WELCOME

This seemed like the sort of thing better done in person. Nika didn't have a lot of experience to go off of, she simply relied on her woman's intuition.

Even though she was just meeting Lazar, and didn't need to, she'd done herself up nicely today. Wearing her short skirt, her eight layers of makeup, her hair smelling of product, it made her feel normal. She didn't look like a haggard dying woman anymore.

Thumbing through her clothes catalog, with her five dollar coffee drink and sunglasses pushed up on top of her head, she supposed that was the point of all this. Because she couldn't just ask Lazar to meet her someplace just to see him. He wouldn't so much as cover her tab.

There was a rhyme and reason. She was a woman with a purpose, looking over her options of seventy-dollar lingerie and waiting for the bell on the door to chime to announce another patron's arrival.