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To a trained eye, it was obvious that there were deals going on in the different corners of the club, off the “beaten path,” so to speak: guys talking quietly and a little too close to each other, folks in the VIP area who looked ever so slightly out of place but who carried themselves with the confidence of millionaires. Women who looked a little too exactly to the specifications of the club dress code.
Drugs and probably sex work, Danielle thought. She’d dabbled a little bit—not the full thing, but she’d been an upscale “date” for a few of Sam’s friends once or twice, to give them someone legit-looking to go to important “business dinners” with. She’d never had sex with anyone, but she’d eaten her meal and been arm candy and helped, with the other women present, to make the deals that were going on at the table they sat at seem as legitimate as possible. Probably the Sokolovs get a cut of things—that’s why Sam wanted to make sure he had the tab, so he could put the cut he’s paying them on it.
Danielle spotted the mystery man again as she let herself be coaxed out onto the dance floor. He seemed to be trying to leave, but some of the VIPs in the section he’d gone to were obviously making things distracting for him, trying to show him as much attention and honor as possible to make him stay. Must be someone important, she thought absently as she danced. If he was important to the Sokolovs, he was definitely someone she should stay away from; even if she wasn’t in the business anymore, it would create too many conflicts. Even if he was almost stunningly good-looking, even from a distance.
She once more pushed the concerns she’d been feeling out of her mind, getting into the spirit of a night out as Sam took a break from whatever he was doing to join her on the dance floor. “Find any good-looking men, sis?” Danielle rolled her eyes.
“Plenty of them, but none I want to go home with,” she told her brother. “So you’d better be planning on being my ride at the end of the night.” Sam laughed and they danced together like they had from childhood, impressing a few of the people around them with their coordinated moves.
She had gone to the bar again to get another drink when she heard the beginnings of the commotion. There was shouting towards the entrance of the club, and at first Danielle thought that maybe the neutral territory concept was being violated—but an instant later she realized the reality of the situation: the police had come to raid Vagabond.
And just after that it became apparent to her that the criminals doing business in the club were not about to let themselves be raided without a fight. Her heart started pounding in her chest and Danielle instinctively ducked down, mentally trying to figure out where the emergency exits might be—or, even better, the unmarked exits.
Danielle headed towards the back of the club, where the employee areas would be, and thought twice about it when she was halfway there. Shots fired, and she caught the first acrid wafts of flashbangs and the insidious, eye-tightening whiff of tear gas. They would want to be careful, she knew; if people had meth on them, tear gas would be a bad idea in any large volume, since it could cross-react and take out at least relatively innocent bystanders just out for a night of fun.
She collided with something—no, someone—who felt very solid, and looked up to see the sharkskin print spread over a wide, muscular back. The man she’d seen a few times that night, from the VIP section, turned around to face her. “You aren’t part of any business here, are you?” he asked. The DJ had stopped playing, and shouts and shots filled the air instead, making it hard for Danielle to hear.
“No! No,” she said, shaking her head. The man looked around and she felt his hand close on hers.
“Follow me, then,” he said, pulling her behind him. Danielle would have wrested her hand free, remembering her brother still in the melee going on further towards the front of the club, but then reminded herself that Sam had promised her he wouldn’t get her shot, and that she wasn’t a part of his business, anyway. Whatever fate he would meet that night, she had a responsibility to herself not to get caught. She followed the man down an unmarked corridor and wondered at the fact that she actually trusted him—she didn’t know his name, had only seen him, and after all he was a Sokolov, clearly; he’d been a favorite in the most exclusive VIP area of the club.
Darkness swallowed them up and Danielle started to doubt her decision to accept the man’s help, right up until she heard the mechanical clunking of an emergency door opening, and then—all at once, it seemed—they emerged outside, behind the club, in an area that was almost stunningly silent.
None of the cops in the raid had managed to find the little hidden exit, which told Danielle that it was a serious secret. Whoever he is, he’s high up, clearly. She stopped, taking a deep breath to try and slow the pounding of her heart. The door slammed shut behind them, separating them more firmly from the chaos, and Danielle tried to get her bearings.
“Did you come with anyone?” Danielle shrugged.
“My brother,” she said. “Pretty sure that’s not an option for a ride home now, though.” She smiled at the pale, blonde man wryly.
“I can give you a ride,” he said, and she expected him to leer—she expected a Russian accent, an “offer” of some kind in the next breath. Instead he just met her gaze levelly. “But I think we both need a drink after that.”
“I’ve had drinks already tonight,” Danielle said cautiously.
“I think we both need another one—unless you’re drunker than you look right now.” Danielle chuckled softly.
“No, definitely not drunk,” she admitted. “But I’m also not the type to just go along with someone I’ve never met to somewhere I don’t know. I can get an Uber.”
“And you’ll get caught up in whatever blockade they’ve set up,” the man countered. “I can guarantee your safety.” Danielle stared up at the tall man speculatively.
“And how can you do that?” The man smiled slightly.
“Believe me, I can. Let me call my driver and we’ll get out of here—unless you’d like to take your chances?” Danielle considered it for maybe two seconds before shaking her head.
“If you can guarantee my safety, I’ll go with you,” she said.
Chapter2
Victor had seen the woman long before the raid had started, and he’d thought about talking to her if he could ever break free of the loving embrace—so to speak—of the Sokolov family members he’d come to Vagabond to speak to, but when the police had shown up to break up the business going on, that had more or less slipped out of his mind.
“You don’t need to get caught up in this,” Nikolai had said, rising to his feet. “You don’t need your name in the papers about this bullshit.”
“I won’t be arrested,” Victor had pointed out.
“No, but it’ll put your name in the mud, and we don’t want that,” Nikolai had insisted. “There’s a secret exit—not even these cops should know about it—back near the end of the VIP section, behind a curtain there. Even most of the staff don’t know about it. They think it’s a closet. Get
out of here.”
It had been a stroke of luck when he’d felt someone collide with him and turned around to see the exact woman he’d thought of talking to earlier in the night: maybe five-seven, with glowing, light sepia colored skin and her hair done in two braids, wearing a gorgeous blue dress that highlighted her curves and looked absolutely stunning on her—covering more of her body than more than half the women in the club seemed to have seen fit to cover. Clearly, she wasn’t “working” in the sense that many of the other women were; that much he knew.
