The Velvet Stage
Ava Hawkes stood outside The Velvet Room at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday in March, staring at the neon sign that bathed the cracked sidewalk in pink light. The silhouette of a woman's arching body flickered above the door, one leg extended, back curved in a pose of pure seduction. Rain had started falling, light and cold, soaking through her cheap jacket. She was forty-two years old. A journalist. Or she had been, until the newspaper folded three months ago and took her career with it. Twenty years of investigative reporting, of breaking stories, of mattering, all gone in a single afternoon meeting where they'd handed her a severance check that wouldn't even cover two months of rent. Ava didn't look like a stripper. She knew this with painful, humiliating certainty as she caught her reflection in the tinted glass door. Her body was what her ex-husband had called "athletic" when he was being generous, and "built like a twelve-year-old boy" when he was drunk a...