Vicious Promise by M. James
Sofia
To my relief, we start out simple. The first place Ana takes me is an upscale martini bar on a rooftop, where we bypass the line waiting to get in and all Ana does is tell the bouncer her name. The moment her last name slips out of her mouth, his face changes, and he doesn’t even glance at me as he ushers us both inside.
I’m shocked at how it makes me feel. I’ve never cared about any of this, but a strange sort of elation washes over me as the bouncer waves me past, as if I’ve just been admitted into a world that I was only vaguely aware even existed. The bar is full of women dressed in everything from expensive business suits to tight-fitted dresses like the ones Ana and I are wearing, with sky-high heels and perfectly done hair and makeup. The men are elegant and sleek too, clean-cut in suits that I can only imagine are tailored just for them, fitting so well that I can’t help but feel a slight buzz of desire as I look around the room. It’s impossible not to—the bar is thrumming with sexual energy, every man in here an alpha predator looking for his prey for the night. I can feel their gazes traveling over me like electric sparks on my skin, and I’m not sure that I like it. I feel too exposed, and I desperately wish that I didn’t only have one layer of too-tight fabric between my skin and their hungry eyes.
“I need a drink,” I hiss in Ana’s ear, and she grins.
“I’m on it.” She grabs my hand, pulling me towards the gleaming bar. There’s a handsome man in a white-button down and no tie standing behind it, his dark hair slicked back. He’s making something elaborate for a pencil-thin, beautiful woman leaning on the bar, swiftly moving the cocktail shaker from one hand to the next and then pouring it from several inches above the glass, finishing with a flourish before adding a wisp of lemon rind and setting the glass on the bar.
“What do you want?” Ana perches on one of the mahogany stools, pushing a long curl out of her face. “I’m having a gin martini, extra dirty.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Just try it.” She smiles flirtatiously at the bartender, pushing a lock of silky dark hair out of her face. I can see his eyes flick immediately to her full lips. There’s a certain kind of power in what she does, I think, but I don’t understand how Ana and women like her wield it, how they can be so confident in their beauty and their sexuality. I know that I’m beautiful by the definition of the word, but all I feel right now is out of place and awkward, uncomfortable in my thin dress and exposed by everything I don’t have under it. I don’t know how to feel powerful like this.
The bartender slides the two martinis across to us, and Ana picks hers up. “To an exciting night out in Manhattan,” she says with a grin, tapping the thin edge of her glass against mine. She takes a sip, leaving a crimson stain on the glass.
Gingerly, I lift my own martini to my lips. It smells like a pine tree, and when I take a sip, I cough immediately. There’s a faint saltiness from the olives, but aside from that it just burns all the way down to my stomach.
Ana frowns. The bartender looks at me with a small smirk, and I can feel myself turning red. I should never have agreed to this.
“Here.” The bartender pushes a drink across to me, his face slightly more sympathetic. “Give this a try.”
I smell that same piney scent, this time mixed with lime, and when I take a sip this time it’s much more palatable—a bit sweeter, and tinged with enough lime that I think I actually like it. “That’s good,” I manage. “What’s that?”
“Gin and tonic,” the bartender says. His eyes are glued to me now, flicking over my breasts in the bustier-style top of my dress. “Ask for that at any bar with extra lime and top-shelf liquor, and I guarantee you’ll like it. It’s a hard drink to fuck up.” He winks at me. “Just a little tip.”
“I’m sure that’s not the only little tip he’s got,” Ana whispers in my ear, giggling as he walks away.
“I think he’s sexy.” For once I let myself actually look at a guy in a sexual way, wondering what would happen if I asked him for his number, or gave him mine. “He’s got a nice ass.”
Ana frowns. “Don’t get distracted by the first pair of tight pants you see, Sofia. You can do a hell of a lot better than a bartender.”
“What if I don’t want to, though?” Truthfully, I’m not really interested in dating anyone. But the predatory men all around this bar don’t turn me on, they frighten me. All I can think is that any woman with one of them isn’t a girlfriend, she’s a possession.
“Come on,” Ana says, finishing her drink and setting it down. “There’s a lot of night ahead of us.”
We hit two more spots, a futuristic bar with a lot of dry ice and neon lights, and a smoky whiskey bar with leather seating and mahogany throughout. I feel out of place in all of them, and I’m just about to beg Ana to head back to the apartment—or at least go back on my own—when she comes back from the bathroom with a huge smile on her face.
“My friend Devin just texted me back,” she says, leaning in towards me conspiratorially. “She gave me the secret password for this new club. It’s supposed to be wild.”
Wildis exactly the opposite of what I want. But Ana is already paying the bill, an excited look on her face. “I’ve been hearing about this club for months,” she says. “It’s super exclusive. And crazy shit happens there.”
“I don’t know if I’m down for crazy shit,” I start to say, but by then Ana is signing the receipt and grabbing my hand, pulling me out into the busy street again as she flags down a cab. “This is going to be the best night of our lives,” she promises. “I’m so having some really freaky sex tonight.”
Also not something I’m interested in, I think dryly as a cab pulls up to the curb and Ana tumbles inside, pulling me along. I can only imagine what this place that she’s taking us to must be like. Ana is fearless, down for anything, and I have to admit that sometimes it’s a trait I’m envious of.
But how can I be fearless, when I know all too well what’s out there to be afraid of—that there are monsters in the dark streets of the city, the kind of men who would snatch away a girl’s father, and leave her half an orphan at twelve, her mother so brokenhearted that she didn’t have the spirit to fight off the cancer that struck her a year later? The doctors said that we just didn’t catch it in time, but I knew the truth. Even I wasn’t enough to keep my mother tied to this Earth, with my father gone. Not when she believed that his spirit was somewhere out there waiting for her.
I touch the small gold cross laying against my skin, crusted with the tiniest of pave diamonds along the sides. It’s the most valuable thing that my mother owned, other than the pearl earrings that my father gave her for their wedding, and she gave it to me just before she died. It was a gift from her own mother, back in Russia. Ana wanted me to take it off tonight, but I haven’t removed it since her funeral. I wasn’t about to tonight, just to avoid putting someone off. I’m not even a little bit religious—her funeral was also the last time that I was in a church, but nothing in the world could convince me to take off the last thing my mother gave me.
The cab pulls up to the edge of the street again, jolting me out of my thoughts, and I climb out as Ana pays the driver. The street we’re on is dark, and less busy than others, and I feel that pinging sensation again, the warning that something is off. But Ana is already heading towards the wall in front of us, where I can’t even tell that there’s a door until we’re right in front of it, and I can see the thin seam.
Ana knocks three times quickly, and the door cracks open.
“Preispodnyaya,” she says, her accent thickening as she says the password aloud. It’s the first time I can recall hearing her speak Russian, and it sends a shiver down my spine. I rarely ever heard my mother speak it, and I recall overhearing my father tell her than she couldn’t teach me, that she shouldn’t even speak it at home. He’d said it kindly, but still, it was one of the few times I ever saw my mother cry.
The door swings open, and Ana steps confidently inside. I follow, nerves churning in my stomach, and I catch a glimpse of the man standing in the shadows by the door—tall and dressed all in black, his craggy features undefinable in the darkness.
I can hear the heavy beat of the music as we descend down the steps, and I see a red glow ahead of us. By the time we reach the foot of the stairs and stop in front of the archway that leads into the main room of the club, locked behind iron gates, I can feel the music vibrating through my body and shaking the floor beneath me.
Two impossibly thin girls dressed in red latex push the gates open, and Ana grins at me as we walk into the red glow.
“Welcome to Hell.”
