Page 1 of Vicious Betrayal

1

OKSANA

Ican feel the bass rolling out from the club hitting me before I even get through the door, the low thrum vibrating up through the soles of my teetering heels and rattling in my chest. I decide immediately, before I’ve even seen the interior, that I love this place.

The line outside stretches for nearly half a block, full of girls in barely-there dresses and guys in overpriced button-downs shivering in the chilly September night, all of them hoping the bouncer will deem them worthy. We didn't wait. Bianca knows someone who knows someone, and within four minutes of arriving we're inside. Past the velvet rope and the enormous man in a black suit who looked at us like he was cataloging our net worth, and into a mass of sweaty chaos that makes my pulse quicken before I've even had a drink.

"Oh my God," Talia says, gripping my arm hard enough to leave marks. "Oksana. Oksana. Look at this place."

I'm already looking. The club used to be some failed restaurant, and now it's unrecognizable. Black marble floors catch the light from a ceiling rigged with hundreds of small gold fixtures, so it looks like someone tipped over a jewelry box directly above the dance floor. There's an upper level ringed with private booths, most of them already occupied by people who look like they could buy the building outright, and below that, a sea of bodies moving to music too loud to talk over without shouting.

"It's insane," I shout back, grinning, and I feel Bianca's hand close around my wrist, tugging me toward the bar.

"Drinks first. Dancing second. And then we can gossip about who we think actually owns this place."

There’s a reason this club is packed to the brim tonight, and it’s not just how beautifully decorated it is or the fact that a new club opening is a draw for every content creator and eager twenty-something in Chicago. It’s the rumor that this club belongs to Declan Murphy. The Irish boss who runs half of Chicago's underbelly, and who has taken the organization he runs from a violent mafia terrorizing the criminal underworld of the city to a more… diplomatic endeavor. He likes his illegal dealings, if what I’ve heard through the grapevine of my own family can be believed, covered in a more legitimate outer shell. Clubs, bars, restaurants, strip joints—Declan Murphy owns several of each, but they're all hiding something darker underneath.

Everyone likes a taste of danger, and going to a club rumored to be owned by a dangerous mafia boss is exactly that. The general public loves the idea of being in proximity to a criminal, because they don't know what that life is really like. They only know the glamorization of it, not the truth—that belonging to a criminal organization or being born into one of the families, whether it's a powerful man like Declan Murphy or a small-time pakhan like my father, is blood and violence and responsibility, grit and difficult choices and doing your duty.

Except it hasn't been that way for me. I'm the youngest daughter, and so far, that's meant I've been beautifully, almost alarmingly exempt from the unpleasant choices this life forces on people. My brother is going to inherit. My sister is going to marry well. And I've mostly been treated like a pretty extra feather in my father's cap, one who is allowed to do what I want so long as it doesn't reflect badly on the family.

I know better than almost anyone in this club what kind of danger might be sitting at one of those private booths upstairs, sipping whiskey and watching all of us dance without a single flicker of interest in our lives. It doesn't scare me. If anything, it makes it all a little more exciting. I'm right here under their noses, and no one knows who I am.

We sidle up to the bar, where a tall, handsome man with a nose ring and hair buzzed on the sides pours a purple drink into four glasses, garnishing it with edible gold glitter. Talia has her phone out already, snapping pictures of the line of drinks. We all know better than to reach for them before she's gotten her Instagram shots.

"To bad decisions," Bianca says, raising her glass once she's grabbed it after Talia is done.

"To rumors," I say, and Talia laughs. Priya, who's been quiet since we walked in, mostly because she's too busy staring at a man near the DJ booth, finally lifts her glass too.

The drink is delicious and goes down easy, with the sharp bite of just a little too much alcohol. Either the bartender likes Talia or this club uses the strategy of making the first couple of drinks a little stronger so that we keep going, and watering them down later. By the time I'm halfway through it, I can already feel a warm buzz spreading through my veins. I haven't eaten much today. I knew what kind of night this would be when I got dressed, and I wanted the alcohol to hit fast. It does.

We make our way out to the churning dance floor, moving along to the music as we hold up our drinks. I chose a short black dress tonight that clings to every curve, swoops low between my small breasts and dips nearly to my ass in the back, thin gold chains looping across all the way down my spine. Talia is wearing a scarlet red bandage dress, her hair loose and flying, and Bianca went for a silky white number that's devastatingly sexy despite the innocent color. Priya is wearing a bright pink dress that pops against her deeply tanned skin, and she still has her eyes on the handsome man near the DJ booth, who seems to have noticed her now, too.

The DJ himself is great, spinning a fantastic mix of recent hits and remixes of oldies with fresh beats. My hips move as if entirely on their own, all those stuffy dancing lessons my mother insisted I take as a child having given me a sense of rhythm that I'm now using for something she definitely didn't intend. Talia spins under my arm, laughing, her dark curls sticking to her forehead with sweat, and Bianca has her phone out, filming a few seconds of the crowd to post later with some caption about the club everyone's talking about.

A man in a gray suit tries to dance with Priya, and she lets him for about thirty seconds before shaking her head and turning back to us, unimpressed. Another one offers to buy us all a round, and I let him. Free drinks are free drinks regardless of his intentions, and even though we can all afford our own alcohol, there's a rush to getting the attention and having handsome men buy us drinks. Plus, there's no fear that they'll demand we owe them anything—I have security nearby, blending into the outer edges of the club, and if someone tried to touch me, there'd be hell to pay.

The only times I've hooked up with a guy have been entirely my own choice, and because I managed to briefly give my security the slip. It's no wonder my older sister resents me, I think suddenly, and push the thought away just as quickly. It's not fair that she has to marry who she's told and I get this freedom, but am I supposed to toss it away and sit at home learning to arrange flowers just because she has to?

I down the second drink almost as quickly as the first, throwing myself fully into the music as I give myself over to the feeling of being buzzed and twenty years old and fully alive in a city that for me, at least, is nothing but a playground tonight.

And then, as I spin around, rolling my hips against Bianca as we dance together, I see a man standing at the bar.

I wasn't looking for anyone in particular. My eyes catch on the bar almost by accident, sliding across the crowd. And then they stop. Because there's a man sitting there, alone, and he looks startlingly out of place, wedged between a girl in a skirt so short I can almost see the curve of her ass and a guy with a shirt open almost to his navel and chains littering his sweaty chest.

He's older than anyone else in this club by at least a decade, maybe more. Late thirties, I'd guess, maybe forty. He's not dressed like the rest of the men here. He's not wearing a suit or a half-open silk shirt or a hipster-y skinny tie. He's in dark plain jeans and a black button-down with the first two buttons open, showing a hint of chest hair with a thin gold chain lying against it. I can see ink just below his collarbones and crawling up the muscled forearms visible beneath his rolled-up sleeves, and he looks incredibly fit, shoulders pushing at the seams of his shirt. His hair is a dark reddish-brown, curling slightly at the nape of his neck and behind his ears from the humidity in the club, and he has a short, well-kept beard on a strong jaw.

He looks a little weathered and tired, but something about that is strangely appealing. He's not hitting on anyone at the bar or hunting for a conquest. I have no idea if that's just because he doesn't need to or because he's uninterested, but that lack of prowling hunger catches my attention as much as his appearance. He isn't talking to anyone except occasionally, the bartender, and even then it's brief—a word, maybe two, before he goes still again, watching the club with an expression I can't quite read from here. Not bored, exactly. Alert, like he's cataloging every person in the room. There's a stillness to him that doesn't match the chaos around him at all.

"Oksana." Bianca's voice cuts through, and I realize I've stopped dancing entirely. "What are you looking at?"

I don't answer right away. I can't decide if I want to share this pull I'm feeling toward a stranger who hasn't so much as glanced in my direction. But Talia follows my gaze anyway. Subtlety has never been my strong suit, and within seconds all three of them are looking too.

"Oh," Priya says, her voice low and appreciative. "Oh."

"Who is that?" Talia asks in my ear.

"I don't know," I say slowly, still watching him. He lifts his glass, filled with a small amount of some amber liquid, and takes a sip, his gaze still sliding across the room before returning to the bartender. His forearm flexes and his throat moves, Adam's apple bobbing as he leans back slightly on his barstool. His thighs look muscled in the tight fit of his jeans, and below them, he's wearing motorcycle boots that look like they've seen better days. "But look at him."