The bar always smelled like spilled beer and cheap fear.
By midnight the floor was slick with both. Neon buzzed overhead, a tired blue glare that turned everyone’s faces into bruises. I moved through it with my tray and my fake smile, the one I’d practiced in the restroom mirror until it stopped looking like a flinch.
“Table six, Kayla. Move your ass.” Rico’s voice cracked across the noise like a whip.
I didn’t look at him. Looking at Rico was an invitation—one I’d learned to stop sending six months ago, when he’d pressed me into the storeroom wall and told me what would happen if I ever skipped a shift.
“Yes, boss,” I said instead, bright and empty.
He liked me empty. Easier to own that way.
I wove past a group of frat boys arguing over a pool shot, shoulder brushing the sticky jukebox, and dropped the drinks at table six without messing up the order. Muscle memory. Survival didn’t leave a lot of room for mistakes.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” one of them slurred, his eyes dragging over my tank top like he’d left fingers there.
I gave him the same smile I’d given Rico. “Need anything else?”
He opened his mouth, but his friend elbowed him under the table. “Nah. We’re good.”
People in this neighborhood weren’t kind, but they weren’t stupid either. Not when it came to me. Not when they knew who owned the bar.
And who owned me.
I stepped back, tray in hand, and my gaze slid up to the framed photo above the bar—three men in leather jackets, arms slung around each other, money and guns on the table in front of them. The middle one was Rico, younger and thinner. The one to his right had a face like a knife and a tattoo crawling up his neck. I didn’t know his name, didn’t want to. The one to the left had been the owner before he got locked up.
I could feel my father’s ghost staring back at them from somewhere I couldn’t reach.
Dad would’ve hated this place. Hated knowing I spent my nights dodging hands and patching bruises with drugstore concealer to chip away at the debt he’d died trying to pay.
My chest tightened. I pushed the thought down. Thinking about him only opened a door I didn’t have time to walk through.
The music shifted, someone feeding another dollar into the jukebox. A low bass thrum vibrated through the floor, through my legs. Twelve thirty, almost last call. Then I could go home to the shoebox apartment I shared with peeling paint and my father’s old jacket, count my tips, subtract Rico’s cut, and see if I could afford groceries that included something green.
The front door slammed open.
Everything stopped.
Conversations cut off mid-sentence. The song skipping through some ancient rock ballad choked to silence as some drunk yanked the cord from the wall. For a second, the only sound was the hum of neon and the clatter of a dropped glass rolling in a lazy circle.
“Fuck,” someone breathed near the bar. “It’s them.”
Them.
The word hit my spine like an ice cube. I turned slowly, every instinct screaming at me to keep my eyes down and my mouth shut.
Five men walked in, not in a line but in something worse—casual spread, like they already owned the air. Not Rico’s crew. Different colors, different ink. Black jackets with a crimson snake curling around the sleeves. They moved with the kind of slow, confident cruelty that said they’d broken bones just to see what it sounded like.
