Page 3 of Ruined
“Tell me about this winter ball,” I said.
“They’re holding it at the conference center in the Sage City,” she said. Which made sense. Most of the students in her school were from Sage City, the metropolitan area outside of town. “You know, next to the Observatory?” She paused, took a deep breath in, then added with a sharp exhale that seemed to compress her next few words into one, “And tickets are twenty-five hundred dollars each.”
“Tickets are two thousand and five hundred dollars?” I asked in a high-pitched voice. “Are they feeding you gold-leafed ice cream?”
“I don’t know,” Nora whined. “I just want to go.”
I suppose I should have been happy that she was asking me. At her age, I would have found a way to attend without Mama knowing, but after dresses and tickets, my high school dances would have been a couple hundred bucks. Not a couple thousand.
But that’s what it took to keep Nora safe and secret: a private boarding school that was worth the debt I incurred to keep her there. As long as the Dahlia District never got their reins around Nora.
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” I said. I tried not to show that I was already caving.
“Okay,” she said, her voice chipper. I was that obvious to my sister, wasn’t I? A pushover.
The hardest part was letting her go, knowing that anything could happen to her. I would never be free of my existence at the Dahlia District, so money wasn’t the biggest issue. What was another few thousand on top of my debt? You’d hope that an entertainment club for hedonistic billionaires would pay its employees well, and it did. The problem was that most of it went to pay our debts. Sometimes, we never saw a cent.
So would you call us employees? With the debt that most of us owed, we would be here until we died. Some of us had even absorbed our parents’ debts, like me.
It’s not like we could run away. I had watched what happened to servers who tried to abandon their contracts. Dahlia had an arrangement with the local mob and used runaways as an example to all of us. We had too many loved ones on the line. It was better to serve your time and do as you were told.
Dahlia told me once that you couldn’t call it sex trafficking, nor a brothel, because sex was forbidden. When it came up, she preferred to call us servers ‘indentured servants.’ As if that made it any better.
After straightening my hair and tending to the minor cut, I joined the rest of the servers on the main floor. Aldrich was waiting in front of the stage, where an aerial hoop hung suspended in the air, the rope around the top hanging from a beam hidden in the shafts of the stage. A colorful sea of servers in lingerie surrounded him. There weren’t many other guests around, which explained why Aldrich was so popular. Good for him.
“She’s back!” Aldrich said. I sucked in a breath and plastered a smile on my face. “And survived, no less,” he said to one of the servers, who giggled on command. The jerk must have told them that I had overreacted about the cut. It wasn’t the cut itself that bothered me; we agreed to terms, and he hadn’t followed them.
I gestured at the stage. “Aerial hoop, then?”
He nodded. “I’m expecting someone. Do something to impress my guest.”
I selected the songSickby Donna Missal, not because of Aldrich, but because it was my personal favorite and it made the sting of performing for him less jarring. Then I removed my silk robe and adjusted my bra and panties, double-checking the cut to make sure that it wouldn’t break open again. Then I stepped out of my shoes, placing them out of the way in the staircase leading up to the stage.
The music started, and I held onto the metal hoop, making it drift back and forth as I spun in circles. Once it slowed, I lifted my legs, keeping my toes pointed, and scooped my ankles inside of the hoop, keeping all of my limbs straight. Then I angled my body against the curve, arching my back as far as it would go, letting a loose hand fall beside me.
A man in a suit came across the back of the club. Only billionaire club members were allowed inside of the Dahlia District, and I didn’t recognize this new one. He glanced up at the stage, but then he made his way towards Aldrich’s group.
None of the servers had noticed him yet. They were paying attention to Aldrich, who was whispering into their ears, but all of their eyes were on me. To save the club member from being swarmed by the servers, I didn’t look at him closely; not yet. I wanted to give him a moment to relax before the hawks caught his scent.
Using one hand to hold onto the top of the hoop with my legs as an anchor, I cast my hips forward, then looked at the audience, making eye contact with anyone who was watching. The blank eyes. The forced smiles.
Until I came upon him.
That new member. Dark hair. Light brown eyes with a hint of hazel that made them bright. Facial hair impeccably groomed, a roughness that contrasted with his suit. His clothes looked expensive and custom-tailored, fitting to his toned body. Still standing, he leaned forward against the back of a chair, his hands spread wide as if he was ready to make a deal I couldn’t refuse.
For a moment, I forgot what I was doing.
“Hales,” one of the servers whispered.
I hated it when people used that name. It was a stupid nickname Aldrich had made up. As if faux familiarity made my rejections less painful for him.
I lifted one of my legs to the top of the hoop and used that move to transition into a gazelle, an upside-down pose with one knee hooking onto the inside of the hoop with a straight leg on the outside. Then I straightened the bent knee, holding onto the hoop, doing the splits in the air.
The man moved closer to the stage. His eyes were glued to me.
There was a magnetic appeal to him. The confidence oozed through his pores and made me wonder. He must have seen aerial dancers before; what was so special about me? One of the servers at the far end of Aldrich’s flock went to greet him, but he ignored her and kept coming to the stage. He stood at the edge, and again had both hands stretched out across the wooden floor as he looked up at me. The hoop spun and spun, and I caught a glimpse of him.
“Hi,” I said during one of those turns.
