Chapter 1 - The Weight of the Pour
The night I found my brother’s killer, I was carrying a three-thousand-dollar bottle of whisky on a silver tray. My hands did not shake. That was the first rule of survival I had learned after Leo died: fear makes a mess, and messes leave evidence.
Saturday nights at the Crimson Lounge always carried a particular electricity, the kind that crawled over your skin before you understood whether it was excitement or warning. I felt it the moment I tied my black apron around my waist and stepped behind the mahogany bar, where the wood had been polished to such a high shine that it reflected the amber lights overhead like a second ceiling. The club occupied a restored warehouse in Chicago’s West Loop, all exposed brick, steel beams, velvet banquettes, and expensive artwork that looked casually placed only because someone had paid a consultant a terrible amount of money to make wealth appear relaxed.
To the guests, Crimson smelled like luxury. To me, it smelled like survival.
Lemon peel. Wet wool. Old bourbon. Floor cleaner. Burned orange rind from the smoked cocktails tourists ordered because they looked good in videos. Underneath all of it was the faint metallic hum of money moving through a room where nobody paid attention to the people who kept the glasses full. I had worked there six months. Long enough to perfect invisibility. Long enough to learn which men tipped generously because they were kind and which tipped generously because they wanted to be remembered as kind. Long enough to know that the guests never really looked at bartenders. Not properly. We were functional, like glassware, ice machines, folded napkins, polished brass.
Most nights, I preferred it that way.
“Sof,” Ryan Mitchell said, sliding up beside me with an empty tray balanced on his palm. “You’re doing the far-away thing again.”
I reached for the Grey Goose without looking. “I’m making cosmos.”
“You’re making cosmos while staring into the middle distance like you’re narrating the downfall of a small kingdom.”
“Maybe I am.”
Ryan grinned. He had dark hair styled with impossible precision, warm brown skin, and the natural charm of a man who could tell a rude customer to wait his turn and somehow make the customer thank him for the privilege. He had worked at Crimson for four years. He knew every regular by name, every investor’s favorite bourbon, every influencer’s fake allergy, every wealthy wife who ordered club soda with lime until her husband went to the restroom and then asked for tequila.
“Three cosmos, two dirty martinis, one Negroni,” he reminded me.
“I know.”
“You were reaching for Cointreau like it offended your ancestors.”
“My ancestors had taste.”
He laughed, but his eyes softened in the way I always tried not to notice. Ryan cared carefully. He had learned, over the months, not to ask too much. He knew my brother was dead. He knew I worked every shift Thomas Whitmore would give me. He knew I declined dinner invitations from him and his husband Carlos with excuses so transparent we all pretended they were curtains. He did not know the exact number of days since Leo’s body had been pulled from the icy waters of Lake Michigan, ruled an accidental drowning by a police department that stopped investigating the moment the word overdose appeared on the preliminary toxicology report.
Leo didn't do drugs. Leo was a meticulous, stubborn accountant who color-coded his tax returns and cried when he accidentally stepped on an earthworm.
He hadn't drowned by accident. And tonight, tucked into the front pocket of my black uniform skirt, beneath a spare bar rag and a pad of guest check orders, was a small, leather-bound notebook. Inside its pages were names, dates, routing numbers, and a signature I had spent three months tracking down.
The signature belonged to the man sitting in the VIP mezzanine, completely hidden behind tinted glass and heavy velvet drapery.
Julian Vance.
May you like
They called him the Ghost of the Loop. The police didn't touch him. The city council whispered his name like an old prayer. And tonight, less than forty feet away from where I was shaking ice and lime, he was hosting a private poker game.
I looked down at the tray in my hand. The three-thousand-dollar bottle of Macallan M was waiting for table four. But before the night was over, table four wouldn't be the only place I visited. I took a deep breath, adjusted my posture, and pushed through the swinging service door, stepping directly into the lion's den.
