Chapter 2 #2
I jumped when the bell jingled from the door and Daniel came in, smiling disarmingly at me.
His neat suit and careful demeanor made me feel like a hobo wandering in off the street, and I burned with embarrassment about the hoodie, but he offered me a handshake that felt impossibly friendly, like we’d known each other for years.
“Julie Branch?” he said. “It’s wonderful to meet you. My name’s Daniel Harding, and I’ll be your stylist.”
“Hey, Daniel. Yeah, um… my, uh, Kingmaker said you’re the best in the business.” God, saying his name felt so fucking stupid. I wondered what his real name was. Something boring.
“He talks me up too much,” he said. “But I’ll try to live up to the expectations set for me.”
“Ha. Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you.”
He smiled wider. “What I see, Julie,” he said, his voice like melted butter, “is a beautiful white canvas.”
“I’m not that pale.”
His face fell a little. “No, no. I mean, as in… a clean slate. A perfect starting point for something beautiful. I’ll be happy to help bring your inner beauty to the surface.”
I didn’t have any inner beauty to bring to the surface, but whatever. I wasn’t arguing with this man. He’d see in a bit.
Or at least, I thought he would. He was an expert in what he did, leading me into the studio, where he was quick to take my measurements, take pictures of me from all angles and start on them at his computer tablet, analyzing them in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand.
He made small talk in his low, smooth voice with the faintest hint of a British accent as he worked, dabbed things on my face, my hair, tutting occasionally, and then the next thing I knew, I was whisked along in a whirlwind of activity that involved a salon-style haircut and treatment, a skincare routine, and then testing a warehouse’s worth of suits for fitting.
I spent the whole time with my mind spinning around the idea of what this service should have cost and how Kingmaker got it for me, and that was even before Daniel set about making alterations to the clothes he’d picked out for me, a classic navy-blue suit.
And apparently there wasn’t a treatment he wasn’t qualified to give, because he proceeded to lay me down and give me a lash lift, talking me through the process as he did, and then he did my makeup, testing my looks out in a thousand different ways, color-matching painstakingly, humming and hawing over the process until finally, like Michelangelo getting back down from the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, he nodded with satisfaction gleaming in his eyes, and he stepped back, only taking the time to select a delicate gold bangle and a pendant necklace from a shelf, putting them on me carefully, and then pinning a set of earrings in as the finishing touch.
“You’re all done,” he said, drawing back a heavy red curtain on the wood-paneled room he had me in. “Let’s go meet the new Julie Branch.”
And for the love of fucking god, I met the new Julie Branch. It was an entirely different person looking back at me from the mirror, enough so that it actually made me feel a little sick.
That wasn’t me. What the hell was I doing? I was giddy, floaty, staring wide-eyed at myself in the mirror—at the powerful woman who looked like she’d just stepped in from a Fortune 100 boardroom meeting—before Daniel put his hands on my shoulders from behind, adjusting my posture.
“Now, now. You’ll need to put on the most important accessory a person can wear.”
“Please don’t put me in a durag.”
He smiled at me over my head in the mirror. “Confidence. Shoulders back, chest out. Act like you’re supposed to be there as the party’s distinguished guest, and as sure as anything, before the day is out, you will be.”
“Ugh. That’s not my forte.” I tried, though—puffed my chest out and put my chin up and tried for a confident smile. Constipated was closer to the look I got. But I couldn’t lie, it was a hell of a lot easier to feel confident when I looked like this. “Um… thanks.”
“It’s my pleasure, Julie. You’ve been wonderful to work with.
I can only hope we have the opportunity to do so again in the future.
” He stepped out from behind me, facing me directly with his brilliant smile as he said, “Now, we’ll just need to discuss payment.
For the introductory program, it’s normally six thousand. ”
My heart stopped, and my soul left my body. “Oh, uh, Kingmaker…”
He put a hand up. “But,” he said, “it’s different for friends.”
I let my shoulders soften. “Thank god.”
He smiled. “You get my members’ rate of five thousand.”
Nope, there went my fucking soul again. I was frozen to the spot, my heart hammering. “Uh… Kingmaker said he was handling it.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You’re not ready to pay upfront?”
Oh, shit, shit, shit. This was the con, wasn’t it?
He was trying to get me to fork over shitloads of money to his friend.
But—what the fuck? What kind of a scam was I’m going to trick you into getting a luxury makeover?
There was no fucking way. My blood ran cold in my body, and I felt the panic crashing over me like cold waves in the ocean, but I managed to speak, hearing my own voice like I was far away. “I, uh… no. Kingmaker said…”
He relaxed, waving me off. “Well, don’t worry about it,” he said, and it released a tiny fraction of the tension on my chest, at least until he added the follow-up. “We can do it on credit. You can pay in installments.”
Fuck me. What the fuck kind of scam was this? And why did I fall for it knowing every step of the way that this was a scam? “I just… can I just make a call real quick?” I said. “I just need to talk to Kingmaker.”
“Of course, be my guest,” he said, gesturing me towards the back room, and he softened, clearly seeing the panic that was clutching me and threatening to make me break down crying. “And if you need, we can make the jewelry a rental instead. That will bring it down to forty-seven hundred.”
Oh, well, la-ti-da, you should have just said so, let me grab that out of my wallet. I wanted to scream. “I’ll talk to Kingmaker and see what we’re doing,” I said, and dizzily, I stepped into the back where I smashed Kingmaker’s contact, fully expecting him to ghost me.
Instead, he answered on the first ring. “Yo yo,” he said. “How’s the new and improved Julie Branch?”
“Kingmaker, what the fuck, you said I wouldn’t have to worry about the payment,” I said, my voice wobbling, tears thick in my eyes despite me trying to be angry.
“Relax. You don’t have to worry.”
“So you’re covering it?”
“A king knows how to invest in his future, Julie. A couple grand? That’s nothing.”
“I don’t have a couple grand floating around, Kingmaker.”
He chuckled. “Relax. It’s all part of the plan. You’ll pay in credit. You needed a little motivation to help you make sure you couldn’t back down. To succeed, you gotta be hungry. You gotta know how to fight for it.”
I was seeing stars. The room spun, and I held onto a chair back to keep from falling over. “You fucking conned me.”
“Hey. Don’t say that,” he said. “This is the real deal, Julie. This is gonna be the spark that lights the fire within you. When you look back, you’ll know this was the moment that started everything.”
“Fuck you. I can’t believe you fucking did this to me.”
“Trust the process. Now you’re gonna fight for those stacks. And you’ll find now that your mind’s sharp and ready to look for any opportunity to get your hands on ten grand, that ten grand is gonna come to you.”
Ten? Ten. Shit, he didn’t even know how much he’d put me in debt. Maybe I’d gotten lucky with five. “You’re going to pay this back.”
“And then once you’ve done that, that money’s gonna keep flowing to you. Like I said, trust the process. A king don’t worry about the details.”
I was going to pass out. I wasn’t a king. I was worrying about the details. “I fucking hate you, Kingmaker,” I said, my voice wobbling.
“Hey. Easy, girl. Don’t cry. You’ll ruin your makeup.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, this was expensive makeup.” I held in the tears. Just for that. Each tear would have been, like, twenty bucks.
“The event’s coming up. Now that you’ve got your fire in your belly, it’s time to put it to good use. Remember, no way out but through now. It’s time to become a king.”