Prologue

Y eah, this was illegal. It totally was, and it was so exhilarating that I fully understood why people committed crimes. I tilted back my head and smiled at the clouds that drifted there, obscuring the faint summer moon. I was so glad that I was doing this! I was already having fun.

Our heels clicked down the sidewalk and I felt a little shiver of anticipation run up my spine. It was a hot night and about as dark as it could get in the city. In this neighborhood, the streetlights probably hadn't worked for years, but no one I was with seemed very concerned about any danger. They laughed and talked much too loudly to hear trouble coming, probably because most of them were totally drunk (and I thought that they were also high on something, but I wasn't sure about what it was).

This wasn't my usual crowd and it wasn't my usual scene…and I was thrilled by that. For the first time in weeks, or maybe even months, it felt like I was really living again! They acted wilder than my old friends, but I wasn't as pure as the driven snow, either. I'd done some stuff—maybe only minor things, but I definitely had skirted trouble. Once, I'd driven thirty over the speed limit on I-696 and had gotten pulled over in the northern suburbs of the city, where the police tended to be snippy about things like that. On another occasion in college, I'd just taken a hit off a bong when things had gone bad. I had passed it to the next guy and unfortunately for him, that was the moment when the dorm's security officer had opened the door with a master key that no one knew she had. That guy sitting next to me, my roommate's friend, had been left holding the bag. Or bong, as it were.

I'd smiled and giggled my way out of the speeding ticket and I'd jumped out of the first-floor window along with everyone else (besides my roommate's friend) so that I didn't get caught smoking pot on campus. That would have been especially terrible for me, an athlete representing our school; I probably would have gotten kicked off the swim team, and I would have said goodbye to my scholarship money. But nothing had happened.

Anyway, clearly I knew a little bit about misbehaving (and also how to avoid punishment). Trouble in doses like those felt good. It reminded you that you were young and open to adventure. You were alive! Anticipation of a little illegality was what made the city air feel sharp and electric right now, and it made my legs move more like I was skipping on the trash-cluttered sidewalk.

My friend Leni squeezed my arm and smiled at me. Maybe that wasn't the right word for her, because we'd met just recently and I didn't consider too many people as actual friends. But we got along so well that she was definitely more than an acquaintance, and when she'd suggested that I come out tonight? I'd jumped at the chance. Lately, I'd been…well, I'd been in a little slump or something. I hadn't been going out much, with friends or with guys. I was still having a lot of fun; I wasn't trying to suggest that I was upset about being alone and I didn't mean that I was bored. Slowing down made sense, since I'd recently turned twenty-five. When you got older, you did start to cut back on fun. Right? Wasn't it a natural progression for your life to dwindle down and flatten out?

In fact, my twenty-five-year-old twin brother was going to be a father. That event signaled the start of a huge reduction of fun in his life and had been a huge shock to everyone in my family, especially to me. It was something that I was still struggling to accept. Patrick and I had done everything at the same time, except now he was making this giant leap past me, into a world I didn't want any part of. Several of my college teammates had recently made those leaps, too. I'd read their posts about promotions, relocations for jobs, engagements. Two of my former friends had recently even gotten married to each other. They'd held their wedding at the beginning of the summer and I'd attended, as had almost everyone else we'd swum with. Along with the rest of the guests, I had pretended that it was just so great. Yay! You're locked in for life! Congratulations! Now you can get excited about childbirth and mortgages!

I'd danced and drunk and had a great time at their reception while secretly mocking the dumb decision they'd made, and secretly gloating about how I wasn't going to get trapped myself. I'd been to several weddings lately, and had left every event feeling like, phew, there but for the grace go I. I was extremely fortunate to be single and free, not pigeonholed into "wife," "girlfriend," or "partner" like so many other unfortunate women I knew. They were happily tying their own hands and feet and then leaping off a bridge into a stagnant pond of obligations and responsibilities. No, thank you.

I'd continued reveling in my quiet glee until my birthday. I had never believed in all the "big number" stuff about aging, like that you'd confront a midlife crisis when you hit forty or that your biological clock would start ticking hard at thirty. To me, the specific year I reached wasn't important at all…until it was. Because I'd woken up that morning on my twenty-fifth, a little late to get to work on time, and things had changed.

First, the phone had rung with the traditional greeting from my mother. Every year, she started off this day by singing "Happy Birthday" and reminiscing about carrying me and my twin, Patrick, and how she'd given birth to us both over seventeen hours with zero pain medications.

"And someday," she always concluded, "I want exactly that for you!"

For the past ten or so years, I'd had the same reaction after this annual talk, one that was best encapsulated by two phrases: "oh yuck" and "no way." This time, though, it was different. My birthday had come so close to that wedding, when I'd watched Bhuvan and Millie dancing and smiling at each other, and that party had also followed on the heels of my cousin's wedding, which had preceded the marriage of my former best friend, Liv—yeah, it was the confluence of all that. All those solemn ceremonies combined with my brother's baby and my mom's speech on the morning of my twenty-fifth…it made me get really down that day, really sad. I'd headed to my office and completed a ton of online shopping to try to make myself feel better, but it hadn't worked, and I'd returned home to my amazing apartment still feeling weird.

That weirdness had continued. I kept thinking that I could have been the one marrying Bhuvan. I'd never told Millie but he had asked me out, first. I'd turned him down, and I didn't want what she had, of course. But suddenly, I couldn't seem to figure out exactly what I did want. I felt discontented with my fun job, my gorgeous wardrobe, my perfect apartment, and my cool car. What was wrong with me?

What I'd decided, after a few days of moping around, was that I needed to get back to basics. I needed to put on a great new outfit with some amazing new shoes, I needed to put a new purse over my shoulder, I needed to get my hair blown out (it was pin-straight, but it did look better when a professional styled it), and I needed to do my makeup—I needed new makeup. I would go out and have fun, I would meet some guys and enjoy myself!

I had tried it, and that was when I'd run into Leni at a bar and we'd hit it off. We'd made plans to head out tonight, along with a man she was apparently seeing and a bunch of her other girlfriends. We were going to an underground club, which I'd never done before.

"It's like a speakeasy," she'd explained. "Like when Detroit had illegal bars and you had to know the secret knock to get in."

I wasn't sure if that part about secret knocks was true—I remembered something about the Purple Gang and Prohibition, but not enough to prove or disprove it—but what she described sounded very fun. So here we were in a part of the city that I wouldn't have ventured to alone, with a big bunch of people who were really cool to be with. We'd done vodka shots together to pregame and that liquor had been the opposite of cheap, but no one seemed to care in the least. They just wanted to have fun too, and this was exactly what I'd needed.

"Here we are," Leni announced suddenly, and stopped in front of a door that looked no better or worse than any of the other ones on this downtrodden street. She knocked three times and laughed, and the door slid open a little. At that point, the man she'd introduced as her boyfriend stepped forward and held what looked like several hundred-dollar bills through the crack (it was a move that impressed me a lot).

The door opened the rest of the way and all of us laughed together as we went inside and walked down some very dirty, very unsteady stairs. It was so late at night, but the dim basement was full of people, elbow-to-elbow, and the music was going loud. Her boyfriend started ordering champagne and she threw her arms around his neck, yelled that she loved him, and drank straight from the bottle.

It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen, and I silenced all the voices I heard in my mind of my older sisters (Nicola would have told me that the place was a firetrap with no clearly marked exits in case of an emergency; Sophie would have warned me to keep my arm locked over my purse because this was exactly the environment that pickpockets loved; Addie would have reminded me to stay close to my friends because I wouldn't have wanted to get left behind in this neighborhood). Instead of heeding any of that, I danced and drank champagne and had so much fun. It was exactly the good time I'd been looking for to get myself out of the dumps. I enjoyed myself like a normal, twenty-something woman who was free of the encumbrances of men, kids, and even pets. I was there to enjoy myself and to enjoy life, and darn it, I made it happen.

But after a while, even I slowed down slightly on the dance floor. The music was great but these new shoes were hurting my toes a lot, and the champagne wasn't doing enough to quench my thirst, although I had drunk so much of it. I wasn't wearing a lot of clothing—it was summer and we were out, after all, so my little dress made sense. But even with that small amount of coverage, I was roasting.

"Take a break. Come on," Leni called to me, and I wiped the back of my arm over my forehead. Due to the lack of windows and exterior doors (and apparently, air conditioning), it was really warm in this basement club. Still really fun, but I was sure my face was red. I followed her to the back, past the bar and through all the people waiting for service there, and around a big velvet curtain that made me feel even hotter when I brushed against it.

Behind the heavy fabric, there were a bunch of tables with people playing cards. "What is this, the high-roller room?" I asked in her ear. It was almost impossible to hear anything, although the curtain did a little bit to muffle the music.

"It's just poker. I have a chip from last week." She pulled it out. "Come sit with me while I play a hand or two."

But that was actually a problem; according to a big guy who materialized at our elbows, I couldn't hang around the table unless I was playing as well. "Seriously? Then let her in," Leni ordered the guy dealing, and he rolled his eyes but said anything for her. I knew how to play, of course, and the guy set me up with chips after I handed over the money I had.

"I can give you a card for more," I suggested, since the amount of cash I'd been carrying wouldn't cover too much.

"No plastic," the dealer said shortly, and I looked at Leni and we both got into a fit of giggling. He sounded like someone's mean old dad, not a guy who was running card games for fun at an illegal speakeasy. He needed to relax!

"Come on, Kenny. Give her more," she urged and again, he said anything for her and stacked more of the plastic discs in front of me.

We played for a while, yelling over the music and knocking back more of the drinks that a server brought over. The dealer guy gave me even more chips when I asked for them, and they held the game for me once, when I got up to go to the bathroom. I almost fell on the way there and Leni and I laughed so hard that we leaned on each other as we returned to the table. But after a while, I got really bored with playing. We weren't allowed to have phones out, but it felt like we'd been sitting there for a while and I was over it. "I'm going back to dance," I told her.

"You're going to quit now?" she asked me. She sounded so surprised. "You're down a lot. Don't you want to make some back?"

I honestly hadn't been paying great attention. I was pretty drunk after all the champagne and other cocktails and I was tired, too, because hours must have passed. I figured that it must have been around the time that I usually got up for work on weekdays. I was definitely going to use this Sunday to recoup my sleep.

"I'm down? How much do I owe?" I asked, flipping through the few tokens I had left. I'd had a huge pile but honestly, I wasn't even sure what they were all worth.

She looked more concerned. "We used my chip to buy in—"

"You ladies playing? Then be quiet so I can deal," the guy told us, but I said to hold on. He didn't like that at all.

"How much do I owe?" I asked, because I had started to get worried. I made good money at my job, of course, but I did have a lot of expenses, so I didn't have a ton saved. Like, right now, there was a couple hundred in my bank account that was going to have to hold me until the end of the month, so I hoped it wasn't any more than that. My credit cards were getting close to their limits, too, and I wouldn't get any help there.

"You owe me a thousand," she stated.

"What?" I stared. "Why? How could that be?"

"Because I spotted you half of my chip to buy in," she said. "I got it last week as a tip."

"A tip?" I wasn't understanding.

"From my client. My ‘boyfriend.'" She made finger-quotes and rolled her eyes. "He thought it was cute to give me that instead of cash, and he only gave it to me because they threw him out of here for cheating. He knew it wasn't worth anything to him because they won't let him back in, the shithead."

"Wait a minute. That little piece of plastic was worth two thousand dollars?" I stared at the other chips in front of me. "I thought…"

"Are you in or out?" the guy with the cards asked.

"Hold on!" I started counting the circles on the table, trying to figure this out.

"You're down nine grand," the man to my left said, "plus what you owe her."

I almost threw up. "What?"

"You're a terrible card player."

I took a breath and steadied my nerves. "Nine thousand can't be right," I answered.

"It's ten, with what you owe her. Sure it's right," he told me, and explained exactly how I'd gotten into that position. "I pay attention."

"No, you have to be wrong. That's way more than I bought!" I tried to remember how much cash I'd had. "I only had a hundred. I think."

"Plus a thousand from her," he told me, pointing at Leni. "And you asked for more."

"I extended credit," the dealer rumbled.

"I…" He had? At a few points, he'd asked if anyone wanted more chips. Leni had raised her hand and yelled that she did, so I had said it, too. He'd slid some over—where had those gone?

"What the hell is going on?" the dealer now growled at me. "Aren't you with Leni?"

"We're friends," I said, but she was shaking her head.

"No, she's not here with anybody," she announced. "She's just eye candy. She's not getting a cut from me tonight."

"What?" I asked her. "What are you talking about, ‘a cut?' Is your boyfriend paying you to be with him or something?"

She frowned. "Of course he's paying me. If you wanted in on that, you should have said so. He took care of your cover to get into this club and I don't think I owe you anything else."

"If you're not playing, leave the fucking table and go pay up," the dealer said. He pointed toward the curtain where we'd entered, and I saw that big guy standing next to it, his arms folded as he watched us.

This felt like being in a nightmare. I had dreams like these, where I was running but couldn't get away, or—

"We're not waiting anymore," the dealer said. He started to lay out the cards.

"Wait! I'm in," I told him. "I'm in!" I could play my way out of this. It hadn't taken that long for me to lose so much, so it wouldn't take that long for me to get out of the hole, either.

"Good," Leni told me, nodding. "You can win some of the money back. It's not so bad."

Some of it? I had to get all of it! And not so bad? I didn't have anywhere near ten thousand dollars, either to pay the guy at the door or to pay this woman next to me, who was apparently an escort? I shook my head and blinked because the air seemed hazy, and it wasn't just from all the smoke in here. I felt dizzy, too, and so confused—and I kept trying to figure out if I was actually awake, because this couldn't have been right…

"I should have told you that I was working tonight, but I thought you got it," she said, her voice low. "It's a good experience for my guys if I bring along other cute girls, because they feel like they're a big deal since they're they only man in the group. It's like they're special."

But that was just an illusion, as was the friendly relationship between me and Leni. "I didn't understand that you were getting paid. I didn't understand any of this," I said, still shaking my head, and the man next to me started to laugh. I stared at my cards, trying to figure out what to do. "Um, I'll take four."

That same man, the one who'd been keeping track of my debt, pointed at me and also shook his head. "You're fucked. See if you can work it off for Bruno at the bar."

"I don't know how to mix drinks."

"As his girl," he told me. "Where did you get her?" he asked Leni.

"I'm not…a professional date," I answered. I took my four cards and tried to arrange them in a way that would form a winning hand. "Could I wash dishes or something?"

He shook his head again and held up a finger to the dealer, who gave him one card. "You're fucked," he repeated.

I was. I played for at least another hour, but time didn't have a lot of meaning in that hot, windowless room where I couldn't even look at my phone. I picked up cards and laid them down, wiping my forehead and continuing as the other chairs emptied slowly, and until Leni told me that it was time to go, and the dealer started to pack away the table.

"No," I tried to tell them, but the answer was yes. And it wasn't a dream after all, no matter how much I wished it. The chips were almost gone and they also had a drink tab for me.

Honesty was the only way I could handle this. "I can't pay," I said to the guy at the curtain as the lights came up. I held my hand to shield my eyes. "I'm really sorry. I thought the drinks were on…" Well, I'd thought that they were on Leni's "date." The bill alone was more than five hundred dollars, on top of the money from the poker game that I hadn't won back. I'd lost more, much more, but I hadn't kept track as I'd asked for more credit. I didn't even want to know the total.

He stared down at me. "Why is that my problem?"

Leni burst back in from the other side of the dirty velvet. "Hey! It's ok, I worked it out," she announced, and I was so full of gratitude toward her that I almost started crying. "It's ok," she assured the man at the curtain. "Go talk to Bruno and he'll tell you." And while that guard guy was confirming the information with the bartender, she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the steps and outside.

It was broad daylight, and I blinked even more at the bright sun burning overhead. Leni, who'd been so gorgeous in the muted moonlight the night before, got washed out now. I wondered if I looked as tired as she did, because I sure felt that way. It was more like I'd been put through one of the old-fashioned machines that squished water out of clothes. I'd been squished, so that I was flat and broken.

"Come on," she told me, and started rushing away. Somehow, during that long evening at the speakeasy, the rest of the crowd that had arrived with us had slowly disappeared. Her guy was gone, too, and so were her shoes. With the way she was moving, I had to take off mine as well so that I could keep up.

"Where are we going? Let's get a car," I urged.

"No, I have a ride. Come on." She kept pulling me, her nails digging a little into my forearm as we ran along the dirty sidewalk, jumping over mysterious puddles and turning a few corners before she slowed down.

"Was that a lie?" I asked. "Did you really pay them for me?"

"I paid," she said, panting.

"Then why are we running?"

"Because I don't want to be late!" She turned her head anxiously from side to side, biting her lip and squinting to try to see farther. "He told me to be here at ten and it's six minutes after."

"Who told you to be here?"

A car turned down the street and she stopped fidgeting and put one hand on her hip, pushing out her chest. "Fix your hair," she hissed to me.

"What?"

She waved at the car. "Hi," she mouthed, and then smiled at the driver as he pulled to the curb and stopped. She moved to get into the front and then put her head out through the passenger window to talk to me. "Juliet, this is Ruslan," she announced. "He was the one who helped you out with the poker money. He's a great guy."

"Hi," I said, and took a step away. "Um, I'm going to get a ride for myself." I didn't want to be alone on this street, but it felt safer than being with the people in that car. "Thanks for your help, Ruslan, and um, we'll talk later about what I owe you."

Leni stared at me, her eyes big. "No, you can't go."

I must have been really dumb, but I wasn't understanding anything tonight. "What?" I asked again. "Why?"

"You have to pay back the money now," she said to me, and as she spoke, the door opened to the rear seats, where I could see another man watching me. "You have to pay him."

I had a brief thought of making a break for it, and I wondered if there would be anyone in this neighborhood who would help me get away. But she knew where I lived; she and her friends had come over to my place for the pregame vodka shots. She knew where I worked, too, because she'd seen the badge I used to access the twentieth floor of my building.

"You have to pay," she whispered again.

"Get in."

I bent and looked at Ruslan in the driver's seat, and he turned his head to stare back at me. Maybe I could persuade him. "I—"

"Get in."

I did. And I knew, as the car door closed behind me, that whatever direction my life had been heading before, it was now going south.