Page 3 of Danny

"Matteo," he says, not raising his voice but somehow carrying it perfectly across the room. "Get her a new tray."

That's it. He doesn't say anything else to me. He steps around me — close enough that I catch the smell of him, something clean and expensive — and walks toward the back of the room where a private elevator sits tucked behind a marble column. I can’t help myself but watch him walk away. The unhurried stride of a man who has never rushed for anything in his life, and the way people shift out of his path without being asked, without even seeming to notice they're doing it.

He steps into the elevator and turns to watch me as the doors close, eyes piercing into me.

I stand there holding an empty tray and what's left of my dignity, which isn't much.

"Oh honey." Evie Peters materializes at my elbow like she's been beamed there. Platinum blonde hair, red lipstick, cheekbones that could cut glass, wearing the VIP hostess uniform like it's couture and radiating the energy of a woman who has seen some shit in this building and finds most of it hilarious. "Do you know who that was?"

"Uhh… No?"

"Danny Sterling." She says it the way people say tornado warning or the IRS is here. "He’s one of the founders. Built it from nothing. And in four years of working here, I have never — never — seen someone pour a drink on him."

My stomach drops through the marble floor, through the foundation, through the bedrock, all the way to the center of the earth.

"I've also never seen him tell Matteo to get someone a new tray instead of telling Lola to fire them." She tilts her head. Those sharp eyes going curious. "He should've fired you. That's the protocol. Danny Sterling does not tolerate mistakes. He fires people for putting the napkins at the wrong angle, Anna. He once made the head chef redo an entire tasting menu because the plates were a half-shade off-white."

"So why—"

"That's the question, isn't it?" She smiles. "This is going to be so fun."

She disappears back toward the VIP section with the click-click-click of heels, and I stand there in the middle of the most exclusive club in Manhattan with Scotch drying on my fingers and the sinking, terrifying feeling that I've just done something that can't be undone.

I survive the rest of the shift.

Barely. But I survive. I deliver drinks without further incident. I remember which Macallan is which — 18, 25, rare cask, the differences Matteo drilled into me during four hours of training that now feels like it happened to a different person in a different lifetime. I learn that table two's silver-haired regular wants his bourbon with one cube and tips a hundred if you remember. I learn that the woman at table five, one of the only female members, drinks only Perrier with lime and says please and thank you every single time, which makes her my favorite human being in the entire building by a margin so wide it isn't even a contest.

I don't see Mr. Sterling again.

But twice, I get the weird feeling someone’s watching me from the corner. Once near the end of my shift, and once right before I’m about to leave. I couldn’t see anyone lurking in the shadows, but the weird feeling remained.

At midnight I change in the staff locker room in the basement. The uniform goes back on its hanger. My own clothes come on — jeans, sneakers that used to be white three years ago, a gray sweater with a small hole in the left cuff that I keep meaning to fix and never do. I look at myself in the little mirror on the inside of my locker door. Same face. Same dark hair. Same girl who's been eating ramen four nights a week and pretending she isn't scared.

I check my phone. One text from Mom:

Good day today!! Nurse Jackie snuck me extra red Jell-O. Which is obviously the only Jell-O worth eating. Tell me about the new job tomorrow. Love you bunny.

She's been calling me bunny since I was four. I'm twenty-six and five-foot-seven and it still works. It still cracks me open every time, that stupid little word. She's the only person in the world who loves me without conditions, and she's sick, and the bills are a mountain, and the only thing standing between her and the kind of financial disaster that kills people just as dead as the cancer is this job.

This impossible, terrifying job that I have almost definitely destroyed in the first two hours by pouring Scotch on the man who owns the building.

I type back:

Love you. Red Jell-O IS the best Jell-O. Miss you mama, sleep well.

"Good first night." Lola's voice from the doorway makes me jump. She stands there with her arms crossed, elegant even at midnight, looking like she's just stepped out of a board meeting rather than a twelve-hour shift running the most exclusive club in Manhattan. "Matteo says you're a fast learner."

"Thank you. I'm — I'm really sorry about the — about Mr. Sterling's—"

"I heard." She smirks. "He didn't mention it to me."

"He didn't?"

"No." She pauses. "Danny notices everything. And he has an opinion about everything he doesn't like. So when he doesn't mention something..." She trails off, leaving the sentence hanging. "Get some sleep. You're back at six."

She leaves.

I stand in the locker room staring at the empty doorway, turning her words over and over in my head.