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“Gin and tonic,” the bartender says. His eyes are glued to me now, flicking over my breasts in the bustier-style top of my dress. “Ask for that at any bar with extra lime and top-shelf liquor, and I guarantee you’ll like it. It’s a hard drink to fuck up.” He winks at me. “Just a little tip.”
“I’m sure that’s not the onlylittle tiphe’s got,” Ana whispers in my ear, giggling as he walks away.
“I think he’s sexy.” For once I let myself actually look at a guy in a sexual way, wondering what would happen if I asked him for his number, or gave him mine. “He’s got a nice ass.”
Ana frowns. “Don’t get distracted by the first pair of tight pants you see, Sofia. You can do a hell of a lot better than a bartender.”
“What if I don’t want to, though?” Truthfully, I’m not really interested in dating anyone. But the predatory men all around this bar don’t turn me on, they frighten me. All I can think is that any woman with one of them isn’t a girlfriend, she’s a possession.
“Come on,” Ana says, finishing her drink and setting it down. “There’s a lot of night ahead of us.”
We hit two more spots, a futuristic bar with a lot of dry ice and neon lights, and a smoky whiskey bar with leather seating and mahogany throughout. I feel out of place in all of them, and I’m just about to beg Ana to head back to the apartment—or at least go back on my own—when she comes back from the bathroom with a huge smile on her face.
“My friend Devin just texted me back,” she says, leaning in towards me conspiratorially. “She gave me the secret password for this new club. It’s supposed to bewild.”
Wildis exactly the opposite of what I want. But Ana is already paying the bill, an excited look on her face. “I’ve been hearing about this club for months,” she says. “It’s super exclusive. And crazy shit happens there.”
“I don’t know if I’m down forcrazy shit,” I start to say, but by then Ana is signing the receipt and grabbing my hand, pulling me out into the busy street again as she flags down a cab. “This is going to be the best night of our lives,” she promises. “I’msohaving some really freaky sex tonight.”
Also not something I’m interested in, I think dryly as a cab pulls up to the curb and Ana tumbles inside, pulling me along. I can only imagine what this place that she’s taking us to must be like. Ana is fearless, down for anything, and I have to admit that sometimes it’s a trait I’m envious of.
But how can I be fearless, when I know all too well what’s out there to be afraid of—that there are monsters in the dark streets of the city, the kind of men who would snatch away a girl’s father, and leave her half an orphan at twelve, her mother so brokenhearted that she didn’t have the spirit to fight off the cancer that struck her a year later? The doctors said that we just didn’t catch it in time, but I knew the truth. Even I wasn’t enough to keep my mother tied to this Earth, with my father gone. Not when she believed that his spirit was somewhere out there waiting for her.
I touch the small gold cross laying against my skin, crusted with the tiniest of pave diamonds along the sides. It’s the most valuable thing that my mother owned, other than the pearl earrings that my father gave her for their wedding, and she gave it to me just before she died. It was a gift from her own mother, back in Russia. Ana wanted me to take it off tonight, but I haven’t removed it since her funeral. I wasn’t about to tonight, just to avoid putting someone off. I’m not even a little bit religious—her funeral was also the last time that I was in a church, but nothing in the world could convince me to take off the last thing my mother gave me.
The cab pulls up to the edge of the street again, jolting me out of my thoughts, and I climb out as Ana pays the driver. The street we’re on is dark, and less busy than others, and I feel that pinging sensation again, the warning that something is off. But Ana is already heading towards the wall in front of us, where I can’t even tell that there’s a door until we’re right in front of it, and I can see the thin seam.
Ana knocks three times quickly, and the door cracks open.
“Preispodnyaya,” she says, her accent thickening as she says the password aloud. It’s the first time I can recall hearing her speak Russian, and it sends a shiver down my spine. I rarely ever heard my mother speak it, and I recall overhearing my father tell her than she couldn’t teach me, that she shouldn’t even speak it at home. He’d said it kindly, but still, it was one of the few times I ever saw my mother cry.
The door swings open, and Ana steps confidently inside. I follow, nerves churning in my stomach, and I catch a glimpse of the man standing in the shadows by the door—tall and dressed all in black, his craggy features undefinable in the darkness.
I can hear the heavy beat of the music as we descend down the steps, and I see a red glow ahead of us. By the time we reach the foot of the stairs and stop in front of the archway that leads into the main room of the club, locked behind iron gates, I can feel the music vibrating through my body and shaking the floor beneath me.
Two impossibly thin girls dressed in red latex push the gates open, and Ana grins at me as we walk into the red glow.
“Welcome to Hell.”
Sofia
Every part of me wants to run back up the stairs and flag down a cab, taking it straight back to the apartment.
Hell, which is apparently the name of the club—a bit too on the nose, in my opinion—is comprised of a huge dance floor, in which latex and leather-clad men and women are writhing against each other all across it, in boots that could crush someone’s head or put their eye out, and more spikes than an entire Hot Topic. It’s a change from the sleek bars and predatory businessmen, at least, but I don’t think these guys are any safer. I hadn’t realized it was possible to feel more out of my element than I do right now.
Ana, on the other hand, looks perfect. With her dress and lips and nails, all crimson and bathed in the red glow coming down from the lights, she looks like the hottest demon I’ve ever seen—like something in a music video. I can see heads turning as she strides towards the black lacquered bar, and I hurry to keep up with her, tottering in my heels.
“You make a perfect pair.”
I nearly leap out of my skin, spinning around to see a tall man in black leather pants and a tight white shirt beneath a leather jacket standing there, his hands shoved casually in his pockets. His hair is very short on top and buzzed at the sides, white blond, and his eyes are startlingly blue.
“What?” I stare at him dumbly. I have to almost shout to be heard above the music.
He nods at Ana. “One dark, one blonde. One in red, one in black. Both beautiful.” I hear the hint of an accent in his voice, something rough, but I’m not sure what it is. German? Dutch? Maybe Russian, but it’s not clear. Even Ana’s accent is thicker than that, and she’s spent most of her life here in the States.
“Thank you,” I say unsteadily. “But I’m not looking for a date—”
He grins. “Who said anything about a date? But let me buy you a drink.”
