I nod. I think I understand. After all, haven’t I done some version of this my whole life?
Smile at men. Let them believe they are clever. Make people feel important without giving them anything real. I know how to sit at expensive tables and laugh at the right moments. I know how to make men soften when they look at me.
I think I’ve got it.
Then we step into the club, and I realize almost immediately that I don’t.
Venera is not like the places Dmitri took me. There is no polished marble, no velvet rope pretending to be exclusive, no soft lighting designed to make everyone look expensive. This place is low-ceilinged and dark, with red bulbs over the bar and smoke hanging thick in the air even though smoking indoors is supposedly not allowed.
The music is too loud. The floor is sticky. The booths are half-hidden in shadow. Men sit around small tables with open collars and heavy watches, their eyes following every girl who passes.
Marina leans close so I can hear her. “Stay near me.”
I nod.
For the first hour, I do exactly that. Marina shows me how to move through the room, how to pause by a table without fully stopping, how to lean in just enough to hear but not enough to invite hands. She introduces me as Anna, and no one questions it.
At one table, a man gives me money just for laughing at a joke I don’t understand.
At another, someone orders champagne because Marina tells him his friends look thirsty and he clearly likes being told he’s generous.
I start to relax. Not completely. But enough.
Maybe I can do this.
Maybe beauty is useful here too, just in a cheaper dress.
Around midnight, Marina gets pulled toward a table near the bar by a regular who keeps calling her “little fox.” She looks annoyed but not worried.
“Stay here,” she tells me. “Don’t wander.”
“I won’t.”
I mean it. But then Nika waves me over from the edge of the dance floor. “Anna, table six wants another bottle. Bring the sparkler.”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“Behind the bar. Ask Sasha.”
By the time I find Sasha, get the bottle, and realize there is no sparkler, Nika is gone. Table six is full of men I don’t recognize. One of them complains that the bottle took too long. Another tells me to smile.
I smile.
It works. For a while.
Then one of them asks where I’m from.
“Here,” I say.
“No,” he says, amused. “Not with that face.”
I laugh because I’m supposed to.
His name is Leonid, or at least that’s what he tells me. He’s maybe forty, with a soft stomach under an expensive shirt and a ring on his smallest finger. His voice is gentle in a way that almost feels kind after the noise of the club.
“You’re new,” he says.
“Yes.”
