Page 3 of Wicked Tricks

Every club, gang, dealer, or organisation that I knew about in Melbourne paid their dues to The Family one way or another. If they didn’t - owners would disappear, windows would be broken, inventory stolen, police raids under the guise of anonymous tip offs.

This was their game.

If you didn’t play, you lost.

Diana, who was once close friends with the Don Santino, formed the arrangement so we never paid them a cent. They just hung around and made their presence known. Until recently, this arrangement had never been an issue.

Diana shot me a look, gesturing towards her office with a simple tilt of her head, and I knew I was in trouble. She raised her hand, a small gesture, and the lights went off and the music started once again. The girls and the customers went back to what they were doing after taking in their share of the drama. Diana disappeared after one last weary glance at me.

“Are you okay?” I asked Gwen, dropping down to help her clean up the glass from Robert’s tantrum.

She smiled sadly at me, “I’m fine. It’s part of the job, I guess.”

“Yeah,” I grumbled, “well it shouldn’t be. These men just have to ruin everything.”

She shrugged, smiling a hopeful smile, “they’re not all bad.”

I laughed quietly and shook my head.

Naive little girl.

I would believe that when I had some evidence.

Throughout my life I had collected evidence on a lot of things. Large chunks of my life had been almost surreal, my memories were faded and blurry. So through collecting and analysing this evidence, I was able to decide what was true about the world and my life. Logical proof, tangible things that I could hold onto in my mind.

From the evidence that I had collected so far, I could believe some things with absolute certainty. I could prove that the sky was blue, the grass was green, that I could easily survive four days without a meal before getting too weak, and I could fit one hundred thousand dollars worth of cash in Beanca’s furry blue tote bag.

Living by this evidence, and what I knew to be true, kept me alive and kept me safe. It built me up from the scared little street kid that I was, to the woman that I was today. And after over twenty years of searching for anything that would disprove my findings - I still had not stumbled upon a single shred of evidence that would make me believe that any man was trustworthy.

Looking dreadfully at the door leading to Diana’s office, I could hear the oncoming lecture in my mind already. Sighing, I made my way to the door, looking to the stages over my shoulder.

I caught eyes with Bea as she danced in front of a group of very young guys in her neon green bikini. She poked her tongue out and pointed at me mockingly as she continued rolling her hips, not missing a beat, knowing that I was in for a scolding from our mother figure. I rolled my eyes and entered the code to the security lock and slipped inside, being careful to not open the door too wide.

Diana stood in her office, hands on her hips, watching over Livie and Sierra as they counted stacks of cash in the walk-in safe. I closed the heavy door behind me, and shook off my leather jacket, draping it over a chair.

The safe was stacked full with cash and weapons, a stark contrast to the conservative library that the office appeared to be to the normal person. Not even all of the girls who worked at Lilith’s really knew what was going on. There were bartenders, hosts, dancers - girls who just worked the job.

And then there was us. Lilith’s Daughters.

We all had jobs and roles, and we were slowly becoming competition to The Family, not that they knew about it. We tried to keep our success a secret, knowing that if they knew the business we were really bringing in, that they would step in and want a cut.

Livie and Sierra were the newest Daughters, while they had worked for Diana for years, they had only recently gotten into ourextra-curricularactivities.

I was the first.

The first Daughter, the first girl that Diana took in. I looked at her now, the same woman who had found me starving at sixteen.

I remembered noticing her Chanel bag, and how I had even considered stealing it before she offered me her hand, a job, and a warm meal. Eventually, I convinced Diana to let Bea join, and then Mina too. All of us with rocky roads leading us to this.

We dabbled in a lot of activities - burglary, laundering, counterfeiting, amongst other things I no longer enjoyed thinking about.

Now, Livie and I ran one of the most profitable endeavours for Lilith’s - selling stolen and fake identities. Creating these synthetic, fabricated identities was becoming more and more lucrative. We were the only ones in the state who did it and did it properly.

We did such a good job that getting caught was unlikely.

With the help of the girls, we took pieces of information from different people - customers, men on the street, guys online. With all these bits and pieces, we spliced together a brand new legal entity and sold it to the highest bidder.

These identities were almost untraceable if the user wasn’t stupid or cocky, because they could not be traced back to any one person.

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