Page 2 of Vasily the Nail

“It’s a week. I’m just going to Jacksonville to check in on Roman. Someone’s causing him some grief.”

“Right, yeah,” I say with a nod that makes the yellowed light overhead shift to red, but I’m not about to tell Dima the walls are bleeding and I’m positive this means he’s going to die. I have gypsy ancestry, my visions are drug-induced lies. He’s not going to die.

Probably.

“Go on, now. The girl’s pretty. You’re not the bad guy. You’re just the debt collector. You’re not going to die in Flagstaff, not today.”

It’s a murder tableau.

In the front row seats, illuminated by the haze of the stage’s neon spotlights, Alex and Vladimir share a table. Alex lazily twirls a gun on the table while Vladimir smokes a cigarette that’s nearly burnt down to the filter and drums his fingertips on his thigh.

Mikhael’s picking at his fingernails, cleaning out whatever gunk is under them. He’s a nasty fucker. We usually keep him on the road running counterfeits to Vegas and Los Angeles. Artyomdecided that if Mikhael nabbed the girl, she’d be relieved to find out I’m the one collecting the debt.

Kostya sits a row behind everyone else, at a small booth directly behind the group. He’s illuminated less by the stagelights than he is by the cellphone he’s forever messing with. People underestimate Kostya because he’s hardly ever watching what’s going on around him and most of his work in the bratva involves driving me around.

Most people don’t see what I see from him. He might be looking at his phone, but he’s also chosen a spot where he can see every exit while also monitoring the man of the hour. Kostya’s spring-loaded, shying away from the blood the rest of us spill but the most lethal among us when shit flips in an instant.

Directly in front of him is Ivan. Twitchy fuck. The oldest among us, having served under my father and my uncle before him, he loves to wax poetic about the Soviet era. He’s more fucked in the head than I am.

Maybe.

I don’t think there are voices rattling around in his.

So the fact he’s got his hand on the knee of Tony the Bitch — that’s what his own people call him, not just us — doesn’t mean anything either threatening or romantic. That’s just Ivan being Ivan.

Tony’s not seeing it that way. I can tell by his flared nostrils and his glare on Ivan’s hand. He’s a small guy, got that yappy dog energy. All bark. He’s learning now what happens when he tries to sink his teeth in. It’s messing me up, though, that the lasers Ican literally see beaming out of his eyes are right on Ivan’s hand. Does he not even care about how he’s paying for his dumbass debt?

I have to bodily pivot to force myself to look at the stage. Halfway down the underlit plexiglass catwalk is the stripper pole, and the slender girl holding it — no, cuffed to it — is barefoot. She’s dressed, sort of. More than the girls on this stage usually are, at any rate, although the dress she’s in is sheer. That pink light below her glows right through it, showing off the simple black briefs and strangely cut bra beneath it.

Wait, no. I spend far too long leering at her before realizing she’s in a bikini and cover-up. The briefs are a retro fashion, covering everything from just below the navel to her thighs. The top is simple molded cups and thick bands. It’s a chilly forty-five degrees in Flagstaff, but they were dragged up here from Phoenix, which I’m sure was twenty degrees warmer. Still, I’m thinking they must have an indoor or at least heated pool. At her neck is a diamond-encrusted crucifix too large for her slender structure.

But her brother can’t cover a $150,000 debt. Fucking bullshit.

The girl isn’t slender; she’s scrawny. Hardly anything other than a decently curved backside to make her look womanly. They’ve confirmed this is Tony’s nineteen-year-old sister, but fuck, man. I feel like a pedophile just thinking about how he’s settling that debt.

Those pink neon lights begin to coil around her body, threatening to pull her under, a virgin sacrifice to the neon volcano.

I sniff and shake my head. The cocaine drip hits again, propelling me forward — into a table because leave it to me to ruin any sort of commanding entrance when the spotlights look like floating fruit loops and the booths are made out of slaughtered muppets.

Everyone turns and looks at me, including the girl, whom I’ve only seen in profile. Her gaze is a punch in the gut.

She’s got a small, round face, a petite nose with a slight upturn, and an equally small mouth framed with angelically, sinfully plush lips. A fucking cherub with a mouth I shouldn’t be allowed to fuck.

The thought of it, with those tawny lips framing my shaft, tells me I’m not going to need to coke up my dick for an erection to happen. It’s already tweaking like the rest of me.

Giant brown eyes. Goddamn. Like, inhumanly large. Cartoonishly large. A princess from those Japanese cartoons Kseniya loves so much. The more I look at her eyes, the more they grow, until her face is nothing but deep, chocolatey brown framed by octopus tentacles.

But . . . pretty tentacles? Air tentacles waving on a breeze, tempting me forward. Siren tentacles. Water tentacles.

I am underwater, swimming toward her. Keeping my hands at my sides so she doesn’t know I’m tripping balls to get through this. Tony can’t know I’m too much of a pussy to do this sober.

I make my way to the stage slowly so no one can see how unsteady I am, either. The pink bathes my cock, unseen through my pants, but I feel the heat. I can do this. I just need her to be cool.

The girl — fuck, did no one tell me her name? — trembles. From the opposite end of the catwalk, it looks like terror. As I near, it becomes an oscillation beckoning me forward. Inviting me into her. Welcoming me into the arms she can’t separate much more than the width of the pole because of the cuffs. Raven wings unfurl behind her, bouncing and waving in the current.

Probably just hair.

I get close. Too close. She smells like citrus and pepper, something sweet that tickles at my nose. I’m close enough that she has to tilt her head up to look at me, and that’s when I notice her lips are moving. She’s whispering something. I’m not sure if I hear it so much as I read her lips and the flow of violet, a far more pleasant and crisp shade than Dima’s English, as my brain translates her words.

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