Page 15 of Wicked Tricks

“Yeah, yeah,” I grabbed my bag and slung it over my shoulder.

“Love you!” She called after me, as I closed the door behind me.

“Love you too.”

* * *

I unlocked the door to Lilith’s.

The entry was barely noticeable during the day. It blended seamlessly into the greystone buildings and appeared to be just any other black door. As you got close, you could only just make out the letters of the unlit neon sign.

I sighed to myself as I closed and locked the front door behind me. Once the door was closed, the staircase turned into a pitch black space until you reached the top. My fingers gripped the railing, and I climbed the steps carefully. Muscle memory helped a little, and I felt my way around the wall as I reached the top to flick on the lights.

One by one, the lights blinked once before turning on, the large fans above also started to groan as they began to turn. I stood in the entrance, shrugging off my jacket while appreciating the emptiness of the club.

Unlocking the door that led to the back where the dressing rooms and offices were located, I scanned the rest of my surroundings.

Bea would call me paranoid, while I liked to think of it as alert.

It wasn’t because of my encounter with Antoni either, as much as others thought I should have been more worried than I was.

I shook my head and laughed a little to myself.

While I worked almost every night at Lilith’s, this was what I considered to be my day job. From a young age, I had an interest in graphic design, which just so happened to translate well into document forgery.

I had no doubt or disillusion that what we were doing was wrong, and highly illegal, but I had grown up in survival mode and hadn’t found a way to snap out of it. I was one of the kids you hear about, the ones who slip through the cracks.

When I found myself alone on the streets at fifteen, I had no ID, no bank account - no evidence that I even existed. After all this, everything that I had seen and done, there was no way I could go back and get something like a respectable office job.

I couldn’t see myself in that life. I couldn’t see myself in any sense of normalcy or stability.

I didn’t belong there.

This was how we made money, this is how we survived.

My phone buzzed, and I checked the text.

I printed the document that was on my screen, after one last check through for mistakes, and I went and opened the back door. A young woman with straight black hair stood there, holding a baby in her arms. She was starkly pale, sickly thin, and had dark bags under her eyes.

She looked plain exhausted.

“Hi,” she said, checking over her shoulder, “are you Rome?”

“Yeah,” I smiled, “you’re Grace?”

She nodded and smiled, but only briefly.

I opened the door wide and let her in, giving her plenty of space, and led her to my office. The pages were still warm as I pulled them from the printer, and laid them out on the desk in front of us.

“These are your new documents,” I said.

“So it’s like a fake ID?” she asked, her thin fingers touching the pages as she looked closer.

“Kind of,” I said, “I take a mixture of real and fake information, to create a whole new identity. It’s more reliable and harder to track than just buying fake or stolen ID. There’s a whole history here. Bank records, past addresses, old employment details. If you live a normal life, it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll ever be discovered.”

She nodded, staring at the pages and rocking her daughter back and forth. I had only ever spoken to Grace before on the phone, and hadn’t seen her in real life until now. Her tiny frame and bruised skin made my heart turn in an uncomfortable way. I saw a shadow of my past self in her.

“You can start again,” I smiled.

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