Chapter Two Monika
Chapter Two
Monika
“Hey, Monika, can you come in here for a second?”
I glance up from where I’m standing at Margerie’s shoulder, poring over the images on her computer—pictures and videos I sent her over the past week.
Tons of photos of behind-the-scenes wedding-planning blah.
Even though it’s not at all what I like documenting, I can’t deny that these pictures are good, and that Vanessa’s ecstatic oohs and ahhs over every damn picture fill me with a simple kind of satisfaction.
She’s not oohing and ahhing now. Called away half an hour ago, she left her VP Margerie’s office in good spirits. Now she’s back and looking stressed.
“Uh, sure,” I answer, confused by the strain on Vanessa’s face.
Her cheeks are pink, making her look younger than she is, her pretty brown curls full and windswept around her shoulders.
She’s wearing a demure dark-gray button-up and black slacks with just a touch of color on her nails, which are bright pink.
She watches me from the doorway of Margerie’s office like somebody’s standing just out of sight with a gun to her head.
My short black hair tickles my jaw as I tilt my head, trying to make sense of what might have her so on edge—and more importantly, what it has to do with me.
Margerie hasn’t looked up from her computer.
“Go, go. You’re no help anyway. You took all these superromantic pictures, but you don’t even like any of them.
” She scoffs like it’s criminal of me to not want to spend my days following Vanessa and Roland around from dress fitting to cake tasting, taking nauseatingly cute pictures of them smearing frosting on each other’s cheeks. Cue shudder. Cue jealousy.
“I’m not a romantic,” I grumble. “I don’t like the hearts-and-flowers kinda stuff.”
“I got that.”
If she knew what I did like, she’d probably have even choicer words for me.
Or take me straight to her church and drown me in a bucket of holy water.
I don’t know why it surprised me when I found out that Margerie goes to church.
As she’s a trans woman, I sort of assumed she wouldn’t, and that got me realizing she was the first trans person I’d ever met, and that got me wondering if, despite being the daughter of a South Korean diplomat and a German with Malian roots, born in Seoul and raised in Berlin before immigrating to the United States for university, maybe I was a lousy citizen of the world?
And then I realized I was being too hard on myself—I didn’t have any friends.
I’m a workaholic. And that got me depressed.
As a sexually active—my mother would say promiscuous—person, I didn’t even have time to slot in the regular sexcapade these days.
A hot, successful, single thirty-six-year-old who wasn’t even getting laid?
I wanted to weep. It’s been six months since I last had sex, and even that was regrettable and forgettable.
The woman did not eat the coochie—at least, not mine—and her strap-on game left a lot to be desired.
Now I’m following around a hot, happy couple getting ready to celebrate their love, trying to tell myself it isn’t the worst thing in the world.
I’m one of only thirty guests of honor invited by the South Korean ambassador to celebrate a major Korean cultural festival, and I don’t even have a date.
Womp, womp. Cue the world’s tiniest violin.
“Monika?” Margerie glances over her shoulder at me, her red hair electric in the soft natural light streaming in through the picture window behind me. “Vanessa’s been calling your name. You having an aneurysm? Because I can give Emily a ring. She’s the COE doc.”
I swat her on the back of the head and scowl, turning toward Vanessa and snapping out of my pity slump. “What’s up?”
Vanessa’s wearing a similar scowl to mine as she stares down at her phone.
She tucks it into her back pocket and waves me toward her.
“So . . .” Her voice falters as she escorts me out of Margerie’s office through the bullpen.
The Riot Creative offices currently occupy one floor, though they’re expanding to take over the one beneath this one in the coming months.
As part of that expansion, Vanessa’s asked me about taking on another photographer to apprentice—an idea I abhor. I work alone.
And have no friends . . .
Or a date to the ambassador’s party—an ambassador who is friends with my mom and won’t hesitate to report back to Berlin that I showed up to the party of the century alone . . .
Schei?e.
“This isn’t about the apprentice thing, is it?”
“No, no. No!” She shakes her head like she’s shaking out of something, and looks at me askance. “You told me already you weren’t into that. I wouldn’t bully you or ask you again.”
I blink at her, a bit stunned. She’s so different from the other clients I typically work with, who are either hyperdemanding or don’t know what they want and are happy with anything.
Vanessa Theriot is smarter than she lets people know, highly strategic, and also nice.
Most of the members of her team are. It’s sick, really.
I’m not used to being around such niceness. It makes my skin itch.
I smirk, my annoyance dissolving a little bit. “Bully? Have you ever bullied anyone in your life, Vanessa?”
She smiles, her eyes seeming to uncloud from whatever’d been bothering her. “I bully my brothers sometimes?”
“By ‘bully,’ you mean you ask them to do things for you and they do them?”
“Yeah?”
“Right.” I laugh and shake my head as we arrive at the elevators. “That tracks. Where are we going?”
She huffs, “Well, here’s the thing: It seems that your exclusivity clause to the Wyvern isn’t as exclusive as we thought. Jem is reviewing our contract with the COE now, but there appears to be some fishy wording that basically gives Mr. Singkham the right to offer secondments to other Champions.”
I frown. I had my own lawyers review the contract, and they didn’t flag anything like that. Though . . . I can’t say I’m wholly put off by the idea. If other Champions have work for me, it might be kinda nice to take a break from the wedding photography.
Keeping my voice neutral, I say, “Okay. Did they have anyone in mind?”
The elevator doors ding open. I step inside. I have chills on the backs of my arms, though I’m not sure why. I tend to run hot and am wearing a loose long-sleeve black shirt, but I’m feeling warmer and warmer the farther and farther up we go. Heat rises? Nah. That doesn’t track.
“Well, we’ve gotten a few requests for you.
Like the shoot you did for the Olympian after the Forty-Eight Hour Festival.
That was ad hoc, and you were paid separate from our contract.
The other, longer term requests, we’ve shot down—but there’s one that’s come through over the weekend that’s been pretty . . .” Her face screws up.
“What?”
“Just . . . annoying. And Mr. Singkham is urging us to consider seconding you to him, or even splitting up your contract fifty-fifty.”
“Who is it?”
Vanessa’s gaze slides to mine. She’s shorter than I am by a few inches, and almost dainty by comparison, but right now she’s looking at me like she wants to fight. She reaches toward me—past me—and slams on the emergency stop. Red lights flare and a siren sounds. Beedoobeedoobeedoo.
“What the fuck, Vanessa?!” I shout, slamming my hands over my ears.
“Frickity frick frick!” she screams. “I didn’t know the alarm would go off!”
I turn toward the door and smash the bright-red button below the floor numbers, but the alarm doesn’t stop and the flashing lights just flash brighter. “Fuck! It’s broken.”
“Help is on the Way!” a robotic male voice shouts into the cacophony. “Help is on The Way!”
Vanessa tries to reach the control panel but stumbles. “Waugh!” Her arms windmill, and as she falls, she headbutts the railing lining the wall.
“Oh shit!” I scramble over to her as she hits the ground and rolls onto her back. Beneath the blazing red lights, I can already see a purple welt forming in the center of her forehead.
“Is it gonna leave a mark?” she wheezes.
“Uh . . . no. No, definitely not.” Dropping to my knees, I scramble over her, accidentally kneeing her in the gut.
“Ooph!” she gasps.
“Sorry!” I shout over the alarm. I crawl to the opposite wall and reach for the phone hidden beneath a glass panel I didn’t notice before. “Can You Turn Off the Fucking Alarm! We pushed the button by mistake!” I scream into the receiver.
“Help is on the Way! Help is on The Way!”
Meanwhile, static crackles over the line, and all of a sudden, the elevator jerks beneath me. “Fuck.” I look at Vanessa, my heart in my ears.
She’s got tears in her eyes, likely from the pain of trying to brain herself on the wall.
I’ve seen this girl fall over flat surfaces too many times to count.
The fact that she’s still alive is a testament to the Wyvern’s superhuman ability.
“Are we gonna die because I pushed the button?” she mouths, though I can only half hear her over this infernal racket.
The elevator jerks again, and my stomach pops up into my throat before I get a chance to answer her.
Then BAM! The lights and the siren and all the power goes out.
Schei?e! We’re shrouded in darkness. I wasn’t panicking before, but I’m panicking now.
The silence is pronounced now that the siren is dead, and I fucking hate the dark.
When I was on assignment in the DRC, covering the governmental takeover of Goma by rebel militants, the DRC army convoy I’d been traveling with was overtaken, and I survived along with two other soldiers by first running for our lives and then hiding out in a large concrete drainpipe in the ground for two days.