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ZARINA

My dress was sticky now.

One too many drinks had been spilled down my front. It was damp, and the material clung to my torso, but it was easily ignored.

Anything was easily ignored in the middle of the dance floor surrounded by other sweaty bodies.

I held hands with a random girl and screamed the lyrics to a song from the 2010s into the air of Club SVN. We had been inseparable all night, but I didn’t know her name.

Didn’t need to know.

I went out alone so often that I had become skilled at making friends wherever I went. Larissa thought I was crazy for going out by myself.

My sister Valerie thought it was downright dangerous—especially considering who I was.

But I didn’t care.

Dark corners of shady nightclubs were one of the few places I could avoid the treatment that I usually received asLa Princessa Santino. The baby girl of Melbourne’s most powerful crime family. A thing to be protected, sheltered, hidden away until I could be married off.

But not on Friday nights.

(Or Saturdays)

(Or Sundays)

(...Sometimes Mondays too)

A man approached with a look that was all too familiar. That predatory gaze locked on my body as he crossed from the bar to the dancefloor with two drinks in hand.

I pretended not to notice and kept singing. But eventually, I felt that hand on my lower back and his hot breath on my ear.

“A drink for the most beautiful girl in the club?”

I looked down at the drink and assessed it.

“No thank you,” I smiled.

“Okay,” he said slowly, looking down at it and going rigid with the rejection. “Well, what’s your name?”

“Georgina!”

Larissa turned her head away and rolled her eyes. She was usually amused by my lies, but it seemed she was not in the mood to play along tonight. To be fair, she hadn’t really wanted to come out in the first place.

The man only lingered for a few more moments, the hope in his eyes fading incrementally as I bored him with made up details about my made up life. I could never tell someone like him who I really was.

Georginaworked at a bank and fucking hated her job. ButZarinadidn’t know what people who worked at banks did. Luckily, he didn’t seem to catch on to my utter bullshit about ‘HP…uh…WTF’ Financial Software and ‘Interpretive Cash Counting’, though, and lingered for a few polite minutes until he wandered off.

Another man approached a few songs later.

To him, I was Natalie, a successful psychiatrist.

To the next bloke, I was Marie, a backpacker from the south of Germany.

My brother Sammy always said that I was a professional bullshit artist, and perhaps he was right. Because the speed and the detail in which these stories came out was probably a talent that I could put to real use if I wanted to.

But this particular night, none of the men were catching my eye.