Chapter 4 - The Holloway Clout
The air in the foyer curdled into a stunned silence.
The couple standing directly behind us—a prominent real estate developer and his wife—stopped mid-conversation, their champagne glasses frozen halfway to their lips. Several other guests slowed their pace, pretending to admire the seventeenth-century oil paintings along the corridor while tuning their ears to every word.
“Excuse me?” Victoria hissed, her voice dropping into a vicious, razor-sharp register. “What do you mean she doesn’t need to be on the list? Are you out of your mind? This is a private, multi-million-dollar event for the city’s elite! You can’t just let vagrants wander into the gala because they handed you a piece of painted metal!”
“Victoria, calm yourself,” Eleanor muttered through clenched teeth, though her own eyes were darting around the room in absolute mortification. The spectacle she had feared was unfolding rapidly, but not because of me. Victoria’s shrill arrogance was drawing more attention than a fire alarm. “Mr. Campbell, there has clearly been a misunderstanding. Perhaps you are new to your position, but my son-in-law’s family—”
“Eleanor? Victoria? What on earth is taking so long?”
A voice cut through the tension. Walking briskly from the inner ballroom entrance was Richard Holloway. He was thirty-two, tall, slightly soft around the edges, dressed in a bespoke Tom Ford tuxedo that cost more than most people made in three months. He was holding two glasses of vintage Dom Pérignon, looking visibly annoyed that his wife hadn’t yet appeared by his side for the pre-dinner photo op with the press.
“Richard!” Victoria spun around, her voice instantly adopting a tone of tearful victimization. “Thank God you’re here. It’s an absolute disaster. Maya snuck in here to humiliate us, and this security guard is refusing to do his job! He’s actually letting her stay!”
Richard stopped dead in his tracks. He looked at Victoria, then at Eleanor, and finally turned his head toward me. When his eyes locked onto mine, an expression of profound discomfort washed over his features.
Richard and I had met exactly three times. The first was at their lavish engagement party, where he had ignored me until he realized I knew more about commercial maritime logistics than his father did. The second was at the wedding, where Victoria had deliberately seated me behind a massive floral arrangement near the catering entrance. The third was six months ago, when he had tried—and failed—to secure an emergency bridge loan for his family’s struggling shipping subsidiary.
“Maya?” Richard blinked, the color draining from his cheeks. “You’re... you’re here?”
“Good evening, Richard,” I said pleasantly. “Nice tux.”
“See!” Victoria spat, grabbing Richard’s sleeve so violently that champagne sloshed over the rim of one flute, dripping onto the pristine Persian runner. “She talks to you like you’re an equal! Richard, tell this man who you are. Tell him that if this woman isn’t thrown out on the street this second, your father will pull the Holloway Foundation’s multi-million-dollar grant from the Preservation Trust before breakfast tomorrow!”
Richard didn’t speak right away. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing hard against his bow tie. Unlike his wife, who operated entirely on surface illusions and vanity, Richard had spent the last two quarters sitting in tense boardroom meetings with his father, watching their balance sheets hemorrhage capital. He knew what real power looked like, even if he didn’t fully understand why it was standing in front of him in a unbranded black silk dress.
“Victoria,” Richard muttered, leaning in and keeping his voice low. “Let’s just... let’s go inside. It’s fine. If she’s here, she’s here. It doesn’t matter.”
“It *doesn’t matter*?” Victoria shrieked, entirely losing her composure. Several heads turned from thirty feet away. “She is a nobody, Richard! She drives a ten-year-old Civic! She lives in an apartment the size of our walk-in closet! If people see her mingling with our circle, they’ll think we’re subsidizing her! They’ll think our family is taking in charity cases!”
“Victoria, shut up,” Richard hissed under his breath, his eyes darting frantically toward Campbell, who stood with his hands behind his back, an unreadable mask on his face.
“I will not shut up!” Victoria shouted, her vanity completely overriding whatever shred of common sense she possessed. She turned back to Campbell, her face flushed red beneath her heavy foundation. “Get your General Manager down here right now. Get Julian Vance. Or better yet—call the owner of the estate! Call Arthur Sterling! I want the owner of this club standing right here to watch me have you fired and this pathetic fraud dragged out by the hair!”
A dead silence fell over the registration foyer.
Even the low murmur of string quartet music drifting from the ballroom seemed to fade into nothingness.
May you like
I looked at my sister, feeling a sudden, chilling pang of pity. She had demanded the master of the house without ever bothering to look at the deed.
“Be careful what you ask for, Victoria,” I said quietly. “You might actually get it.”
