Chapter 404

Even if I hadn’t known which of the hotel suites Vera Angeloff and her guests were currently occupying, all it would have taken was one glance down the west hallway to figure it out.

Only demanding, entitled VIPs asked for an entire display of fresh flowers outside their suite door.

Now, to be fair, Ash’s team had done a lovely job. They’d set up a shallow side table and gotten three bouquets of different heights that still worked together and complemented the peachy colour of the walls. It was just as nice a display as they might have put up anywhere down in the public areas of the casino or hotel areas - I tried not to think of how much the Vaso spent weekly on flowers, let alone the entirety of the Las Vegas Strip. Part of me thought I should invest in a greenhouse company or something as a side gig.

But still, a request for fresh flowers inside a Suite wasn’t that uncommon. But outside?

I shook my head, wondering how many days Ash would be able to milk this one before he had to swap them out for a new one, and then turned and knocked on the door with my ‘polite but firm’ rat-a-tat-tat. My job rarely brought me up to the hotel rooms, but I’d learned that little rhythm and amount of firmness from some of the cleaning crew - enough to draw attention immediately, but still light enough to not be mistaken for rudely banging on the door.

It wasn’t until the music turned down inside the Suite that I realised there was a low level playing - that, at least, was a check in favour of Angeloff. I knew Jonas infrequently had to deal with the managers of musical acts when their clients were just begging for noise complaints while they blared music at ungodly, deafening volumes. I could only imagine the issues if Angeloff was a Russian rave girl playing euro trance music or drum and bass at top volume, shaking the walls with it.

Our suite doors were heavy oak, each one elegantly carved to look like stonework pillars and scenes from some generally ancient Middle East culture, and I tapped my toes and blew out a breath as I waited for it to be answered. Angeloff’s suite door had a scene of turbaned riders charging across some sort of desert scene, but the longer I looked at it, the more I felt like the horses looked kind of ... derpy. And I also wondered if any of our Owners had really stopped to look at it. Were the turbans ‘accurate’ or kinda racist?