Chapter 5 Last Night at Onyx

Sasha

I went back to Onyx that same evening to clear out my locker, because I didn't want a version of this where I disappeared from that building without saying it to Tony's face first. He'd been decent to me, in the specific limited way a man who profits off you can be decent, and I owed him that much.

My locker held less than I expected it to for fourteen months of work. A spare pair of heels. A photo of my mother from before she got sick, tucked behind the mirror where nobody would think to look for it. A folded twenty I'd hidden there once for an emergency I'd never had to use it for. I put all of it into a gym bag that felt too small for how much of my life had actually happened in this room, and told myself that was a good thing, not a sad one.

I hadn't planned on running into Brianna. I should have. It was a Tuesday, and Tuesdays were hers.

She was at the mirror in the dressing room when I came in for my things, and she watched my reflection instead of turning around, which told me she'd already heard.

"Ten million," she said, to the mirror, not to me. "That's what they're saying, anyway. Guess the numbers finally paid off for you."

"I'm just here for my locker."

"Must be nice." She turned around then, arms crossed, and there was something underneath the usual sideways sliding she'd been doing at me for a month, something sharper. "Fourteen months. That's all it took. Best shifts, best clients, and now this. What exactly did you do to land a number like that?"

"Danced. Same as you."

"Sure." She laughed, short and ugly. "Must be some dance. What's he like, Cross? Everyone's dying to know. You get him talking at all, or does the great Lex Cross just watch?"

I felt the question land somewhere it shouldn't have, a little too specific, a little too interested in details a stranger buying a dance wouldn't usually ask about. I filed it away the way I filed everything and kept my face flat.

"None of your business."

"Everything's my business when you're the one who walks out of here and the rest of us are still stuck." Her voice climbed, just enough that a couple of the other girls glanced over. "You think you're better than this place. You've thought that since the day you walked in. Well, congratulations, I guess you finally proved it."

"I never thought that."

"You didn't have to say it."

I got my things out of the locker without answering her again, because there was no version of this argument I was going to win, and because some small, unkind part of me understood exactly what she was really angry about, and it wasn't the ten million dollars.

Rico was leaning against the door frame by the time I turned around, arms crossed, watching Brianna with the specific patience of a man who'd broken up worse fights than this one and wasn't in a hurry about it.

"You good?" he asked me, not her.

"I'm good."

"Brianna." He didn't raise his voice. He never had to. "Go clock in. Table three's been asking for you for ten minutes."

She shot me one last look, somewhere between hate and something closer to grief, and left without another word.

Rico walked me out to the car himself, which he didn't usually bother with for anyone.

"Don't let her get to you," he said, once the club noise had dropped away behind the door. "She's not wrong that it's not fair. Ten months watching someone else get every good shift while she's stuck covering the bad ones, that builds up in a person. Doesn't make what she said to you right. Just means it wasn't only about you."

"I know."

"She's been asking around for quick money the last couple weeks. Rough company too, not the usual kind. I've seen her talking to a couple of guys out back I wouldn't want near my own sister." He said it plainly, the way he said most things, not dramatic about it, just a fact he thought I should have. "Not my business to fix. Just wanted you to know before you left this place behind for good."

"Why tell me? I'm not her problem to worry about anymore."

"Because you're the only person in that dressing room who ever actually looked at her like a person and not competition." He opened the car door for me. "Doesn't mean you owe her anything. Just means you're the only one who'd notice if something went wrong."

I got in, and he shut the door with more care than the moment strictly required, the way he did most things involving people he'd decided to keep an eye on.

Brianna's voice stayed with me all the way home. So did the familiar pull beneath my collarbone, where fabric always covered what mirrors never forgot.