The words fell from Yanna's lips, tasting of defeat and metal. They were an answer to Ria, an answer to the medical bills, an answer to the hollow pit in her stomach where her pride used to be.
"I'm not afraid. I'll do it."
Fear, it turned out, had a texture. It was the rough, starchy cheapness of the black uniform scratching against Yanna's skin. The locker room was a cramped, humid shoebox in the bowels of the Navarro Gallery, smelling of bleach and nervous sweat. Girls bustled around them, pinning stray hairs and applying brave, bright slashes of lipstick that didn't quite hide the anxiety in their eyes. For them, this was a gig. A great payday. For Yanna, the uniform was a costume of profound fraudulence. It didn't make her invisible; it branded her as an imposter, a barnacle clinging to the hull of a magnificent yacht.
Ria, already dressed and practically vibrating with nervous energy, did a final check on Yanna's severe, tight bun. Her fingers were quick and sure, a stark contrast to her frantic monologue.
"Okay, rules are simple. One, don't talk to the guests unless they talk to you, and even then, it's 'yes, sir,' 'no, ma'am,' and 'right away.' Got it? Simple."
Simple. Yanna thought. Like quantum physics is simple if you have the brain for it.
"Two," Ria continued, her words tumbling over each other as she smoothed an imaginary wrinkle on Yanna's sleeve. "Smile like your rent depends on it, because ours kinda does. Not a big toothy grin. A small, pleasant, 'I-don't-exist-but-I'm-happy-to-serve-you' kind of smile. Practice it."
Yanna felt her lips twitch into a grotesque approximation of pleasantness. It felt like her face was cracking.
"And three," Ria said, finally stopping to meet Yanna's eyes in the smudged mirror, her voice dropping with sudden gravity. "And this is the most important, Yans. Stay away from the Navarros. All of them. Especially her. Got it?"
The feigned smile died on Yanna's lips. "Stay away from the person who hired us. Right. Makes perfect sense."
"I'm serious, Yans," Ria hissed, her eyes wide. "Look at this place. These people operate on a different frequency. You get too close, you get zapped. Just… be a ghost. A polite, smiling ghost who serves expensive champagne."
A supervisor with a clipboard and a permanently sour expression barked for them to line up. Yanna's heart began to hammer a frantic rhythm against her ribs. This was it. The door at the end of the drab service corridor was a portal. On one side was her world—a world of cheap starch, worried whispers, and the smell of bleach. On the other…
She stepped through, and the universe shifted.
The sensory shock was a physical blow. The main gallery was a cavern of white marble and glass, so vast and echoing it seemed to swallow sound. The low, sophisticated thrum of a hundred quiet conversations washed over her, a murmur of money and power. The air, crisp and cool, was heavy with the intermingled scents of night-blooming jasmine, expensive leather, and something sharp and woody that had to be the cologne of billionaires. Towering abstract sculptures twisted towards the impossibly high ceiling, their polished metal surfaces reflecting distorted versions of the guests drifting between them. Massive, chaotic paintings exploded with color on the walls—beautiful, expensive secrets she could never hope to understand. And the people. Gods, the people. They moved with an unconscious grace, their laughter low and effortless, their clothes draped over them like second skins. They didn't walk; they glided. Yanna felt a hot flush of shame creep up her neck. She was a crow that had stumbled into a flock of peacocks. She gripped the tray of champagne flutes the supervisor thrust into her hands, the cool, heavy crystal her only anchor.
Her feet moved on autopilot, carrying her into the heart of the glittering assembly. The smile was glued to her face, a rictus of forced placidity. Her hands were clammy. Each time a guest plucked a flute from her tray with perfectly manicured fingers, she flinched internally. Their eyes slid over her, through her, registering nothing more than a mobile drink dispenser. It was exactly what Ria told her to be—a ghost—but the reality of it was profoundly dehumanizing.
Look at them. The thought was a bitter acid in her mind. Look at the casual ease in their shoulders. That woman in the emerald silk dress probably spent more on her shoes than Yanna's family earned in six months. The man laughing by the sculpture had a watch on his wrist that could pay for her sister's medicine for the next ten years. They had never known the gnawing terror of an empty wallet, the meticulous, frantic calculation of every single peso. They were a different species, bred in a climate of serene, unshakeable security, and Yanna hated them with a sudden, surprising ferocity. She hated their beauty, their grace, and most of all, their goddamn effortlessness.
She was refilling her tray at a makeshift bar when it happened. It wasn't a sound. It was a change in pressure, a subtle shift in the room's electromagnetic field. Conversations near the grand entrance didn't stop, but they lowered in volume. Postures straightened. Heads turned, not with vulgar curiosity, but with the trained, instinctual deference of a court sensing the arrival of its monarch.
Yanna followed their collective gaze. And there she was.
She saw the presence before she saw the person. A locus of gravity around which the rest of the room orbited. Then, details resolved from the blur. Camille Navarro. She was not dressed in a gown like the other women. She wore a tailored suit of ink-blue silk that fit her powerful frame like bespoke armor. It clung to her broad shoulders and tapered at her waist, exuding a sharp, androgynous authority. Light glinted off the severe, elegant lines of a silver watch on her left wrist. As she turned her head to murmur something to a waiting associate, Yanna saw it: the dark, intricate lines of a massive tattoo peeking out from the crisp collar of her white blouse, a hint of wildness coiled beneath the veneer of absolute control. She moved with a slow, deliberate grace, her hands in her pockets, her head held high as she surveyed the room. She wasn't walking through her party; she was a panther surveying her territory, and every single person here was her guest, her subject, her prey.
The stories didn't do her justice. They had made her sound like a monster. They had not conveyed that she was a terrifyingly beautiful one.
A hand snatched a glass from Yanna's tray, startling her. "Ah, there you are," a portly man slurred, already half-drunk. Yanna forced her smile back into place and drifted back into the crowd, her eyes involuntarily tracking the woman in blue. She watched as Camille approached the man with the expensive watch. The man's demeanor changed instantly, his easy laughter freezing on his face, replaced by an eager, almost fawning attention.
Yanna floated closer, pretending to offer her tray to a nearby couple. She could only catch fragments of the conversation, carried on the cool, still air.
"…a remarkable acquisition, Camille. Truly," the man was saying, gesturing to a massive, violent splash of red and black paint on the far wall.
Camille's gaze drifted to the painting. She was silent for a long moment. Then, Yanna heard her voice for the first time. It was exactly as she had imagined from that bathroom floor weeks in the future—and yet, not. It was lower. Calmer. Utterly, lethally dismissive.
"It's adequate," Camille said, her voice barely a murmur, yet it sliced through the chatter. "The artist's early work showed promise. This piece, however, is merely… loud."
The finality of it was brutal. A casual, effortless execution. She hadn't raised her voice. She had simply passed judgment, and in that one word—loud—she had stripped a multi-million-peso painting of all its value. The man's face fell, his expression one of a puppy that had just been kicked. Camille gave him a thin, bloodless smile that didn't reach her eyes and moved on. A shiver, cold and sharp, traced its way down Yanna's spine. The stories were true.
The rest of the hour was a blur. Yanna moved through the gilded crowd, a nameless automaton with a fixed smile. She saw Ria across the room, who gave her a quick, reassuring nod. See? You're fine. You're invisible. The small gesture was a lifeline. Bolstered, Yanna went back for a fresh tray, the last one before her scheduled break. The flutes were filled with rosé champagne this time, the pale pink liquid catching the light. She could do this. Fifteen more minutes.
Her designated path took her along the west wall, where the crowd had thinned. And where Camille Navarro was now standing alone, her back partially to the room, contemplating a triptych of stark, photographic portraits.
Yanna's blood ran cold. The quiet, frantic prayer started in her head, a desperate litany against her pounding heart. Please don't turn around. Please don't see me. Please don't see me, please don't see me. She kept her eyes fixed on the far corner of the room, tried to make her steps silent, tried to shrink into her cheap black uniform and simply cease to exist.
The universe, it seemed, had a sick sense of humor. The apathetic entity she had railed against had chosen this exact moment to deliver its punchline.
A clumsy guest, a young man in a poorly fitting suit who was laughing too loudly and had had far too much to drink, stumbled backward without looking. He collided hard with Yanna's arm.
Time seemed to slow down, to warp and stretch. Yanna saw the tray tilt, an impossible, horrifying angle. She saw the elegant flutes, which had felt so heavy and solid in her hands, lift into the air in a graceful, silent, deadly arc. She heard a collective gasp from the few people nearby, a sharp intake of breath that was swallowed by the sudden, percussive crash of a dozen glasses shattering on the polished marble floor.
But one glass didn't shatter. One full flute, in a final act of cosmic spite, flipped end over end, emptying its entire contents in a perfect, glistening wave of pale pink champagne. Right down the front of Camille Navarro's ink-blue silk suit.
A bubble of absolute, profound silence expanded from the point of impact. All chatter stopped. Every single eye in the vast gallery turned towards them. The champagne soaked instantly into the expensive silk, making it cling to Camille's torso. The wet fabric went from ink-blue to black, starkly outlining the shape of her body and, beneath it, the dark, menacing sprawl of a massive dragon tattoo, its scales and claws now hideously visible through the drenched material.
The woman did not move. She didn't gasp, or curse, or even flinch at the cold shock of the liquid. For a long, terrifying second, she remained perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the artwork before her. Then, with a slowness that was more menacing than any sudden rage, she lowered her gaze. She looked down at the spreading, ruinous stain on her chest. And then, she lifted her head.
Her eyes—dark, predatory, and devoid of any emotion but a terrifying, cold focus—met Yanna's.
Yanna was frozen. She was no longer a person. She was a statue of pure terror, her blood turned to ice, the broken shards of glass at her feet a perfect metaphor for her shattered future. The empty tray was still gripped in her white-knuckled hand.
Camille took one silent step forward, the sound of her expensive leather shoe on the marble floor a death knell. She didn't look at the drunken guest who had caused the collision, who was now babbling incoherent apologies. She looked only at Yanna.
She reached out.
Her fingers wrapped around Yanna's right wrist. The grip was not violent; it was far worse. It was calm, controlled, and as unbreakable as a band of forged steel. Yanna felt the warmth of Camille's skin against her own, a shocking, intimate heat. And then she felt it—the deliberate, specific pressure of Camille's thumb pressing down, right onto the delicate, fluttering pulse point. The exact same spot on her arm where, just two days before, she had found solace in her own secret, sharp-edged pain.
The touch was a violation. The touch was a claim. The touch sent a bolt of pure, unadulterated terror through her, followed by a horrifying, shameful, electric thrill. Yanna's breath hitched, caught in her throat.
Camille's voice, when it came, was not a shout. It was a low, dangerous growl that cut through the dead silence, meant for Yanna and Yanna alone.
"Do you have any idea what you've done?"