1. Evelyn
According to the government, Evelyn Blake has never existed, thanks to my mother who didn’t register my birth.
I accepted the only job in Arkham that would hire me without ID.
Mr. Cabot stressed that the Gilt and Gloam wasn’t a sex club, or even a strip club, but I knew it was a den of vice.
The slick chrome of the bar, the deep black of the leather seats, the bouncers glaring from the dark corners of the room.
As a club hostess, I’d get an hourly wage plus tips for the drinks I sold, and all I had to do was wear revealing outfits and chat with customers.
The club had a little dressing room, and Roxy and I were the only two in it. The fluorescent light was garish, but it did nothing to diminish her beauty. She had fire-engine red hair, hourglass curves, and a bubbly personality that bordered on manic when she was nervous.
I fussed with my top, trying to make it something that it wasn’t. Something mature and flattering. Instead, it hung limply, the fabric rough and slightly itchy.
I couldn’t pull off Roxy’s smoky eyeshadow and bright lipstick, or the easy way she spoke to the customers. My face was bare of makeup, outside of a swipe of mascara, and I kept saying things that confused the customers rather than charmed them.
Envy bloomed in me, and I quickly snuffed it out. Roxy had been nothing but kind since I arrived.
“All ready for the VIPs, Belle?” Roxy asked, using my fake name as she touched up her red lipstick.
She saw my confusion in the mirror and continued before I could ask.
“Shit, Cabot didn’t tell you? They’re, like, friends of the owner or something, and they’re coming in tonight. Mr. Bodrov is the boss of ‘em.”
My clothes were thrifted, as cheap as I felt. My high heels were too tight, my short skirt dug into my hips, and my pink halter top drooped, hiding my flat chest. What VIP would ever want me?
The double doors to the Gilt and Gloam slammed open before I could ask for advice. The acrid scent of strong cologne and deadly men filled the upscale bar. Guns gleamed on their hips, black and discrete, unlike the hunting rifles we had at the commune.
Roxy and I joined the lineup with a dozen other women who were all glamorous, confident, beautiful. Everything I wasn’t. The men towered over us, even in our heels, and did nothing to hide their lecherous stares.
“Girls, girls! You know the drill. Line up, so we can get a look at you all!” Mr. Bodrov’s pinched eyes studied us, his mouth puffy as if stung by a bee. We were already obediently lined up, but the line straightened, shifting like tiny ripples in a pool.
His underlings bared their fangs as they looked down the lineup, hunger burning in their eyes. There was a hierarchy. They had to wait for their patriarch to take the first pick.
In a way, the ritual of the VIPs selecting their entertainer for the night felt like returning home to Mount Aer, except this flock did not accept me as their own. And I was the sole sheep, surrounded by wolves.
As Mr. Bodrov selected a dark-haired woman named Fiona, and his underlings chose their companions, a man with hair almost as red as his face stared at me with toxic intensity.
I didn’t want him to select me, and I tried to make myself smaller to compensate. When it was his turn to pick, his pockmarked cheeks stretched into a sadistic smile. He had a scar on his jaw, the shadow of a jowl appearing in the dim light of the club.
“Gorky! Gorky, get over here,” he shouted, ushering the bartender to his side.
“Aye, what is it, Jimmy?”
“Look, I don’t wanna tell you how to run your business or nothin’, but don’t tell me you’re hirin’ little boys around here now?”
Tears of humiliation squeezed into the corner of my eyes, and I furiously blinked them back.
Since running away, I’d become painfully aware that my status as an outsider was plain to see.
My makeup was amateur, my blonde hair unusually long and religiously coded, my chest too flat, my cheeks too round.
“When they insult you, that’s when you must hold your head up highest.” My grandmother’s voice was always strong, even when it contained the telltale rattle of illness. Following her wisdom, I forced myself to stand taller. I wouldn’t let this thug get under my skin.
“You know I don’t have anything to do with the hiring. Take it up with Cabot,” Gorky replied.
Jimmy clapped the back of a stout man to his left. “What about you, Nikolas? You like little boys, don’tcha?”
Nikolas looked me up and down like I was a piece of meat. Before I could realize what he was doing, his palm was pressed to my left breast. I jerked away, shocked by the brazen grope. My lips parted and my legs quivered, heat travelling up my spine, leaving me confused and shivering in its wake.
Despite my upbringing, despite bearing witness to consummation rituals, I had never been touched like that before. My guts churned, sour in my throat.
“You know I prefer to source my own entertainment away from Vasilyev Holdings,” Nikolas said with a cruel grin. “Not good to mix business and real pleasure.”
“No accounting for taste, hey moneyman?” Jimmy said, throwing his head back in laughter. It was a joke, though I couldn’t figure out the punchline. He grabbed Roxy by the waist with one hand and palmed her breast with the other. “Well, at least you have some women with tits around here.”
She didn’t flinch away, but she did slap his hand. His grip tightened.
“You’re all disgusting. Leave her alone,” Roxy hissed, and Jimmy cackled.
I folded my arms across my torso protectively.
Nikolas walked further down the line, taking a moment to breathe. He wasn’t looking well, and popped a pill when Mr. Bodrov called him over.
I was numb as the few remaining men chose their women, and then I was alone with my humiliation and rage. Gorky, the bartender, sidled up to me, his eyes trailing down to my chest. He licked his lips, his breathing loud and unpleasant in my ear.
“I ain’t never seen a little boy that had a fat ass like yours. Don’t let them get to ya,” Gorky said, right before he reached down and grabbed my rear. His hand was fleshy but strong, the scent of body odour and cheap cologne bearing down on me.
It was too much. I needed to get out of there. I bolted out of Gorky’s grasp, ran past the two bouncers, and out of the club. Cruel cackling chased after me before the doors slammed shut.
The midnight air stung my lungs, and tears mingled with mascara as they fell down my cheeks. Expensive cars lined the curb of the quiet Arkham street. A bouncer leaned against one, glancing up at me from his phone before dismissing me just as easily as the VIPs inside.
I was a pathetic runaway with nowhere else to go.
A foolish, na?ve virgin, offering herself up in the den of wolves.
My mother hoped for a different life, disobeying my grandmother, and where did that get her? Pregnant at fifteen by a man twenty years older than her. He dragged her to Mount Aer, where he was the Father to all, but denied I was his child before I turned four.
The heat of my skin steamed in the cool air, and my flesh prickled. My hair was so long and straight and heavy that it grazed the backs of my knees, but nothing shielded me from the damp spring chill as it crept into my bones.
I had to get myself together before going back to the club. The VIPs didn’t choose me, but I’d focus on the other customers. I took a shaky breath, trying to find calm.
The city was unfamiliar and strange; the noises of the evening unsettling. I missed the bleating of goats, of waking at dawn to milk them, but that life was behind me. The one I’d run away to was harder than I imagined it would be, but I couldn’t return to Mount Aer.
Somehow, I had to make this job work, since the other places that paid under the table rejected me. One look at my long hair and my conservative frocks, and they knew I didn’t belong.
Jimmy and Nikolas and Gorky were disgusting, and though their crass comments used different words, it was familiar to the past I was running from. I tried to escape the river of fate, and the current grabbed hold, forcing me down the same path.
It was the Gilt and Gloam, or I would have to return home, disgraced, and be married off to Henry, my own half-brother. Raising children for a man who hated me sounded like torture.
At least in Arkham, my choices were my own.
I opened my purse and took out a protective crystal my grandmother gave me before she died. As I squeezed it in my hand and breathed in the fresh air, my heart began to settle.
I was wiping the last of my tears when a streetlight blacked out, then another, then the whole road was bathed in darkness. The clouds and fog hid any light from the moon, and the inky air consumed me. My footsteps were muffled, and I slowed my pace.
To my right, there was a noise.
I froze, listening. Metal. Scuffling. Cloth on concrete. None of it made sense, and I backed away. Whatever was happening, I didn’t want any part of it. I’d already run from one awful situation into another.
But the concrete was worn, and my heel caught an uneven patch. I stumbled forward, dropping my protection crystal right before my hands slammed onto the hood of a car to break my fall.
Instantly the car alarm pierced the air.
Acting on instinct, I bent down and grabbed my crystal, but in front of me, the flashing headlights illuminated the silver eyes of a man.
He was lying on the road in front of the driver’s side of the car, toolkit in hand.
His body was covered in tight, black clothing; the only visible part of him were those stunning eyes.
And right between us was something I recognized from Mount Aer. A white metal box with wires connected to it and a lump of ivory putty that smelled of motor oil. I gasped and jerked away, my blood turning to ice in my veins, dread coiled in my throat.
“Is that a bomb?” I clapped my hand over my mouth, wishing to swallow the words back in, but it was too late.
His eyes narrowed, seeming to study me with curiosity.
Stupid girl. Don’t question men about their intentions. I’d been gone for a month, but my mother’s voice was as loud as ever in my head. It was shocking to see an explosive, smelling just as I remembered them from home.
I was frozen in place by fear and uncertainty, my legs trembling, sweat gathering at the nape of my neck. The scent of pine and berries warmed the cool air as I stared down at him.
Silently, the man put his finger to his covered lips and pulled himself under the car.
The security alarm kept screaming, so I could barely make out the gruff male voice bellowing out behind me: “Hey, girl! Get away from there.”
I backed up, hands in the air, my wide eyes landing on the large bodyguard I’d passed when I left the club. “I tripped. Why did the lights go out?”
“Do I look like the electrical company? Get the fuck away from the moneyman’s car.”
Despite the flashing lights of the car alarm, the street was still blacked out, but I took one careful step, then another. The bodyguard was looking at me, and I didn’t dare glance down beneath the car.
He could detonate the bomb at any second.
A fitting death for a harlot. Standing on the side of the road in cheap clothes, flushed with the sting of rejection and loneliness as a man the size of a door sneered at me for breaking my fall on someone’s car.
“You work at the club?”
“Yes.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes, returning to his post in front of the Gilt and Gloam. “Fucking bimbos.”
He never saw the man beneath the driver’s side of the car.
He never saw the bomb.
And when I looked again, they were both gone.