Page 1 of BRATVA'S Avenging Bride
Katherine
The bruise on Lena's cheek is three days old and still the color of rotting plums.
I watch her try to cover it with foundation in the dressing room mirror, her hands shaking so badly she smears it across her temple. She's sixteen. Sixteen. And Boris put his fist in her face because she didn't smile wide enough when that banker with the wandering hands bought her a drink.
"It's fine," she whispers when she catches me staring. "I'm fine."
She's not fine. None of us are fine.
Mira sits in the corner, pressing a bag of frozen peas to her ribs. It’s her second beating this week. Her crime? Asking for a cut of her tips. The tips we earn on our backs, on our knees, in the private rooms upstairs where the cameras conveniently malfunction.
I look at my own reflection. The scar above my eyebrow from when Abram threw me into the bar rail. The cigarette burn on my collarbone from when I said no to the wrong man. The exhaustion carved into the hollows under my eyes.
Three years of this cage dressed up as a nightclub. Three years of smiling, complying, pretending it was protection.
Protection. What a joke.
The only thing they protect is their profit margin.
"Katherine." Mira's voice cuts through my thoughts. "You okay?"
I meet her eyes in the mirror. She knows that look. She's seen it before, right before I do something stupid.
"Yeah," I lie. "I'm fine."
But I'm not fine.
I'm done.
The plan forms during my shift, while some tech bro with too much cologne grinds against me on the dance floor and whispers what he wants to do to me later. While Boris watches from the bar with his dead shark eyes, making sure I'm smiling. Making sure I'm compliant.
The storage room in the back. That's where they keep the industrial cleaner. The stuff that's more chemical than soap, the kind with warning labels about flammability.
I've cleaned enough spills to know exactly where it is.
I slip away during the chaos of last call, when everyone's drunk and sloppy and the bouncers are busy throwing out the ones who can't stand anymore. The hallway to the storage room is empty. The lock is broken, has been for months.
The bottles are right where I remember. Three of them. Big. Heavy.
My hands don't shake when I grab two. There's a clarity to this moment, a cold certainty that settles in my chest like ice.
This ends tonight.
I wait until four in the morning, when the last customer stumbles out and the girls start heading out to the tiny, dingy apartment we are all made to share.
Mira catches my arm in the hallway. "Kat. What are you doing?"
I look at the bottles in my hands. Then at her. "Getting us out."
Her eyes go wide. "You can't. They'll kill you."
"They're already killing us. It’ll be quicker this way. Just get the rest of the girls, get out and say nothing, okay?"
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her fingers tighten on my wrist, and for a second, I think she's going to try to stop me. Try to talk sense into me. Going to remind me that I'm not brave, I'm just broken.
But then she looks past me, down the hall to where Abram is laughing with the bouncer about something. Where the locked doors keep us in the dark when we misbehave. Where we become too scared or too tired to fight anymore.
"The fire exits," she whispers. "I’ll block the side one and the front. You will have to go out the back."
