Inferno (Page 31)

I gaped at my reflection. I had been Barbie-fied. The dress was miniscule, and so tight it clung to every inch of me. My hair brought new meaning to the word ‘volume’ and the hairspray had turned it into a glittering blonde rock. My eyes were rimmed with so much black it was hard to find the blue inside them, and my lips had been lined and glossed until they shone at twice their normal size against my bronzed and blushed face.

‘Well?’ Millie wiggled her high-definition eyebrows at me through the mirror.

‘I look like a hooker.’

She came to stand beside me.

‘You also look like a hooker,’ I told her.

‘A twenty-one-year-old hooker?’ she asked with big, hopeful eyes.

Eden was a sleek three-storey building on the corner of West Grand Avenue. It climbed into the sky in a display of black monochrome and tinted glass. On the corner, two bouncers and a severe-faced woman holding a clipboard were guarding a velvet-roped entranceway. Above them, ‘EDEN’ was imprinted in illuminated red letters that lit up the street below. The spiralling tree emblem from the crimson card stretched across the entire second storey.

My mind flittered across Luca and his disdainful thoughts of my intelligence. Oh, if he could only see me now. ‘I never considered myself an idiot until this very moment,’ I said, staring wide-eyed at Eden as we drifted towards it.

‘Really?’ said Millie, blinking heavily. ‘But you’ve done so many idiotic things already.’

I winced.

‘If anything, this is the least idiotic, because we’re going into a public place and, most importantly, I am here!’ She waved her hands in front of her. ‘It’s cool, you know. Some people just wait for danger to find them, but not you, you go after it. You say “Hey, Danger, bet you weren’t expecting me. Suck it.” You don’t wait for the dolphin.’

‘Huh?’

‘The dolphin,’ she emphasized. ‘You don’t wait for the dolphin to hit you in the face.’

‘Oh.’ I touched my head against hers as we reached Eden, smiling, despite everything, because I had found someone just as weird as me to be friends with. Smiling because I was doing my best not to freak out.

There were two lines of people trickling from the entrance; the first was a short one that moved quickly. The second line stretched all the way around the building and down the street and was moving at a snail’s pace.

Millie flipped her hair over her shoulders and sashayed into the smaller, elite line. I went with her, pursing my lips to try and look pouty and important. The woman with the clipboard dragged her gaze along our outfits. A smug smile flitted across her thin red lips. ‘Names?’

Millie had already pulled her ID card from her purse.

The woman didn’t glance at the ID or her clipboard. ‘Sorry, girls. You’re not on here. You’ll have to join the back of the line.’

Millie bristled. ‘You didn’t even check.’

Her smirk returned. ‘Hon, I don’t need to check.’

Millie released a sharp laugh. ‘Excuse you? Perhaps you need a refresher course on who we are?’

The woman’s expression faltered. She flicked her gaze to me. ‘Your name?’ she asked me.

‘Sophie Gracewell,’ I said. ‘I have … an appointment with my uncle.’

An appointment?

Smooth. Real smooth.

She looked down at her list again. ‘Sophie,’ she muttered, flicking a page up so she could look at the one underneath it.

Millie poked her head forward so that it was almost right on top of the clipboard. ‘He’s a close friend of Donata Marino.’

She deflated in front of us. ‘Miss Gracewell,’ she said, unclipping the rope and standing back to let me through. ‘My apologies. We’re expecting you.’ She eyed Millie with badly concealed contempt.

‘I think you mean you’re expecting us,’ Millie said. Her smile was deliciously false. ‘We wouldn’t want a second mishap, would we?’

With a sigh, Clipboard Bitch stepped back to make room for Millie too. ‘Ladies,’ she said, ‘welcome to Eden.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE AMBUSH

We combed the first two floors, scanning the dance floors and slipping between booths and drapes. We tried not to knock against glasses of Moët champagne as we shimmied between tables full of models and socialites and men in glossy suits. We downed a couple of vodka and sodas for courage before making our way up one last flight of stairs.

The third floor was smaller than the others. It was furnished entirely in dark wood and thick bamboo furniture, with gold flames casting streaks along the walls. A line of trees in floor-sunken pots climbed towards the ceiling, their spindly branches stretching overhead in waxed leaf canopies. It was like walking into a glamorous safari, only we were the animals.

Towards the far end of the room there was a small stage where a girl with cropped black hair and eye-assaulting sequinned shorts was crooning into a microphone. It was hard not to stare. She was such a train wreck, flopping across the stage and clutching the microphone like it was her life raft. The third floor was a lot quieter than the other two, probably owing to her.

Just behind the unhinged performer was a secluded seating area. It had been cut off from us by drapes and there was a burly bouncer standing in front of the entrance, scanning the small crowd. In the whole club this was definitely the hardest place to get to, and that’s how I knew Jack would be in there.