The Red Rabbit, a strip club barely clinging to the edge of respectable, hummed with its usual late-night thrum. Aria, twenty-one and already weary, leaned against the bar, the sticky scent of stale beer and cheap perfume clinging to the air. Her eyes, however, were lost in the pages of a battered romance novel, its final line, 'And they lived happily ever after,' a cruel whisper against the reality of her life.

"Aria, someone puked in the men’s room. It’s your turn," Mona, her manager and resident tormentor, chirped beside her, snapping Aria back to the fluorescent-lit grimness.

She sighed, pushing herself upright. The tiny black shorts she wore, practically panties, chafed. This was her life: 24/7 strip clubs, cleaning up other people's messes, and barely making enough to survive. As she turned, her hand brushed her book, sending it tumbling into the nearly empty, slushy ice bucket. A cheer went up from the leering drunks at the bar, a soundtrack to her perpetual misfortune. "Oops," Mona cooed, before sauntering off, leaving Aria to the mess.

Later, staggering towards her beat-up car under the pre-dawn sky, a prickling sensation crawled up her spine. Like icy fingers, like eyes watching. She paused, looking into the deep shadows of the parking lot. "Hello?" she called, her voice thin in the vast quiet. No answer. Just the tightening grip of fear. She fumbled for her car keys, the unsettling feeling of being hunted following her all the way home to her dilapidated trailer on the outskirts of Happenstance, a town she desperately wanted to escape.