Page 14 of Darkest Deeds

“You cost us money tonight again.”

“The guy was a douchebag. I did you a favor.” Grabbing a brush, I furiously work it through a glob of hairspray stuck in my hair.

Dmitry’s face twists in annoyance. “He was a paying customer and not the first one to complain about you. You are here to act like a whore, Ava, not a princess.”

His words echo in my head and my stomach roils. My hand shakes around the hairbrush as a haze blurs my vision.

I close my eyes and sink. Drowning is the only escape. Down, down, down.

“You want to act like a whore, I will treat you like one.” His voice is rough, and I risk a glance at his face, immediately wishing I hadn’t. His eyes are almost black. Cold and empty—like his soul has been swallowed by Satan himself.

“No, please! We’re just friends, I promise.” Screaming is a mistake. The moment I open my mouth, my lungs fill and nothing’s left.

“I see the way you look at him,” he roars, ripping the pinned orange blossom out of my hair and grinding it into mush on the concrete. “But it does not matter now. He will not take what is mine. I will ruin you. Do you hear me, whore?”

“Ava,what the fuck? Are you high or something?”

I blink, the memory fading away as bile churns in my stomach. Turning around, I throw my hairbrush, clocking him in the shoulder. “Don’t call me a whore.”

The veins in Dmitry’s huge neck strain, but before he can respond, my attention shifts to the girl standing next to him. Her wide eyes blink like a deer caught in headlights, and she shuffles her feet nervously as I stare.

I nod my chin in her direction. “Who’s this?”

Dmitry rubs his shoulder while glancing at the waif beside him. “This is Rose. We are giving her a trial run.” He rakes his eyes over her like she’s a hot bowl of borscht.

She’s a little bit taller than me, no more than a hundred pounds soaking wet, and she’s staring at me like Dmitry plucked her out of the front yard of a Norman Rockwell painting. Strawberry blonde hair hangs down her slender back while a set of wide brown eyes stare me down. It isn’t until that moment that it hits me.

She looks like a younger me.

With that one thought, the memory comes rushing back, and the room becomes too small. The air too thick. The pain too real.

“Train her,” Dmitry says, pushing her toward me. She takes two timid steps in my direction, and I take two back.

“I can’t.”

“That was not a request, Ava,” he warns, a glint in his eye. As usual, I keep my mouth shut and stare at my shoes. Making his way toward the back door, he chuckles before turning the handle and slipping out. “There are no choices here. You of all people should know that.”

I fight off a wave of nausea as the girl stands there staring at me like I’m about to lead her down the yellow brick road. But this isn’t Oz, and there’s no Emerald City. The only thing she’ll find at the end of this road is the entrance to hell.

---