by Virna DePaul
If her mom could see her now.
Barrett concentrated on memorizing details Nick would be sure to ask her about. She tried to relax. She was inside. If she got picked, she would have a chance to explore the inside of the club whenever she was free. If she didn’t get picked, she’d sneak in. Fortunately, according to Moira Finn, who offered insider information every time Justine called her to gab, there was a media junket scheduled before the club’s grand opening.
Apparently every girl in a G-string between New City and Atlanta was hoping to be interviewed by a national reporter and get a taste of fame. The club would be crowded with all kinds of people coming and going at odd hours, which was to their advantage.
There were over a hundred applicants vying to be noticed. A lanky man in a suit that didn’t fit him too well strolled onstage.
“Gil!” His name got screamed over and over, like he was a rock star instead of a sleazebag pimp.
So this was Gil Mansfield, turned vamp and suspected child abductor.
If only she had a way to alert Nick right now. But a cell call could be overheard, even intercepted and recorded. They had no way of knowing if electronic surveillance was operative inside the club. Nick had emphasized the danger. They’d agreed to call only when it seemed safe to do so. And even then they would be taking a risk unless they were several miles away from the club.
Mansfield ran a hand over his slick hair and adjusted his tie, blatantly preening for the girls.
Barrett’s eyes narrowed, memorizing his face and the way he walked, in case she ever had to figure out who he was in some dark alley.
She almost missed the entrance of the man who owned Club Red.
Tall, magnificently built, and expensively dressed, Vladimir Ouspensky radiated sinister confidence. He had a quelling effect on the overexcited girls. They went quiet as he strode across the stage.
A pouty brunette with a beauty-pageant body joined him, draping her slender arm across his broad shoulders. She was the one Nick had pegged as Miss Silicone, Barrett realized. She seemed to be advertising her status as Vladimir’s girlfriend, in case the dancers didn’t get it.
His long black hair fell over his shoulders as he leaned forward, studying each girl in turn with remarkable concentration.
Then he made his choice, pointing only to the ones he liked. The bouncers began to escort the rejects out. Many were chattering like magpies again, not exactly heartbroken. The pouty brunette skittered off the stage to talk to a girl she seemed to know.
Barrett remembered the other clubs she’d glimpsed from the outside when she and Justine had driven through New City to the condo. Most would probably find work.
An uneasy feeling came over her as she glanced around at the rapidly thinning crowd. Justine, who was standing right by her, elbowed her hard.
“He’s staring at you, Barrett,” she said under her breath. “I told you you’d get noticed.”
Barrett looked up quickly at the man on the stage. She was immediately riveted by his dark eyes. It wasn’t a cliché to say they looked like burning coals, because they actually did. The irises were black with a spark of incandescent red.
Despite the heat in his gaze, she shivered. His mouth had a cruel sensuality, with lips that curved but never smiled.
Definitely a force to be reckoned with, she thought, trying to ignore the uneasy feeling that kept growing.
His gaze lifted as he half turned to speak to a woman who’d just joined him. Her plump figure was encased in tight fuchsia knit, with hennaed, spiky-short hair.
Barrett strained to hear Vladimir Ouspensky’s murmured words and the woman’s soft response.
Only one word came across clearly.
Stripped.
She turned to Justine, who had heard it, too.
“No need to go that far. You don’t have to do this,” Justine whispered out of the side of her mouth. “I’ll walk out with you. Come on.”
Barrett shook her head. She was inside the club. He wanted her. She was staying.
Sure enough, Vladimir had wanted Barrett to strip, but not in the way she’d assumed. Yolanda, the woman in fuchsia, had been ordered to remove the natural color from Barrett’s hair and do a white-silver rinse with polymer finish. The result was stunning and wildly sophisticated in an otherworldly way.
She barely recognized herself, though Vladimir, watching, had insisted that her long hair not be shortened, but only trimmed. The precision-cut result was a masterpiece of geometry.
Standing behind her, he had let her pure white locks run through his fingers over and over again. Each time they fell into the same perfectly straight horizontal line at the end.
He never touched her skin. Just her hair. The air moving against the nape of her neck was an infinitely subtle sensation. She would have called it erotic if Nick had been the one doing it.
When Vladimir Ouspensky did it, it was sexual. She was disturbed by her instinctive reaction to him, dismissing it as only physical. But it was something more than that. She sat in silence as he stepped back, feeling ashamed of the answer that came to mind. It was a thrill. Being so close to such a powerful and evil man was an undeniable thrill.
Barrett corrected herself. Not a man. A vampire. Barrett was certain that’s what he was.
Profoundly evil.
He met her eyes in the mirror she was facing. She crossed one wrist over the other, as if she were protecting her body from him. The warmth of the heavy gold bracelet reminded her that he could not read her mind.
Thank God for that.
He murmured his thanks to Yolanda, who stood to the side, her hands on her hips, critically surveying her handiwork. Then he spoke to Barrett.
“Welcome to Club Red. I think you will make a most elegant hostess.”
Justine had been right. No one had asked to see a résumé. It really was all about the way you looked. She’d offered a few vague lines about having worked in a New York nightclub and given it an imaginary name. He’d waved the explanation away, and as far as the club’s made-up name, hadn’t seemed to care. Clubs opened and closed with blinding speed in any big city anyway, trendy one minute and passé the next.
“Thank you for the opportunity,” Barrett said. “I was wondering, though—what do you want me to do until the grand opening?”
“Various things.” He gazed approvingly at her in the mirror. “Feel free to move about the club in order to completely familiarize yourself with the layout. Even I lose my way from time to time.”
She nodded, not believing that for a second. Club Red seemed like an extension of him. Overwhelming. Complicated.
“You are expected to arrive before the girls do, and supervise their signing in and so forth. Learn to use the software. Although if you’ve worked in a nightclub I suppose it will be familiar to you.”
“Of course.” She gave him a confident smile. Justine could probably download the program—or Nick could—and tutor her at the condo. She was going to have to learn fast.
They were interrupted by a low whistle.
“Look at that fantastic hair. Girl, it don’t get no whiter. And blown straight as a ruler.”
The woman who spoke to Barrett was African American, tall and stunningly beautiful, with dark doe eyes outlined in smoky pencil and breathtakingly long legs. Jeans and tee and platform sandals made the most of a feline figure that didn’t quit.
Vladimir nodded to the woman, a hint of a smile playing about his lips. Then he spoke to Barrett. “I must go. I will allow this lady to introduce herself.”
“Oh—okay. And thanks,” Barrett said to her. “I like the look. It just takes a little getting used to.”
Barrett wasn’t lying. She stared into the mirror, feeling somewhat unsettled by Vladimir’s abrupt departure. Her sudden self-consciousness compelled her to tame the waterfall of white—or maybe just brush away the strange feelings her transformation had evoked.
A few more long strokes and she was done, setting the brush down.
She felt really different with her hair stripped and bleached to no color at all, as if she’d acquired an alternate persona: cold and unapproachable. Which wasn’t what she would need to successfully infiltrate Club Red.
“Yeah, he’s like that,” the woman said knowingly. “I heard Yolanda’s supposed to do hair and makeup only for the important girls now.” She snapped her fingers and pointed at Barrett. “You must be the new hostess.”
“As a matter of fact, I am. But I don’t think that makes me particularly important. Justine recommended me for the job.” Barrett left out the chain of events. If you had to lie, keep it simple. One of Nick’s mottoes.
“Never heard of her. But I know Vladimir likes white,” the other woman said. “Don’t ask me what I’m doing in his brand-new club,” she joked.
“Did you just get hired, too? By the way, I’m Barrett Klein.” Barrett extended a hand, the fake last name flowing smoothly from her lips.
“Sammy Privett. You can call me Sam. Pleased to meet you.” She confirmed that with a warm handshake. “And don’t get me wrong, I love the platinum princess look. Can’t rock it quite like you do myself, but so what. And to answer your question, me and Vlad go way back. I’ve worked for him before and I’ve got a lot of connections he finds invaluable. Sure hope they finish fixing up the club before the grand opening.”
“Me, too.” Barrett twisted her gold bracelet and noticed how Sam’s gaze tracked the movement.
“Be sure you keep track of your bling. Or just wear the fake stuff. That’s what I do.” Sam grinned. “Want to see the dressing room? Some of the dancers are already steaming up the mirrors.”
Barrett was taken aback. “Doing what?”
“Generating hot air, honey. Between their damn blow-dryers and the way they gossip, it’s probably about a hundred degrees in there already.”
“Oh. Got it.”
“Come on. We can listen in. Nothing but lies. Better than TV any day of the week.”
Sam motioned to Barrett to follow her as she swung open the door to a backstage corridor. There were bare bulbs in wire cages strung from a long rod fastened to the ceiling.
Barrett trotted after her, noticing that the fixtures just barely cleared Sam’s high hairdo, she was so tall. Despite her long strides, there was a sensual swing to her walk that Barrett envied.
“What is it you do, Sam?” she asked, catching up to her.
“I used to strip but that game got old. So I switched to warming up the audiences before the shows. That’s what Vlad wants me to do here. With a side hustle,” she added. “I’m a costume consultant.”
“Great. Can you help me out?”
Sam turned and eyed Barrett’s conservative suit. “Sure. Burn that and start over.”
“Thanks a lot,” she laughed.
“I wasn’t insulting you. You just need to find yourself something sharp to match that hair.”
Barrett stopped at the door to the dressing room when Sam did, peeking inside over the other woman’s shoulder.
“Ladies, this is Barrett Klein. She’s our new hostess, so show respect, because she’ll be checking your time sheets if you dance and bottle sales if you’re serving.”
Dead silence. Which did not bode well.
Sam forged on. “She comes highly recommended by a lady called Justine—excuse me. What are you all staring at?”
“Her.”
The terse reply said it all. The unknown name got Barrett nothing but suspicious stares. Blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes, and one pair of brilliant purple eyes—tinted contacts, she realized—fixed on her face. No one smiled.
“Justine is Moira Finn’s friend, if you’re trying to figure out the connection,” Barrett said quickly. “I understand that a lot of you are represented by Moira?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“My agent.”
“Really? Hey, can you give me her business card?”
“Fuck off.”
The ice was broken. Most of them seemed to know Moira or her agency or they acted like they did. Barrett was welcomed into the dressing room and then more or less ignored in a friendly way as the strippers went back to what they had been doing: putting on makeup and fixing their hair and talking a mile a minute. About their boyfriends and husbands, mostly. They moved on to which clubs didn’t pay their dancers promptly or docked them for little infractions. They were hoping for better from Ouspensky.
Sam gave her a nudge. “Had enough of these heffas?”
“What did you call us?” a girl asked, more amused than annoyed.
“You heard me. Let’s go, Barrett.”
She stopped on her way out, her attention captured by music blasting from a closed room. Someone cranked it up even louder. Barrett was almost deafened.
Pounding feet jumped in and kept the beat. Stampeding cattle would have stepped more lightly. Was the show choreographer putting a chorus line through their paces? It certainly sounded like it.
Barrett looked around, realizing that she was alone for the first time. With the blasting music as a cover, she ought to do some snooping for as long as she could get away with it.
She walked quickly away, turning left into a corridor that also looked empty, glancing into rooms with open doors and grimacing at the new but tacky loveseats and other suggestive furniture. No doubt there for striking a pose, novelty chairs shaped like giant stiletto heels had been placed in each room. Ugh.
So Nick wouldn’t give her hell, she quietly turned the doorknobs of rooms that were closed. All locked. Her instincts told her that Jane wouldn’t be held on this level or the ones above it. She was looking for stairs that went down.
A heavy door, almost vaultlike, stood shut at the end of the corridor. There was no exit sign above it and no clue as to what it was for. But there was a keypad next to it with a tiny, blinking red light. No way to tell if that meant it was open, or shut and alarmed.
Barrett stopped for a second, uneasy. Had she heard footsteps? The music wasn’t as loud here but it still didn’t seem possible.
A man appeared near the heavy door. Not one she’d seen. By her guess, a guard. Bald and ugly, with a thick neck. His dark suit and dark glasses creeped her out.
“Looking for something?” he called.
“Ah—the rehearsal.”
He pointed in the general direction of the way she’d come.
“In back of you.”
“Thanks so much.” Barrett turned around and walked away with measured steps. She could feel the guard’s eyes burning into her back.
Seemed like a good idea to follow through on where she supposedly wanted to be. By the time she reached the source of the loud music, the door was open. The dancing part seemed to be over. She stopped in her tracks again, transfixed by the sight of strippers showing off their latest routines.
The pole-dancing class at her upscale gym was nothing like this.
Nearly naked bodies shone with glitter and sweat. Their heavily made-up eyes had a feral shine. Barrett had never seen anything like what they were doing. Undulations and rolls so sexy any man’s mind would be permanently blown. Back bends with their heads through their legs. Lifts with silk straps into lascivious, spread-legged positions that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Solo girls in pin-up poses. Several girls, entangled.
Barrett stared with wide eyes until someone all in black, not definitively male or female, came to the door, threw her an annoyed look, and slammed it shut.
Time to go.
Chapter 20
The auditions over, Vladimir headed back to his office, the secure one that was below the main floor of the club. He frowned when he saw who was lounging on the chaise in the hall outside the office door. Gil Mansfield had his eyes closed as he listened to music that Vladimir could hear playing
faintly in his earbuds. The toes of his stretch-sided narrow boots were scuffed. No doubt from keeping the beat, as Gil was doing now, to the abominable tunes he preferred.
For a former soldier, he was slack-bodied and going to seed, and that was even before the physical deterioration caused by the FBI’s drug had started. You got what you paid for with a turned vampire, Vladimir thought angrily. Apparently, the FBI’s experimental programs could use rigorous oversight in more ways than one. He ought to offer himself as a consultant, if only to increase his chances of poaching the better ones. As it was, however, he already had a contact inside. One who kept him one step ahead of the feds. One who’d led him to Gil.
And one who’d led Gil to Murphy, through the tracking chip planted inside all turned vampires. Gil and his men had tracked down Murphy on some godforsaken mountain and he’d soon be one of Vlad’s guests.
Then he’d be Vlad’s gladiator, competing against another turned vampire in the cage.
Real blood would be spilled. Physical limbs ripped off.
It would be quite thrilling to watch.
Mansfield yawned suddenly, bringing Vlad’s attention back to him. Vladimir scowled with disgust, wondering how Mansfield had ever survived the U.S. military. The fellow had betrayed every principle he had sworn to uphold, had aided the enemy time and again. How unwise of the army to have given up on executing traitors.
“Get up,” Vladimir snapped, yanking the earbud out of Gil’s ear. “Why are you here?”
The lanky man scrambled to his feet.
“That girl we just brought in? She’s kind of spooky. Those big eyes of hers get on my nerves, the way she stares. She keeps banging on the walls. We gotta stick her in a soundproofed cell somewhere else.”
“Do it after I talk to her.”
“First I have to do a walk-through of the dressing rooms,” Gil said. “You know, keep an eye on the regular girls.”
“Look, but don’t touch,” Vladimir advised him. “Do you think you can remember that this time?”
“Yeah, sure. Sam is always hanging around there anyway. She’s so tall she sees everything. I can’t cop a feel.”
