Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4) by Lauren Gilley

Author:Lauren Gilley [Gilley, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HP Press
Published: 2019-12-22T18:30:00+00:00

~*~

Mia hadn’t been inside a nightclub since she was underage and her friend Megan had gotten them both shoddy fake IDs and they’d smiled their way into an old warehouse lit up with neon, blacklights, and which had smelled like human sweat and feet. She remembered a blue drink in a plastic cup that tasted like battery acid and left her face half-numb, half-prickling with an ugly buzzing sensation. A pair of older boys with acne and too many facial piercings had hit on them, and Mia had ended up holding Megan’s hair back for her in the most terrifying bathroom she’d ever seen.

The experience hadn’t left her with a positive impression of nightclubs, just in general.

She didn’t want to go into this club. The Wet Whistle, the neon signage above the door read. All black from the outside, no visible windows. A place designed to trap the dark inside; a den for every laughing, wild, half-drunk person who wanted to throw their hands up and shake their hair in their faces and pretend, for a little while, that their savagery was an expressible, external trait, rather than the odd collection of daily cruelties that they inflicted upon one another, just because they could.

She liked calm, and quiet, and a more structured kind of exercise. She didn’t like feeling wild and unhinged; it reminded her too much of what it had been like to be sick; to feel like her body was running away from her, control sliding through her fingers like sweat-slick reins.

But Val wanted to go inside – saw it as another modern indulgence he was dying to explore – and she didn’t have it in her to protest, not when he’d been locked up longer than this country had existed. So she let him open the door for her, and invite her to lead the way with a courtly wave of his arm. It hadn’t been very long, but she’d already grown used to that – to his manners, so extravagant by today’s standards, so very him. She took a deep breath, steeled herself for the onslaught of sight, sound, and scent, and stepped into murkiness of the vestibule.

It was dark, but once the door had shut, she found it wasn’t as dark as she’d feared. Low-level can lights with a faintly purple tinge glowed in the black-painted ceiling, and tall, chrome urns on either side of the door held tall sprays of silver, purple, and blue faux grass. She spotted a counter – a coat check – where a sizable line had formed, patrons stripping jackets off of cocktail dresses, silk shirts, and even a suit or two, handing them over to efficient employees dressed all in black.

This wasn’t a shitty nightclub where kids with fake IDs came to get drunk; this was swanky, upscale. The people taking off their coats were young business professionals, tastefully decked out for the evening.

Some of her anxiety eased, though there were too many smells to properly catalogue, and she felt the throb of music through the soles of her feet and back in her molars.

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