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chapter one: THE ROUGH WORK
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WEDGED BETWEEN pleasure houses and would-be gambling houses that had long since fallen into disrepair, the Crow Club cut an imposing, albeit garish, figure.
The black-and-red paint job that made it so easy to miss in the dark hours where smog from the factories drifts into East Stave would be damning if not for the shiny metallic crow hanging above the door, drawing pigeons and legitimate buyers alike inside. A few stragglers, out of money and drunk off their minds, swayed outside the doors, where a man as tall as the archway shooed them off grumpily.
It wasn't a comforting place by nature or design, but Lev had always felt at home here. Unlike the Slat, which was more boarding house and base of operations than well-maintained façade, the Crow Club didn't try to hide the people who made their living inside of it, and it had only ever added to the intrigue. Lev preferred the wallpapered interior and whiskey-spotted bar to any of the other pleasure houses that made their homes on this street by far, if only because it was one of the only places here that didn't have half-bad acoustics.
Lev straightened her floor-length dress again and finished pinning her hair up in a low bun at the nape of her neck. Fake jewels (she'd been told to say they came from Shu Han, but it was far more likely they were cheap plastic) adorned her hair and neck, and the too-tight dress the color of the pearls the Queen used to wear to state affairs made her feel as if she was suffocating. She'd managed to keep it from showing since she stepped through the side door this morning, but the strain of singing the same set of songs for eight straight hours was beginning to wear on her.
She didn't usually take such large shifts, but this one had seemed easy. She'd needed to be at the Crow Club anyway for a separate job, and it was always nice to pick up some extra coin while she was at it.
But she hadn't expected the singer for the next two shifts to bail, leaving her to pick up her slack. At the time, she hadn't thought it would be too difficult, but she cursed herself now for bringing her performing outfit with her in the first place. She should have known Per Haskell would put her to work the moment she walked inside.
