Page 9 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
I smiled for the first time in two weeks without manufacturing it.
“Okay.”
She hung up. I sat in my kitchen with my cereal going soggy and the morning coming through the window, and for a few minutes everything felt good.
***********************
The Golovin Grand was different from every other casino I’d worked in.
I felt it the moment I walked into the production entrance on my first day—the quality of the silence underneath the noise, the way the staff moved with a particular purposeful efficiency that spoke of something more organized than the cheerful chaos of most Strip operations. The backstage area was three times the size of The Constellation’s. The dressing rooms had individual mirrors with actual bulb lighting. The costumes, when I saw them for the first time in the wardrobe fitting, were constructed with a level of craftsmanship I’d never had against my skin before.
“The owner has opinions about quality,” the wardrobe coordinator said, briskly cinching the corset panel at my back. “Don’t stretch the beading. Don’t eat in costume. If a piece needs repair, bring it directly to us—don’t improvise.”
“Understood.”
She met my eyes in the mirror with the efficiency of someone running a very tight operation.
“You’re well proportioned for this bodice. It was altered for the last girl in your position, but on you it’s nearly perfect.”
She said it as a technical observation, the way a mechanic described a good fit between components. I was getting better at receiving my body as information rather than verdict. It was slow work.
*****************
I stood in the wings on opening night and felt, for the first time in months, like myself.
The stage manager counted us in. The music swelled from somewhere below the stage—live orchestra, which still slightly staggered me—and I walked out into the lights.
The house was full. A thousand people dissolving into darkness beyond the lip of the stage, the VIP tiers running along both sides of the room, the private booths tucked into the elevated gallery at the back. From onstage you couldn’t see faces clearly. It was all just shapes, the occasional glint of a watch or a glass,or the general impression of an audience as a warm and breathing mass.
I hit my opening mark. I lifted my chin. I danced.
For the first twenty minutes, it was perfect. The number flowed exactly as rehearsed, and I was inside the music in that particular way that made everything else go quiet—no debt, no envelope under a sweater, no closed doors inside my chest.
Then something shifted.
It was that prickling at the back of my neck—the same instinct that had spoken on a dark street two weeks ago—and my body responded before my mind did, a slight stutter in my peripheral awareness, a certainty arriving without evidence.
I was being watched.
It was even more unsettling that what I felt wasn’t the generalized attention of an audience; it was something specific. Something with direction and weight.
I kept dancing. I kept smiling. I moved through the choreography with the automatic precision of something rehearsed enough to survive distraction, and behind the smile I turned my attention slowly, carefully, toward the VIP gallery. I hoped I was wrong, that I was just assuming things. That no one was really watching me.
The private booths were dark. It was intentional. They were set back and shadowed, designed for privacy, for the kind of guests who wanted to observe without being observed in return. I could make out shapes. Figures. The occasional movement of a hand lifting a glass.
One booth. Right of center. Second tier.
A man sitting very still. This man was motionless in the way that things were motionless when stillness was a choice rather than a default. Upright. One arm resting on the table. Dark suit.
The lights shifted and for three seconds the angle changed and a pale reflection caught what might have been the line of a jaw, the set of a shoulder.
My left foot hit the wrong mark.
I corrected myself instantly but the girl beside me caught it, I could feel her micro-adjustment compensating, and I pulled myself back with a force that should have been unnecessary and kept my eyes on the front of the house for the rest of the number.
It’s not him. It was not him. This was a city of forty million annual visitors and men in dark suits were the house uniform of Las Vegas after eight o’clock and I was constructing meaning out of a silhouette in a dim booth because I had spent two weeks being very disciplined about not thinking about a specific man and apparently my subconscious had chosen tonight to collect the debt.
I smiled. I danced. I took my bow with the rest of the cast to the kind of applause that felt like warm weather, and I walked into the wings.
