Page 3 of A Love So Deadly
I need to do something else to find Kayla.
Screw it. I’m going to. Somehow, some way.
My charge home is fueled by fear and anger, and by the time I reach uptown and its working-class microcosm, I need a drink. Or maybe more than one. I buy some Chinese takeout and a bottle of cheap bourbon, which puts me firmly in the world of class.
The door to our building’s broken again, but the upside is new graffiti. I take the stairs two at a time, listening to the din of the other residents as I go. When I close my third-floor apartment door, I eat and knock back a few drinks, just to let theheat snake through me and give chase to the cold in my bones that’s got nothing to do with the weather.
The heat doesn’t touch that other, cold, knotted place in my chest, though.
I’m janky too, nerves biting at me.
At Kayla’s room, I push open the door, heart crushing in as I take in the neatness that was never her.
Before she started at VMR, she was gloriously alive, a storm of haphazardly placed things, a trail of cosmetics and clothes. Her perfume would sparkle in the air behind her.
She got the job and the perfume stopped, and she started to get focused. That was normal, the focus, at least at first. She’d landed a place where if she played it right, she’d get her dream job. But then it got weird. The focus wasn’t on the job, but the place. And she got neater, less…her. Like her personality was eaten away day by day.
She came home less and less and then…not at all.
“Crap.”
I return to the living room and plonk down on the ratty couch, the sounds of life from the building seeping in.
The weird thing with VMR is how reclusive the head people are…president? Owner? CEO? There’s a public arm, obviously, and when I research them it all seems on the up and up. Like any company, they come and go over time. People get new jobs, they age, retire, die.
But unlike other companies, the figureheads seem to be just that. Figureheads. Every single one I’ve researched feels more PR-like, not business-like.
Like those old pop bands who looked good but weren’t the artists. They lip synched. They played the part.
That’s it, isn’t it? These people play the part.
It’s one thing with VMR—one of the things—the real powerholders are shadowy, unseen. And the unsavory rumors always go exactly nowhere.
Except as I’ve found out, into blackball hell. RIP, career.
Journalistic career. But I’m queen of the odd job, sovereign of making myself fit and make it work. I’ve been everything from cleaner to factory worker to PA. And I can make my resume fit whatever someone wants.
What I need is to get into the VMR HQ.
That’s more than clear. It’s a beat in my veins. I need to find a way in.
I pour another drink and take a big swallow, setting the glass on the scuffed coffee table, and then I pull my computer to my lap and start scrolling through the job sites.This task isn’t exactly a storm of VMR jobs.
I flip to their site, but it ranges from technical to artistic and those are jobs I can’t fake or fudge. I don’t know how to operate a camera or do professional make up.
And while I can edit a script, there aren’t any.
Their site is a dead end. So I flip back to the job sites. Some are locked behind a pay wall, but I have Kayla’s password for them, back when I’d help her apply for jobs when she was hitting the pavement, her eye always on VMR.
But the pay wall sites have nothing.
So I go to an old generic one that anyone can use, search and apply for jobs from.
Suddenly a white-hot flash sears me.
There.
VMR.
