By the time my clothes have washed and dried—three times, because the dryer is about on its last leg—it’s almost eleven o’clock. I need to find Logan, talk to him about my concerns of this strange place, and make sure we’re still on the same page. Keeping Missy safe has to be our top priority. I know I’m on my own when it comes to Gideon.
§
I sneak past the empty front desk and scan myself into dorm B to put our new, clean clothes away. So as not to wake Missy, I forego the bathroom and change in front of the lockers. After some digging, I locate something from my bag I haven’t worn yet. If I’m going back to the Lounge—which I am, regardless of the little voice that tells me not to—jeggings and Converse aren’t going to cut it. If Asyd’s there spinning, well . . . I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to look hot for her.
Once I’ve stripped from my clothes, I remove the outfit in question: a shiny, black one-piece bodysuit that reminds me of Trinity from one of my favorite classics: The Matrix. I love it, though I’m not sure if I have enough confidence to wear it and pull it off.
Sheryl-Dean gives me a playful whistle as I pass her, back at the desk now, reading a paperback romance novel with horses and abs on the front. “Your hair looks great,” she says. “And nice outfit.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Jacki’s the best, ain’t she?” She plucks a wiry strand of her reddish-brown. “May be goin’ to see her myself soon.”
“Yeah, she surprised me, for sure.”
“Well . . .” She heaves a sigh. “Have a beer for me.”
“Okay, I will. See you later.”
“Night, hon.”
§
Unlike my usual cloak of invisibility when traipsing through the humdrum passersby of the Cross lobby, every goddamn eye gawks at me now. With no curve left to the imagination, apparently, I can pull off the Trinity-from-The-Matrix outfit, as retro-cyberpunk as it is.
If I saw you out there . . . Gideon’s words lament through my memories. I wouldn’t know whether to fight you . . . or fuck you. And there’s a blooming realization, a deadly flower: that’s my weapon here. Unarmed, in a place full of strangers who might turn on you at any given moment, brains and body is all you have left.
But this confident, strong, and dangerous woman is a machine I haven’t learned to operate yet. Once again, I’ve led myself into uncharted territory.
To my dismay, there’s another DJ spinning House music when I get to the Lounge. A guy this time, with a black beanie beneath silver headphones, black aviator glasses, and a thin line of hair from his sideburns trims his jawline to a goatee. Not the luscious blonde bundle I was hoping for. And by the looks of the slender crowd, I’d say they agree.
“Damn, hey, baby,” a guy says behind me, then brushes my ass with his hand.
I turn and give him a cool smile, delivered with not one, but two middle fingers. He can hear that over the music just fine.
“Yeah, fuck you, too, whore!” He laughs with his friends, and I digest my fury for the second time tonight.
“Hey!” a female voice calls from a few folks away.
I find a familiar face, framed by dark blonde hair, though it takes a couple seconds to place who she is. “Oh, hey, Kelly!” I say when she squeezes her way to me. “I didn’t recognize you! You look—” I give her simple black dress and heels a once-over. “Different—in a good way!”
She smiles, and maybe she’s laughing, but I can’t hear her over the music. “Thanks!”
“Wanna get a drink?” I ask her, grateful to her for saving me from myself, and these assholes.
“Sure!”
We push through the crowd, which appears to be growing by the second, until we get to the ramp that leads to the bar area. We’re met by an actual mob around Logan and another guy at the bar.
“Well, fuck.” I cross my arms. “Guess we won’t be getting a drink for a while.”
“No worries.” Kelly winks. “I gotcha covered.”
I sit at a square, wooden table beside the nearest stripper cage, because it’s the only empty one. The woman on stage beside me is beautiful, with long, creamy legs, and a vine tattooed around one ankle. But her heart-shaped ass, natural C cups, and high cheekbones aren’t the first thing I notice about her. Deep within her sad eyes, a story unfolds, as she stares off into the distance, moving sensually, but automatically, as if she’d retreated far inside and switched on “auto-pilot.”
She glances at me, then forces a smile, moving her body my direction, like she just noticed my presence. I almost tell her “it’s okay, you don’t have to do that, I’m just here having a drink with a friend,” or some such nonsense, but I’m mesmerized by how she touches herself, telling me she’s the only one left to do so.
My body grows warm as she pokes her head through the bars, and blows hot air into my ear, followed by a lick, a nibble, and the whispered words: “Help me.”
Alarmed, I peer up at her, but when I open my mouth to ask her how—and why—she rises to the pole in the center, giving me a twirl around it. When she stops again, her eyes land on something across the room. She stares hard at it for a moment, prompting me to follow her gaze. There, mounted to the wall is one of those black bubbles, a red light beneath it. In fact, there’s one within a few feet of each cage.
Kelly stands at a metal rectangle on the wall with a black area in the center. She presses her face to the scanner beside it, the black part opens, she takes two brown bottles from inside, and the door closes again. When she returns to our table, she sets one in front of me, then takes her seat across the table, giving the dancer behind us a nod.
I examine the bottle, comforted that it’s Kelly who gave it to me. I trust her, and that’s rare these days. When I take a sip and feel bubbles on my lips, the taste of cold beer, I’m at once filled with glee, but also sadness, thinking about the last time I drank it on my back porch with Eve and Gideon, as he grilled our last, old-world meal. Seems like another lifetime ago. I guess it was.
“Oh my gods, beer.” I take a gulp, and end up guzzling half of it. For Sheryl-Dean, of course. I’m a woman of my word, you know, sometimes.
“It’s good shit, right?” Kelly bumps my elbow with hers.
“Fuck, yeah. Is that one of the perks when you wear a suit around here? You don’t have to wait in lines, and you get magical beer from the wall?”
She laughs where I can hear her this time, and it’s genuine, though shaky and unused, like most laughs these days.
“I guess so,” she finally says, after gulping some of her own.
I grapple with the urge to spill my fears to her, and to ask her why the stripper from the stage next to me just asked me to help her—and with what—but I’m afraid to. Not knowing who to ask what around here makes things difficult.
“So, how’s Buddy?” I ask her instead. “Is he still—?”
“Yes ma’am, he hasn’t left. We’ve been keeping him fed, and I go up top twice a day to give him a good belly rub.”
“Thank you so much. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
“Hey, it’s no problem. It’s the least I could do.”
A man in black fatigues and a matching beret enters from a doorway behind the stairwell to the Alley. When the woman on the stage beside us sees him, she grips the bars and cries. “No!”
He opens her cage door, and she gives him a good kick to the jaw with her heel, prompting two more men to exit from the same doorway. The first man climbs into the cage and pins the woman’s arms behind her, cups a hand over her mouth to stop her screaming, and the other two assist with her flailing feet.
“Fuck!” one guard yells. “Fucking cunt bit me.” He shakes his hand, trying to wrangle her arms back again.
“They took my baby girl!” the woman screams. “They said she was sick, but they’re ly—!”
The man slaps h
is hand over her mouth again and they rush her through the doorway.
Kelly sighs, stares at the bottle in her hands.
“What the fuck is going on?” I ask.
“She was . . . sick. I guess.”
But she avoids my gaze, tapping the side of her bottle.
“She wasn’t sick, Kelly. Don’t bullshit me; tell me the truth. What’s going on here?”
I sense tremendous weight behind her silence. But she finishes her beer, and sets it on the table between us with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Grace. I can’t.”
Eighteen
Kelly returns to the beer-hole in the wall four more times, but the last two are mine. She cuts herself off for the same reason I should if I could. She can’t let her guard down. But she wants to be free of this place, I can sense it.
“So, how did you meet Gideon?” I ask her, good and drunk, but not sloppy yet. Drunk enough to open a can of worms I’m not sure I should open. “I heard what Deuce said, but it seemed you had some things to say, too.”
She inhales, adjusts a silver chain around her neck, then meets my question with a sad apprehension. “I was . . . friends with his fiancé, Ezri. We went to college together, and when I left for the military, she stayed and became a fitness instructor, which is how she met Gideon. She trained him for a while, then they ended up getting together, and I met him shortly after they were engaged. He’s the one who introduced me to Deuce.”
“Oh, yeah? So . . . what happened with him and Ezri? He never would tell me.”
“She . . .” Her hair falls across her face when she peers into her lap, and she brushes it behind her ear. “She committed suicide.”
“No . . . Why?”
She’s fidgety, giving a nervous glance around the room, then she leans in closer. “How much did he tell you about his past?”
“Not that much.”
“I’ll tell you this, but it’s because you deserve to know, and . . . well, I’m not sworn to secrecy on this one.” She moves closer still. “The people that took him are called Y.”
“Y?”
“Yes. He was with them before all of this, when they first organized a few years ago. His brother, Dru, is the man in charge of this region’s precinct, and he and Gideon have always been competitive, so naturally, Gideon wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps, until . . .”
She clasps her hands, then reaches over to take a pull from my bottle. “A couple of the guys were fucked up one night and they followed Ezri home from the gym. They raped her—four of them—and took turns filming it, then they played it on the big screen at the tower the following day. That’s when Gideon left them. And when he got to Ezri, she was already dead. She’d taken a whole bottle of Vicodin.”
A numbness washes over me, and the truth burns to my core, as if I’d ingested Drano. I can’t stop the flow that follows, because it all makes sense now. I can understand why he kept all of those things from me. One truth would’ve revealed another, then another, and then there’d be the risk of losing me, or me losing my snow-white vision of my dream man. He wasn’t only protecting me, he was protecting us—the us that no longer exists because of his lies.
But the thorn in that dead rose is the question of why—why was he with them in the first place? The Gideon I know would never be a part of the terrible things they were doing, and he wasn’t. So only one answer is clear: perhaps he wasn’t the Gideon he is now—just as I’m not the Ophelia who beat him to a bloody pulp, and blamed him for killing her brother and her best friend.
Hence, the alchemy symbol on his chest. He even admitted to going through a rebirth of sorts. So maybe, if he had told me all of this himself, I would’ve understood, and even embraced him for it, considering I could relate. We could’ve worked through it together, prepared for what happened at the church. We might still be together now.
Kelly brings me close to her, a stern gaze down her nose at me. “I swear to you, he’s one of the good guys . . . now.”
“Excuse me, Private,” someone says from behind us. “Could you come with me, please?” asks an officer in green fatigues, like the ones Kelly was wearing the night we met.
“Sure.” She gives me a stiff pat on the shoulder. “Hang in there, Grace. It’s hard to lose people you love,” she says, as a cover up, but relative, regardless. “You’ll get through it,” she adds, before following the man out of the bar.
I’m left there in a stunned, tipsy stupor, finishing my fifth bottle of beer. Kelly’s three are still on the table, so it would appear I’ve been having a grand time. I rise from my seat as another dancer climbs into the cage beside me. She’s nervous, smiley, and naive, grinding her pussy against the pole, twerking like she’s done it a thousand times. Someone’s life didn’t change much when the world ended. Lucky for her.
I leave the stripper and head to the bar, which has thinned out enough to leave a few open seats. Logan stands before a couple chicks, cleaning a glass, chatting with the blonde in front of him. I almost turn around, because I don’t want to create an awkward situation, but when I discover it’s Asyd Rayne he’s talking to, my feet propel me there despite my nerves. The ingested liquid courage helps.
Logan gives me a nod as I take the empty seat next to her at the bar.
“Hey,” I greet him.
“Hey.”
Asyd turns to face me, but says nothing. She readjusts her long, blonde, wavy hair to her left shoulder, then sips clear liquid through a red straw.
“What time do you get off?” I ask Logan.
He finishes stacking clean glasses, then sips from his own behind the bar. “Twenty minutes. When she goes on.” He motions across the bar, and she gives him a nod.
I spin around in my seat to face Asyd and bite the bullet. “I was there that night at the log cabin.”
The straw drops from her lips and into the glass, and she peers over at me. “No shit.”
“Yeah. My girlfriend and I escaped. We were on the roof until dawn.”
She’s quiet for a while, stirring melted ice cubes around in her drink, which I’m hoping isn’t moonshine.
“How’d you get away?” I ask her, though I sense it’s an unwelcomed topic.
“They . . .” But she stops, straightens, then starts again. “I pretended to be dead. I left once they were all gone.”
“Who was it—do you know?”
She doesn’t answer at first, then she shakes her head, but there’s something wrong; I can tell. She’s keeping something from me.
“What are you drinking?” I ask her. “I’ll get you another one.”
“Vodka,” she answers, to my relief. “But I always drink for free before my set.”
“Oh, gotcha.”
She motions to Logan, who has traveled to the other end of the bar to serve a group of guys and girls who can’t be much older than eighteen.
“I’m Syd, by the way.” She stabs her ice with her straw, then offers her hand, and I shake it.
“Grace. Nice to finally meet you. I’ve always loved your music.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“One more?” Logan asks her when he gets to us, removing a scanner from a cradle hooked to his belt.
“Two,” she says. “One for my new friend, Grace.”
Those words coming from one of my favorite DJs . . . wow. I won’t lie and say I’m not totally fangirling right now.
Logan fills two rocks glasses to the brim with clear liquid from an unmarked bottle. Sketchy. But Syd’s drinking it, and she seems fine, so . . . I take a careful sip, ogling her pale thigh that curves up to slightly exposed ass cheek. She busts me checking her out, but she just grins. “I gotta get ready.” And she gets up, adjusting her cropped white tank over exposed, creamy abdomen. “You have a favorite artist?”
“Um . . . Azedia?” I say, because it’s the first thing th
at pops in my head on the spot. “That’s one of them, anyway.”
She nods, then slurps the last of her vodka.
I guzzle mine, savoring the burn. Being close to a female after so long burns the same, and gets me almost as drunk.
“Thanks for the drink,” I say.
She winks at me. “See ya out there?”
“Fuck yeah.”
“Good.”
With that, and a heated gaze that makes me warm all over, she descends the ramp. I watch that sweet ass until it disappears, then sink back into my seat, numb with lust.
“Damn, girl.” Logan laughs, flipping a towel over his shoulder. “You and I have a little more in common than I thought.”
Nineteen
I love Gideon, and I forgive him. I want more than anything to find him and be with him. But Syd reminds me of Aislynn, still, like she always has. Even more so, now that I’ve talked to her in person, which is weird. And Logan is here, and he’s comfortable, and I’m drunk. I’m a lost cause. I’ve lost the ability to even justify my actions appropriately. I’m weak, and I’m a mess.
“Listen,” I tell Logan, as he passes through the bar’s swinging doorway. “We need to be on the same page.” I move closer, stumbling into him, though my intention was to redirect things to “business,” as opposed to “pleasure.”
“Yeah. We’re on the same page, all right.” His hands trace my curves, and he brings me against him.
“What are you doing?” I whisper. So much for business.
“Well, I mean—fuck. Look at you. You’re one fine-ass female. Did you get your hair done?”
I halfway sense the purpose for the flattery, and also that it’s working. My senses blur at the heat from his touch, and he leans over to kiss me. I let him, kicking myself for getting too drunk to handle my shit. But a part of me wants him to do what he’s doing. I’m without defense against this bad boy when I’m intoxicated.
Logan’s mouth tastes sweet, familiar, and when I realize what the flavor reminds me of, I pull away. “Have you been drinking the moonshine?”
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