Page 3 of Velvet & Sins

“I think he’s dead,” she murmured.

No fucking shit, Sherlock.

I was too tired to deal with this shit, and it had to happen now, fifteen minutes before the night shift was supposed to start. It couldn’t have fucking waited until, I don’t know, after fucking midnight? Once I was nicely tucked in my bed, contemplating all of my life choices and wishing I was somewhere in the Bahamas, on the beach with a strawberry Mojito in my hand, while two hot men sat next to me, talking my ear off.

It just had to happen now. Fucking now.

“What do we do now?” Karina asked, her heels clacking over the marble floor as she came closer to the body, right where the blood was starting to spill around the man lying on the floor.

Dead.

Gone.

Deceased.

And I fucking saw the man who did it.

Why the fuck did I agree to be an afternoon Manager on Duty, when I knew—I fucking knew—that nothing good ever comes from the afternoon shift, on a Saturday, in Velvet City? Last week we had an overdose in room 3007, the week before that a couple tried to kill each other. The week before, a man tried to propose to his girlfriend and ended up falling from the twenty second floor.

And now this.

The night was going so well. The arrivals were done, porte-cochère didn’t have fifteen million cars piling up, while my valet supervisor literally chilled his balls in the staff room. My front desk team was relaxed, smiling, no one was bitching, I wasn’t surrounded by a fucking kindergarten for once, and then this dude happened.

This fucking idiot happened.

“Did you really have to die in my hotel?” I hissed, looking down at his open eyes and gaping mouth, his face already losing color, getting paler with each passing second.

“I should call the police,” Karina murmured, looking at me as if I fucking knew what to do in these situations. I came to this city to run away from my boring fucking life in Croyford Bay, to make something out of myself, to really live, and the only thing I got were twelve-hour shifts, annoying team members, two good friends, and Saturdays marked with murders.

“Should I call the police?” she asked, waiting for an answer from me. I mean, I probably should be the one giving out instructions, telling her what to do. I was her manager, not the other way around, but I stood frozen, remembering what my mother told me when I used to live in Croyford Bay.

You haven’t seen anything, Evelyn, she would say, whenever people started talking about the infamous families living in the area.Even if you did, you didn’t. Trust me, it’s better to remove yourself from those situations.

And what the fuck did I do tonight? I saw the man exiting this room, and I called out after him, asking him questions, looking him straight in the eye. Straight in the fuckingeye, smiling like a freaking lunatic as I stood in front of a murderer. Okay, maybe I didn’t know he was a murderer at the time, but still. Fuckingstill.

I was a motherfucking idiot, with no sense of self-preservation.

See nothing, say nothing, that was my mother’s favorite saying, and I threw it all out the window the moment I stepped on this motherfucking floor. As if I didn’t know that the mafia ruled these streets, or that their boss had a permanent reservation in The Penthouse, our main Nightclub. Hell, they owned this hotel, and I should have known to keep my head down and say nothing.

I would either get killed, or worse—they were going to fire me, throwing away the years I’ve spent building this career.

“Evelyn, you need to tell me what to do,” Karina continued, as if I wasn’t in the middle of an existential crisis. My eyes flickered from the white walls, now covered in splatters of blood, to the increasingly large pool of crimson spreading around the body, to the viridian sofa chair I always liked but would never look at in the same way, because it had pieces of brain matter all over it.

“Evelyn!”

“Shut the fuck up, Karina!” I seethed, trying to think. “I’m trying to figure it out.”

“What’s there to figure out?” she asked, her eyes widening, panic evident in them, and my stomach decided to growl in that moment, squeezing my guts, reminding me I haven’t eaten today. Unless we counted coffee and cigarettes, but that wasn’t going to feed my belly. My nerves, maybe, but not the essential part of me.

“Call the police,” I instructed, needing her to get the fuck out of here. “And alert the Loss Prevention Team. They need to know what happened.”

And I needed to think, to figure out a way to get myself out of this shit.

The police were going to ask questions, they would check the cameras and they would see me standing there, talking to that man. And I wouldn’t be able to lie. God, I was always so bad at lying. I couldn’t even cheat on my exams because I knew my poker face was pure shit.

And I wouldn’t lie to the police. I was raised better than that, but that also meant whoever that man worked for—and he definitely wasn’t just some psycho, walking around, killing people—would come after me.

I could hear Karina’s high pitched voice as she spoke on the phone, blurting out the information she knew, but she had no idea what deep shit we were all in right now. What deep shit I was in. My heels clicked over the floor as I took two steps forward, coming closer to the man lying on the floor, his life extinguished before it could even start.

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