Chapter 13
Velvet Omen
They say time heals all wounds, but nobody mentions how efficiently it can sandblast your dignity down to the raw nubs if you let it.
Two weeks after my disastrous debut at Neon, I was no closer to understanding the rules of the world I’d stumbled into, but I could say with confidence that my bones ached in entirely new and exotic ways.
My hands stank permanently of glitter and coconut-scented body oil, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw a kaleidoscope of neon pink and green, and the memory of a man’s body hitting cinderblock like wet cement.
Life, as ever, had found new ways to keep me guessing.
In theory, my second week at Neon was supposed to be a cakewalk.
I’d survived my first set. I’d learned not to trip over my own boots while spinning at unsafe velocities.
I’d even been told by Michelle, sometimes mentor, and reigning queen bee, that my “emotional rawness” was the kind of thing that could pack a house, if I kept it together and remembered to smile through the existential panic.
What Michelle hadn’t prepared me for was the circus that followed.
The Monday after my debut, I gave notice at the diner.
This is how I imagined it going: the manager, a man who had the charisma of a beanbag chair and the emotional intelligence of an Excel spreadsheet, would beg me to stay, but I’d toss him my apron and walk out with a rebel flourish, feeling as free as a newly paroled inmate.
Instead, he just shrugged and said, “You want me to post your shifts online or you doing your own coverage?” It took the wind out of my sails, but also left me with nothing but time, and more shifts at Neon than I’d ever planned on taking.
At first, the routine was almost soothing.
Days spent cleaning, running errands, and microwaving old mac and cheese for Mateo; nights spent in the club’s endless black-lit greenroom, pushing myself through new routines until my thighs burned and my arms trembled.
But the more time I spent at Neon, the more I noticed that things were… off.
Not just bar-full-of-creeps off, but a deeper, weirder kind of wrong.
For one thing, the VIP section had customers I’d never seen anywhere else in the city.
Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse, just for a second, of eyes that flashed a little too bright, or a movement so fast it blurred out of the corner of my gaze.
Some of the regulars there looked like they’d been sculpted by a committee of Renaissance artists.
How strange it was that I had never seen them before.
After nearly eight years of waitressing, I had grown accustomed to the regulars, the tired businessmen, the rowdy bachelorette parties, the occasional lost soul nursing a drink in the corner.
But the patrons of the VIP lounge were an entirely different breed.
The velvet ropes that separated us felt less like a barrier and more like a warning. I finally understood why I had been kept away from that elusive world, one where beauty twisted into something almost unearthly.
I tried to look away. I really did. But there was a middle-aged man, always clad in black, exuding an air of quiet menace, who occupied the same corner table every other day.
He never touched his drink and never engaged in conversation.
Each day, he arrived with a different young man, typically no older than twenty; they were always strikingly handsome, their expressions a mix of excitement and trepidation.
By the end of the night, the young man would invariably be nursing a red drink, wine or something thicker, glimmering under the lights.
As he departed, I’d catch sight of him leaving with an expression that suggested he’d been both thrilled and unsettled by the experience, while the man in black remained seated, watching with an inscrutable smile.
Then there was the tall man with the aviator glasses, his hands perpetually trembling as he counted and recounted his bills.
He seemed to carry a weight of anxiety that hung in the air around him.
I once caught him off guard; his glasses slipped from his nose and clattered onto the table, revealing eyes that blazed a vibrant red, a startling contrast to the pallor of his skin.
In that moment, he looked almost feral, like a cornered animal ready to bolt.
He quickly adjusted his glasses, but I could still feel the tension radiating from him as he resumed counting, his movements frantic and jittery.
There was nothing theatrical about it; just an unsettling precision that made my heart race and sent a chill racing through my veins.
The most unsettling presence, however, was the enigmatic group that drifted in every day from Friday through Sunday.
Three or four men who moved with an eerie synchronicity, always clad in dark attire that seemed to absorb the light around them.
Occasionally, one would let out a laugh, a sound so rich and deep it echoed through the club.
It was as though they shared an unspoken bond, their silent communication weaving an invisible thread that bound them together.
As I moved under the lights, their attention pressed in, slow, invasive, like hands stripping me down and exposing every insecurity I tried to hide.
Their laughter hung in the air like smoke from an unseen fire, wrapping around me with a strange mixture of allure and dread.
In those moments, I felt both exposed and captivated by their presence.
By the following week of my debut, the crowd had doubled.
I recognized more than a few faces from the week before, and more than a few seemed to be watching me with a familiarity that bordered on predatory.
When I took the stage, I felt their attention like a physical weight.
It should have terrified me. Instead, I found myself leaning into it, using it as a shield.
If you’d told me three months ago that I’d ever enjoy being the center of a crowd’s attention, I would have laughed so hard I’d choke on my own spit.
But now I relished it. Not the leering or the bills tucked into the corset, those I could live without, but the sensation that for a few minutes, every secret and scar in the room belonged to me alone.
After, I would take my cut of the tips, wrap myself in the gauzy black robe, and spend the rest of the night perched in the greenroom, hands still shaking, waiting for my heartbeat to slow.
Rita said it was adrenaline. Michelle said it was stage fright.
I suspected it was the sensation of being watched not by an audience but by something else entirely, something older and hungrier.
It didn’t help that Aiden had become a permanent fixture at every show, always arriving late, always sitting at the very edge of the dance floor, eyes fixed on me with a focus that could strip paint.
He never tried to talk to me after, not anymore.
Just sat, watched, and left the second the lights came up.
I hated that he was there. I hated that I looked for him anyway.
By the third Friday, my life had condensed into two spheres: the weird, haunted world of Neon, and the quiet, wary one I shared with Mateo at home. The two orbits never touched, and I was fine with that. Or told myself I was.
Except that the world refused to stay divided.
A few days after my last set, I spotted the man in black again, this time lingering by the park’s entrance as if he were a shadow cast by the lush greenery of late summer.
His tailored suit absorbed the sunlight, creating an almost surreal contrast against the backdrop of vibrant leaves still clinging to their warmth.
Our eyes locked from across the path, and when he offered a slight smirk, it pierced through me like an arrow, sharp and unsettling.
I quickly averted my gaze, but when I dared to look back, he had vanished into thin air.
I started to wonder if I was being followed. At the grocery store, at the laundromat, even on the stairs of my own building, I’d sometimes catch the faintest hint of perfume or the echo of a voice I couldn’t quite identify.
Mateo noticed it too.
He started double-checking the peephole before opening the door. Asked why I’d started locking the deadbolt twice. Once, he stood at the window longer than usual and said, “That guy’s been out there before, hasn’t he?”
The final straw came the night I saw the man with aviator glasses standing outside my building, hands in his pockets, head tilted back to study the fire escapes like a contractor or a private detective.
He didn’t acknowledge me, didn’t move. Just waited until I was inside, then turned and vanished down the street.
I locked every window, drew every shade, and spent the rest of the night camped outside Mateo’s room with a baseball bat in my lap.
Around two a.m., his door cracked open. “Mom?”
I froze.
He looked at the bat. Then, looked at me. He didn’t ask questions, just said, “You want me to stay in here?”
“Yeah.” I croaked out as a reply.
He nodded once, closed the door behind him, and locked it.
The following day, he asked if we could get one of those doorbell cameras “just in case.” He tried to sound casual about it. But failed.
I wanted to believe that this was just city paranoia, the kind of fear that comes from too many late nights and not enough sunlight. But I knew better. Whatever ran through Neon, whatever shadow world I’d wandered into, it wasn’t content to stay contained.
It wanted me.
So I did what I’d always done: put on my best face and pushed through it.
I got up every morning, made breakfast for Mateo, rehearsed until my body hurt, and danced every night like it was my last chance to outrun the ghosts.
I watched the crowd, cataloged the regulars, kept a running mental log of everyone who looked at me too long or too intently.