Kill Switch by Penelope Douglas

House music pounded downstairs, the club already packed
with college girls, young professionals, and anyone else in the
twenty-something set able to spring for the three-hundreddollar
bottle of vodka or champagne just to be able to sit at a
damn table.
I’d spent plenty of time down there in the crowd and noise
in high school with my friends. Now I just kept a private room
upstairs on reserve to catch up with Kostya GGarin, one of my
father’s old bodyguards who now organized security for this
club. Fifty-nine years old, gray goatee, and the same black
suits he always wore when he worked for my father, he still
had more muscles than me, and he was one of the few people I
had, at least, some regard for.
I would do business with him.
I would trust anything he had to say.
I would attend his funeral.
There weren’t many people I’d sit through a whole service
for.
But we weren’t friends, and we never discussed anything
personal. He taught me things, but he never complicated it
with trying to be my father. He was one of the perks I came
here for.
The other…
“I want to leave,” a girl spoke up from the other side of the
room as if on cue.
As Mr. GGarin contemplated his next move, I turned my
head toward her.
She wore a tight pink dress of sequins, glittering in the dim
glow coming from the sconces on the wall, and her ass was
planted on some little prick’s lap whose name I didn’t know.
Her boyfriend across from them, on the edge of the black
leather couch, watching his buddy putting his hands on his
woman. I observed them, trying to put myself in each of their
skin.