Page 1 of Danny

Anna

The uniform doesn't fit.

Not in a catastrophic way. Not in a way anyone else would notice. But the trousers are doing something hostile to my hips, and the black silk blouse has apparently been designed for a woman with the chest measurements of a fourteen-year-old boy, which I am not. I'm a twenty-six-year-old with a body that a kind person might call "curvy" and my mother calls "built like your grandmother, God rest her soul."

I tug at the blouse for the ninth time in three minutes.

"You keep pulling at that, you're gonna rip it," Matteo says without looking up. He's behind the bar doing something complicated with a shaker that involves a lot of wrist and zero apparent effort. Matteo Rossi has the kind of effortless cool that makes you want to hate him, except he's also the only person in this building who's been nice to me in the past four hours, so I'm choosing peace. "You look fine."

"I look like a sausage in silk."

"You look fine." He slides a finished martini across the bar with two fingers — just two, like the glass is a hockey puck and the bar is the rink and he's been doing this since birth. "Station six tonight. Far corner. The tables back there are mostly regulars, they tip well, they won't bite." He pauses. "Probably."

"That's not reassuring."

"It's not supposed to be. It's preparing you." He's already reaching for the next glass. "Rule one: don't stare at the members. Rule two: don't touch the members. Rule three: if a member touches you, tell Theo. Rule four—"

"Who's Theo?"

Matteo tips his chin toward the far wall. A man the approximate size and shape of a refrigerator stands near the entrance to the kitchen corridor, hands clasped, face blank, scanning the room like a Secret Service agent who's been told the president is in the building but won't say which one. He has to be six-five, six-six. Arms that strain the seams of his black suit jacket. The kind of neck that makes you think his head was placed on top of his body by a crane.

"Theo Kane. Head of security. If anyone gives you trouble, you find him. Or he finds you. Theo has a sixth sense for it."

"Got it. Giant friendly bouncer. What's rule four?"

"Don't spill anything."

I look down at the tray he's set in front of me. It's silver, polished to a mirror finish, and currently holding three glasses of something amber and expensive-looking. My reflection stares back at me from the surface — slightly sweaty, slightly panicked, brown hair already escaping the ponytail I spent twenty minutes on.

"Matteo."

"Yeah."

“I’m now panicking I’m going to spill something!”

He looks at me for the first time. Really looks, with those sharp dark eyes that I'm beginning to suspect miss absolutely nothing that happens on this floor. Then he grins, all crooked and warm.

"You're gonna be great," he says. "Go."

I do not feel like I'm going to be great. I feel like I'm going to throw up on the polished black marble that makes up the floor of The Sterling Club, which would be a real power move for my first night but probably not the kind that leads to continued employment.

The Sterling Club is kind of what you’d expect for a members only club that caters to billionaires. Low lighting. Intentionally flattering, the kind of lighting that makes everyone look ten years younger and seven percent more mysterious. Booths along the walls in dark green leather, deep enough that you could disappear into them, each one with its own little pool of amber from a table lamp. A piano player in the corner doing something jazzy and sad that I can't name but makes me feel like I should be holding a cigarette and staring out a rain-streaked window. The bar where Matteo works is all black marble and backlit shelves — rows and rows of bottles, some of them in locked glass cases like museum exhibits.

And the men.

They're everywhere, in every booth, and at every table. Dark suits, expensive watches, shiny calf-leather shoes. They talk in low voices. They don't laugh loud. They move through the room with the unhurried confidence of people who have never once worried about a bill, a deadline, or whether their card would decline at the bodega when they were trying to buy toilet paper at 11 p.m.

That last one is me. Last week, specifically. The card declined. I bought single-ply with quarters from my coat pocket and walked home in the rain carrying it like a shameful trophy.

This is not my world.

I'm a girl from a walk-up in Washington Heights with a community college degree in communications — communications, like that means anything — and three years of waitressing experience at Mama’s Diner on Ninth, where the vinyl booths were held together with duct tape and the best tip I ever got was forty bucks from a plumber named Gary who also wrote his number on the receipt in handwriting that looked like a crime scene. I didn't call Gary. Nothing against Gary. I just have bigger problems than being the star in a true crime podcast.

Problems like the $87,000 I owe St. Vincent's Hospital for my mother's cancer treatment, which is a number so large it's stopped feeling like money.

But Lola Montana hired me.

I still don't fully understand why. The interview was fifteen minutes in her office on the ground floor — a beautiful woman in her late thirties with dark hair pulled back tight, a navy dress that fit like it'd been painted on, and the calm, steady gaze of someone who could fire you, comfort you, and reorganize your entire life before lunch. She'd looked at my resume. She'd looked at me. She'd asked me why I wanted to work here, and I'd said, "Because I need the money," which was either the most honest or the stupidest thing I could've said.