CHAPTER TWO
Five minutes earlier
Roksana squinted at her reflection in a passing taxi window to make sure the flashing lights of her LED light-up bra weren’t showing through her sweater.
It’s August and you’re in Sin City.
The multitude of passersby on the strip’s sidewalk were more likely to find her cardigan odd, rather than the flashing pink lights of her bra.
She dodged a couple of girls in minidresses, catching the attention of her childhood friend Kira across the street, who was in similar attire and visibly flagging in the stifling heat. They’d come up with this plan to make their best friend, Olga’s, bachelorette party memorable, but if they didn’t commence Project Rump Shaker soon, tomorrow morning’s front page headline on all the Vegas newspapers would read: Five Semi-Drunk Russian Girls Melt into Flesh-Colored Puddles.
They’d come up with this plan on her apartment floor in Moscow, blissfully unaware that this level of heat even existed. Upon boarding the plane two days ago, they’d checked the weather and decided the three-digit temperatures probably had something to do with the conversion of Fahrenheit to Celsius and would probably be fine.
This was not fine.
Roksana waved her limp arms at Kira and pointed to her wrist.
How much longer?
Kira looked at the screen of her cell phone, cradled it between her chin and shoulder, holding up both hands with her fingers splayed.
“Ti cho ebanuti?” Roksana shouted across the noisy strip, safe in the knowledge that none of the Americans crowding the sidewalk were aware that she’d just yelled are you fucking crazy at her best friend.
Seriously, though. Ten more minutes of waiting to kick off the plan?
She wouldn’t make it that long without getting heat stroke. The champagne they’d drunk for breakfast, lunch and continuously in between was gurgling ominously in her stomach. Any ounce of bounce had been sucked out of her blonde hair, leaving the jagged edges of her bangs in her eyes. And she could almost hear her skin sizzling under the force of the great Western sun. Time to take cover.
Cringing over the charges likely piling up with the international texts, she shot her friend a quick message. Going to cool down. Be back in ten.
Roksana toed off her metallic gold high heels, cradling them to her chest, and kicked into a jog on the sidewalk, the promise of sweet air conditioning beckoning her toward the entrance of the closest casino, Circus Circus.
Thanks to the expensive airfare from Moscow and the cost of being a bridesmaid—all on student budgets—they were staying on the lower rent end of the Vegas strip. Considering the hijinks Roksana and four of her best friends planned to pull off in ten minutes, being a little removed from the more concentrated crowds was probably a good thing.
Hopefully it meant the police would take longer to arrive.
Did Roksana and her friends celebrate their early twenties boisterously, as if consequences were naught but some distant possibility? Yes. And she reveled in it—maybe the most out of all of them. She and her girlfriends had met as children in Moscow, though Roksana was never free to play in the park or cheer at local hockey games, her mother forcing her to keep close, to learn the family business after nightfall. It wasn’t until Roksana turned eighteen and started making her own decisions that she and her friends became inseparable. And she’d made up for a lot of lost time since embarking on adulthood, spending her nights laughing and her days being taught normal subjects at university.
History and geography as opposed to moving without a sound and concealing weapons.
Now, on her way into Circus Circus, a security guard eyed her bare feet pointedly, but she gave him her best smile and he waved her inside.
The ice-cold air wrapped around her bare calves, her damp neck, and she moaned, unconcerned about the gawkers. The brightly colored carpet of the casino floor felt smooth and soft on the bottoms of the infernos she used to call feet, the leather of a nickel slot seat welcoming her overheated body as she dropped into it sideways.
Eyes closed, she tipped back her head and absorbed the cool.
Heaven.
She was in heaven.
Until…there. A tingle caught Roksana in the back of the neck, a product of the one and only trait she’d inherited from her legendary mother. Prickly intuition when something interesting was in the air—but interesting could mean so many things, couldn’t it? A Molotov cocktail being thrown through a window was interesting with its iridescent blue trail, the shards of glass whipping around it and forming a hazardous picture frame. Given her mother’s profession, Roksana was afforded plenty of time to study those deadly cocktails and their results.
Tonight, however, she was nearly six thousand miles from home and there was no break in the excited hum of gambling and conversation. This was not her mother’s brand of interesting, thank God. For some reason, Roksana was hesitant to open her eyes and discover the reason for her neck prickle. There was a fizzing sound in her ears and it was coming to a crescendo, whipping faster and faster—