Free Release: Davlova: Book One by A.M. Sexton

falling on the one long, rough, wooden table in the center. The parlor was more intimate, although also a bit claustrophobic due to its lack of windows. Its walls were lined with books, although only a few of the employees ever bothered to read. There was a fireplace, and several deep, soft armchairs, and three small tables with chairs around them where the whores played cards.
    “Do you play chess?” Lalo asked me one day as we entered the parlor.
    It was early, and several of the women were sitting around the room, two playing cards with Lilja, another lounging with Tawny on the couch near the fire. One of the card players laughed at Lalo’s question. “Please say yes, Misha. He’s been trying to get one of us to play with him ever since Rona left. He’s driving us mad.”
    Lalo’s cheeks colored a bit. “She was the only one with a head for the game.”
    “Yeah,” Tawny teased. “The rest of us have inferior heads.”
    “That’s not what I—”
    But Tawny laughed. “I was ribbin’ ya.”
    Lalo eyed me hopefully. “ Do you play?”
    “I’m willing to learn.”
    “Careful what you volunteer for,” Lilja warned, as she played one of her cards into the stack on the table.
    “It’s hard,” another said.
    “It’s not,” Lalo said. “It’s just—”
    “Complicated?”
    “Impossible?”
    “Boring?” the girls offered in turn.
    He smiled at me. “Complex.”
    I was intrigued. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
    He retrieved a board and a box of playing pieces from a shelf, and I sat opposite him as he began setting up the board.
    “Anyway,” one of the girls at the card table said, clearly resuming the conversation they’d been having when Lalo and I entered, “he said he went to Chilpan once, and there are people there who claim men once came from the skies, and he said—”
    “I bet he said a lot of things,” Lilja interrupted. “It don’t make them true, Dulcie.”
    “They’ll say anything, trying to impress us. Like any of us give a damn.”
    “They do that to you, too, Lalo?” asked the girl playing cards with Lilja and Dulcie. She was tiny. I guessed she barely weighed a hundred pounds. “Do they do everything they can to impress you?”
    “No,” Lalo said, without embarrassment. He didn’t even look up from the board and its pieces, which he was placing in lines on the checkered top. “They mostly get what they came for, then leave.”
    “I wish mine did that.”
    “You’re too nice, Clea,” Tawny told her. “Tell them talking costs extra.”
    “Sometimes I don’t mind.” She gathered Lilja and Dulcie’s cards and began tapping them on the table, lining them up so she could shuffle. “If only we could pick and choose our customers.”
    “No kidding,” Dulcie said. “Must be nice to be a kept man like Misha, only having one chump pumping away at you each night.”
    “Even if that man’s Donato?” Lilja asked.
    Dulcie dropped her gaze to the table, and Clea paused mid-shuffle to glance my way. “Is he mean?”
    I thought of La Fontaine, and the upside down sky. I thought of the night after that, when he’d nearly strangled me. “Only on occasion.”
    “Hey,” a girl I hadn’t noticed before said from her seat in the corner of the room, lowering her book. “No shop talk.”
    The others rolled their eyes, but fell silent. She retreated again behind her book, and Clea began to deal the cards.
    “All right,” Lalo said, rubbing his hands together. “The point of chess is to capture the other player’s pieces. We each have sixteen of them at the outset...”
    The first game wasn’t much of a game at all, as Lalo discussed each move either of us made, pointing out the options and the pitfalls. I found the game fascinating, and Lalo was clearly impressed with my ability to remember how each piece moved after being told only once.
    An hour later, as we were setting up for a second game, the parlor door opened and a girl’s dark head poked