Page 12 of Knight
Back to the Club, Expecting Consequences
I walk through the service entrance at nine-fifteen expecting to find my locker cleaned out.
That is how it works in places like this. You scream at a floor manager in a hallway at two in the morning, the owner hears it, and by the next shift your name is off the roster and your tips are forfeit and no one says a word because everyone on this floor understands the math — you are replaceable and the man who signs the checks is not.
I spent the entire day preparing for it. Went through the job listings on my phone while Marisol did her homework at the kitchen table. Waitressing gigs. A cleaning company in Midtown that pays cash. A nail salon looking for part-time front desk. All of it paying half of what I make here.
But when I walk into the dressing room, my locker is untouched. My name is on the rotation board. And the first thing Destiny says to me while she is lining her eyes in the mirror is, "Girl. Marco is gone."
I stop with my bag half off my shoulder. "Gone."
"Reassigned. Whatever that means in this place." She caps her liner and looks at me through the mirror. "Happened this morning. New guy on the floor — Anthony something. And get this — payroll is being audited. Every dancer's account. Going back six months."
Six months. Every dancer's account.
I hang my bag in the locker and say nothing. But I can feel the other girls watching me. Brianna at the vanity. Jade stretching by the back wall. They know what happened last night— this building has no secrets, just delays — and they are doing the math the same way I am.
Marco is gone because of the hallway. The audit is happening because of what I said to the owner. The man I accused of running a house where managers steal from women is tearing his own books apart the morning after I said it to his face.
I do my set. Three songs. The usual rotation — opening slow, building through the second, finishing hard. The floor is busy for a Wednesday. I do my job the way I always do it. Disciplined. Precise. Eyes forward, body working, mind somewhere else entirely. Tonight my mind is on Tomás's shoes and Marisol's calculator and the eighty-seven-dollar electric bill, and none of those thoughts show on my face because this stage is a machine and I am the operator and the machine does not have feelings.
I am toweling off backstage when the new floor manager — Anthony, tall, polite, nervous in the way new hires are when they know the last guy got erased — finds me by the lockers.
"Nova Vasquez?"
"Yeah."
"Mr. Rivas would like to see you in the back office."
My stomach drops straight to the concrete floor.
Mr. Rivas would like to see you.Said like a summons. Said like a death sentence.
I toss the towel in the bin. Pull on my jacket. Zip it to my collarbone. And I walk down the same hallway where twenty-four hours ago I told a man worth more than my entire building that he was complicit in theft.
My pulse is hammering. My face is still.
I have been walking into rooms that scare me since I was eighteen years old. One more will not kill me.
His Territory, Her Refusal to Shrink
The office smells like leather and whiskey and money.
I clock the room in two seconds because that is what you do when you walk into a space that belongs to someone more powerful than you — you map it. Desk, heavy wood, probably costs more than a year of my rent. Two surveillance monitors mounted on the wall showing the club floor in grainy blue light. A bottle of Macallan on a shelf behind the desk, three-quarters full. One glass. He drinks alone.
And Romeo Rivas, leaning against the front edge of that desk with his ankles crossed, sleeves rolled to his forearms, watching me walk in like he has been waiting.
He has been waiting.
"Close the door."
I close it. I do not sit. There are two chairs in front of the desk — leather, angled toward him like an audience before a king — and I ignore both of them. If this conversation is going to happen, it is going to happen with me on my feet.
"Marco is gone," he says. "Effective this morning. Every dancer's account is being audited back six months. Anyone who was shorted gets paid in full by Friday."
He delivers this the way a man delivers news he expects applause for. Chin slightly lifted. Eyes on mine. The faintest shiftin his posture, like he is leaning toward a reaction he has already predicted.
I give him nothing.
