you’re borrowing from aren’t a bank.”
He said nothing. He just watched me with those eyes that didn’t give anything away. No dismissiveness, impatience, or calculation. He listened the way very few people listened: like the information actually mattered.
“By the time I realized what was happening, I owed twice what I’d borrowed. I’ve been making payments — I make payments every month — but the interest grows faster than I can cover it, and now they’re saying…” I set the glass down. My throat was tight. “They’re saying cash isn’t what they want anymore.”
“I know what these men are,” he said, his tone simple.
“I figured you might.” I looked at him directly for the first time since we’d sat down. The lamplight softened the severity of his face without quite erasing it. “Who are you?”
He considered the question. “Someone who finds men like that inconvenient.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
Yet he didn’t offer one. His eyes landed on my wrist. “You should put ice on that.”
I pulled my sleeve down. “I’ve had worse.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not pity—I would have gotten up and left for pity. It was something harder to name. A kind of recognition.
“You’re a showgirl,” he said. It wasn’t a question. The stage makeup I hadn’t fully removed probably told him that, the glitter still clinging to my collarbone, the remnant of false lash adhesive at my right eye.
