18
Walking into The Vellum was like climbing inside a designer handbag worth six figures: silent, pristine, and way too elegant to be carrying two mortals like us. The sliding doors sighed open as if they’d instantly recognized we weren’t exactly their usual clientele.
Inside, the air smelled like cedar, white musk, and multimillion-dollar contracts.
The walls looked like gray velvet—though I was pretty sure if we touched them, some invisible alarm would zap our fingers.
In the center of the lobby, a black crystal chandelier dangled like post-apocalyptic art, and every receptionist held themselves with the posture of a diplomat cross-trained in ballet.
Tess walked as if she’d been called up to accept a lifetime achievement award—confident stride, dark sunglasses indoors, coat draped over her shoulders in open defiance of gravity.
I followed, with the unmistakable look of someone about to be arrested for breathing too loudly in a two-thousand-dollar- a-night hotel.
“This place smells like offshore money,” Tess whispered as we passed the colonnaded gallery. “And if you order the Nebula cocktail, they literally bring the fog to your table. Liquid nitrogen. Silver-glove service.”
“Perfect,” I muttered. “I already feel broke down to my bone marrow.”
The lobby bar looked like the fever dream of a fashion designer on opiates: mirrored walls, champagne-colored mood lighting, ochre velvet chairs arranged in perfect circles.
At the center, a backlit onyx bar where white-gloved bartenders in tux jackets poured fluorescent liquids into teardrop-shaped glasses.
We sat at a table overlooking a rotating kinetic sculpture. I tried to disappear. Tess, on the other hand, owned her space with the casual elegance of a retired KGB spy.
She picked up the menu.
I stared at her in horror. “What are you doing?!”
“Seeing what’s good.”
She flipped through the pages with the serenity of someone who’s never once checked a price before ordering.
“Are you out of your mind?!” I hissed, leaning across the table. “We can’t even afford the cheapest shot of espresso in here—and I highly doubt they serve ‘two-dollar watered-down drip coffee.’ ”
Tess adjusted her sunglasses, still glued to her face like she was under the Cannes spotlight. “Fear not, darling. It will all be repaid… in the future.”
I sighed.
I told her about the last phone call with my parents. How they’d decided to cut me off financially for good and let me face “real life.” That next month I wouldn’t even have enough for subway fare, let alone lunch.
Unless…
Well, unless I signed a million-dollar contract for How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar with a publisher so big they had an entire floor dedicated to every single genre.
But I left that part out. My secret plan was still too fragile to drag into daylight.
And besides, Tess would’ve been negotiating the merch rights by tomorrow.
“Stop thinking like a broke laundress, Bea. Very soon I’ll have access to half of Mr. Ryder’s fortune and all his properties.
Do you really think a forty-dollar cocktail scares me?
Tonight, it’s on me. I’ll blow the last pennies of my sad little librarian salary…
Consider it a preview of my future as an heiress. ”
The waiter appeared.
Early twenties, chiseled jawline, hair styled with surgical precision, and the air of a finance major moonlighting as a model to pay tuition.
Tess sized him up like she’d just won a coupon for mentally undressing him. She was buzzing—electric, intentional, hormonal. She looked at him as if her eyes alone had just ripped off his underwear.
“I’ll have a… Comet’s Tongue,” she said, her tone pure fireworks, crossing her legs with lethal elegance.
The waiter nodded, trying to stay calm, but his eyes flashed a brief oh God, help .
“And you, Bea?” Tess asked without taking her gaze off the boy.
“Uh… The Narcissus Protocol,” I said, grabbing the first vaguely philosophical name I saw on the menu. It probably contained something that would set my tonsils on fire, but at this point I was fully committed to the bit.
“Excellent,” the waiter said with a strained smile, then disappeared so fast he left behind a trail of cologne and panic.
Tess chuckled. She leaned back like she’d just won a court case, eyes sweeping the room with the calm authority of a woman who’d finally conquered her natural habitat: composed clients with crystal glasses in hand, twenty-thousand-dollar handbags dropped casually beside perfectly pedicured feet.
Her gaze lingered on the damask carpets and the paintings that were probably worth more than my life. She sighed in pure serenity. She was at peace with the world. Or at least with her future .
“So?” I asked, lowering my voice. “What’s the plan?”
I expected a whisper, a conspiratorial glance, maybe even a coded gesture.
Nope.
Tess didn’t lean in. She stayed reclined, regal, like she was about to recite a grocery list.
“Ryder should be in one of the top-floor suites. Twenty grand a night. Right now, he’s probably still asleep, recovering from last night’s performance.
Or maybe not… maybe he dragged some random bimbo upstairs.
One who’s bouncing around his suite like a caffeinated bunny, ready to brag to the nearest lamppost for the next six months. ”
She shrugged, utterly unbothered.
“But you know what? I don’t care.” She locked eyes with me, cold and unwavering. “A seductress isn’t some cheap floozy. A seductress chains the mind and the soul. The body is just… collateral damage.”
“Okay,” I said, ignoring the detour. “So Ryder’s in the presidential suite…”
Tess nodded. “Exactly. And to leave the hotel… he has to pass through here. The building has no side exits, no secret tunnels, no teleportation, no back doors. Sooner or later, he’ll step right into our line of sight.”
“Him and his bodyguards…” I said.
“Who cares about his bodyguards?” Tess scoffed. “ It’s not like I’m planning to mace him. The plan is simple: capture his attention.”
“With what?” I asked. “A dramatic performance of Baudelaire poetry standing on this table?”
Tess shook her head, laughing, sunglasses sliding down to the tip of her nose.
“Wrong. Though you weren’t far off… I’ll talk about something close to his heart. His idol. The washed-up jazz bum from the sixties who killed himself at thirty-two… Lev Mirov.”
“Who?!”
“Exactly.”
She leaned forward just slightly, lowering her voice like she was revealing the Pentagon’s launch codes.
“A Russian-born saxophonist who became an American citizen. Brilliant, disturbed, practically unknown. Countess élo?se always says: Artists are predictable. They all have one hidden idol. Someone nobody knows. A lighthouse they sail toward their whole lives. Ryder is no exception. After digging through interviews, articles, obscure posts on dead forums, I found out Lev Mirov is his god. His personal deity. A name you’ll almost never hear in a music school, let alone in a bar.
That’s why it’ll work. The second he hears me say it—in the most unlikely place possible: the lobby bar of the Vellum Hotel, New York City—he won’t be able to ignore me. ”
The cocktails arrived .
The same waiter—still gorgeous, still visibly tense—set them down with a trembling hand. Maybe he was afraid Tess was about to smack his ass, because he flinched ever so slightly when she gave him that killer half-smile.
“Cheers,” he said with a stiff bow. Then bolted like a bomb tech who’d accidentally started the countdown.
Tess and I clinked glasses. Her toast was sharp, decisive. “To the art of war.”
The Comet’s Tongue was an ominous shade of purple with an aftertaste somewhere between cactus blossom and eraser shavings. My Narcissus Protocol, on the other hand, tasted vaguely like gardenia cream with a splash of wrong choice.
“But I don’t know anything about Lev Mirov,” I protested.
“You don’t need to. I’ll do all the talking. The moment Ryder steps out of that elevator, I’ll start singing Mirov’s praises. You… just smile and nod. This isn’t rocket science.”
“So… what do we do now? Just sit here and wait?”
Tess crossed her legs, lifted her chin, and, without even glancing my way, said: “Precisely. We sit here… and we wait.”