The Siren by KATHERINE JOHN (general ebook reader .txt) 📕

a store, with a side of fruit juice and a heavy dose of cleavage. Sometimes the customers get handsy (the women as often as the men), but I don’t mind. Like Iris said, I’m selling a fantasy. I give them just enough of what it is they need—to feel sexy, special, wanted—then I retreat to my doorman building in West Hollywood and watch the sun come up from my balcony with a view all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

That’s not to say I don’t occasionally go home with one if he strikes my fancy—to his place, never mine, and I never stay overnight. If he comes back to the club hoping for another round, I make it clear that’s impossible. If he doesn’t get the hint, I have Marty throw him out. Marty’s had more than his share of my body, but it’s a fair exchange; he keeps me safe. Anyway, he’s sexy in a Jason Statham way when he’s not too drunk, and he never asks questions. I’m twenty-one now, but I’ve been working here off the record nearly two years, and I’ve never had to so much as show an ID.

I started at the Ninth Circle because I’d heard from a girl in my acting class that it was where Cole hung out. She’d apparently met him there the first time she slept with him. Yes, I take acting classes. Not because I still dream of becoming a movie star—I’ve long since given that up in favor of exacting revenge on my mother’s killer—but because I have to be convincing in whatever role I need to play to achieve that goal.

Cole’s an easier target than Stella, who had a rough ride in the years following my mother’s death and has become somewhat of a recluse since the meat grinder of public opinion spat her out. Also, men like Cole are so simple. They all want one thing. I figured I’d meet Cole and worm my way into his life, find out what really happened to my mother, then figure out what to do about it. But around the time of my arrival, he took off for London to shoot a movie. After that, he went to rehab, then he got a sober girlfriend, and on like this for over a year.

Until tonight.

I spied him the moment he walked in, running his silver-ringed fingers through those famous dark locks. He was dressed in black—leather jacket, ripped jeans, motorcycle boots—traveling with a good-looking younger actor I recognized and another guy in a suit who was probably an agent or a producer or something. He didn’t scan the room the way guests usually do as the velvet door closes behind them; he didn’t need to. Everyone continued right on dancing or drinking or hustling without any indication they’d registered the newly arrived star, but they knew he was there, and they were glad.

Celebrities are a common occurrence in the Ninth Circle—what it’s known for even. It’s a place they can go and fly under the radar, not be bothered or photographed while they let their hair down. Everyone’s beautiful; everyone’s cool. And yet each time a celebrity passes beneath the pink neon sign warning “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” the energy in the room surges. On a night when multiple celebrities are in attendance, the electricity is palpable. This is one of those nights.

But I don’t care about the others; I only want Cole.

I’ve imagined this moment so many times in the eleven years since I woke up motherless in the hospital; I should be ready. But I am in no way prepared for the onslaught of emotions that crashes over me as I saunter over to his table, my heart pounding harder than the bass that shakes the walls of the cave-like club.

Suddenly I’m eighteen again, climbing out of Fred’s truck at the bus depot on a warm June evening, my suitcase in hand, the urn of my mother’s ashes wrapped carefully among my clothes. I’d been touched they let me take her with me, surprised by the hard-earned $500 they gave me for graduation, moved they waited until the 180 West pulled out of the station, waving as we chugged away into the sunset. But I was so glad the Pennsylvania chapter of my life was over.

I slept fitfully on the bus through the night and got off in the morning somewhere in southern Illinois, where I dragged my roller bag down the road to a used car lot and bought a ten-year-old gold Accord with my pile of cash. Iris had always said Japanese cars never die. I drove recklessly across Missouri and Oklahoma with the windows down, eating kettle corn from a bag between my knees. I talked my way out of my first speeding ticket in Albuquerque, twirling my long blond ponytail nervously while allowing tears to pool in my big blue eyes. “I’m going to Hollywood to become an actress,” I pleaded. “I only have enough money to get me through the first week till I can find a job. If I get a ticket, well—I’ll have to go back home.”

He caved.

When I got to Hollywood, it was love at first sight. The palm trees, the strip malls, the sunshine, the seediness. Los Angeles is awash in contradictions, a place where you can find a star who makes twenty mil a picture in line at a two-dollar taco stand with its sign written in Korean. Nobody cares who you are or where you came from unless you’re a celebrity, in which case they care very, very much—but only as it applies to them. It’s such an unabashedly selfish city. The last bastion of the Wild West, where anything can happen.

I promptly paid an exorbitant amount of money for a mostly clean apartment on the first floor of an old stucco building, got a job as a waitress at a café around the corner, and began taking advantage of all the city had