Miss Night

Chapter Four

Things at Elysium moved fast.

Lane helped show me the ropes for the first few nights, training me on how the clubs in Elysium were normally run. I learned that the dance club was affectionately known amongst the bartenders as D&D, standing for Debauchery and Drunkards, while the upstairs lounge was known as 2M, referring to the minimum salary somebody needed to make in order to fit in.

Darius, one of the other bartenders, told me that he called it 2M because the money he made up there went straight to paying his mortgage. Either way, the clientele at Elysium were certainly on a higher shelf than they'd been at APEX.

It was almost impossible to explain to my sister the level that these patrons were on, but I still tried. Every night when I returned just as she was starting to get ready for work, I would fill her in on the elegant women and the men wearing twenty thousand dollar watches. Audrey would always respond with some joke about her sixth grade class and how she'd fill me in on which one of them would ask her to marry them. Apparently, it happened often. Which didn't take too much of a stretch for me to imagine. Everybody loved Audrey, it didn't surprise me that her students did too.

Even though Giovanni—Mr. Russo, rather—told me that I could hire someone else to help work behind the bar I found that I still liked doing it myself. It was strange to split my hours with working in the office managing the bar and then actually out working behind it. Strange but good.

Still, I hadn't seen him since my first day a little over a week ago. Nothing in my office books held any information that would be of value to Marafi— just club sales and contracts. Nothing about the other companies or the Russo Family in general.

In fact, the only member of the Russo family I met was Giovanni. The others didn't appear to frequent Elysium as much as the Marafi Family did at APEX. I was beginning to wonder if the Russo's even bothered with the club, until one Friday I spent half an hour chatting with a guy at D&D and after he walked away, Lane nudged me in the side.

"That's Frankie," she said, "he works for the Family."

I gaped a little. "He does? Doing what?"

"We don't usually ask, but I think Frankie does some work on the docks," Lane narrowed her eyes a little, gauging my reaction with surprise, "you know who they are right?"

The Russos? I nodded my head. Ever since I was forced to take this job, I started learning more and more about them. The Family had their hands in lots of different legal ventures. Their parent company invested in luxury goods, cars, and realty. Their illegal ventures, however, were a little harder to determine.

"Yes, I know who the Russos are. I just don't know exactly who works for them and who works for them."

Lane's eyes glinted a little with humor as she pushed a beer across the counter to a customer. She grinned