Marcus looked at the secondary booking window on the angled monitor, where the name Chloe Miller – VIP Comp Upgrade blinked in the pending queue for the Presidential Suite. Beside the name, the nightly rate of fifty thousand dollars had been manually crossed out by the system and replaced with an internal staff family rate of four hundred and ninety-five dollars.
Brittany quickly jerked the monitor back toward herself, her pale cheeks flushing dark pink for the first time that afternoon.
"That’s a private terminal screen," she snapped, her fingers flying over the mouse to close the window. Before she could click the corner X, Arthur Pendelton stepped behind the counter and clamped his hand firmly over her wrist.
"Don't touch another key," Arthur said, his voice shaking with a mixture of horror and disbelief as he stared down at the pending reservation on the screen. "Chloe Miller? Your sister? You released a board-locked penthouse suite so you could comp it for your sister?"
"I didn't comp it, it’s a legitimate employee family rate!" Brittany hissed back, yanking her wrist free and glaring up at the older manager. "The suite was going to sit empty anyway once I cleared the unverified hold. My Uncle Richard told me last week that if any tier-one rooms went unused after three-thirty, front desk leads were allowed to allocate them for promotional visibility. Chloe has four hundred thousand followers!"
Around the marble columns, the remaining lobby guests weren't even pretending to look at their phones anymore. The woman in the fur-trimmed coat stood frozen beside her husband’s suitcases, her eyes darting between the flushed receptionist and the tall white man in the charcoal sweater who hadn't moved an inch.
Arthur closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, looking as though the crystal chandelier above them were about to crash down on his head. He turned back to Marcus, his voice dropping to a desperate, pleading whisper.
"Mr. Vance, please," Arthur said, gesturing toward a frosted-glass doorway tucked behind the concierge alcove twenty feet away. "The executive office is right through there. Whatever happens next, I beg you not to let this play out in the center of the main lobby before Chairwoman Sterling arrives. Give me five minutes of your time away from the guests."
Marcus looked at Arthur’s trembling hands, then glanced once more at the young bellhop near the brass cart, who had quietly stepped forward to keep anyone else from approaching the desk.
"Five minutes, Mr. Pendelton," Marcus said evenly. "And bring Miss Miller. I’d hate for anything to be miscommunicated before four o'clock."
Inside the glass-walled executive office, the heavy oak door clicked shut, muting the ambient murmur of the lobby outside. The room smelled of old leather, cedar polish, and the faint, metallic tang of central heating. On the mahogany wall behind Arthur’s desk hung a framed black-and-white photograph from 1978, showing a younger, white-haired man in a tuxedo shaking hands with a line of uniformed bellhops and maintenance workers on the hotel’s opening night.
Marcus walked straight past the leather visitor chairs and stopped in front of the framed photograph.
Brittany stood near the corner of the bookcase, her arms crossed tightly over her teal blazer again. Being away from the staring crowd in the lobby seemed to have restored a fraction of her defiance. She pulled her phone halfway out of her skirt pocket, her thumb moving rapidly across the screen under her elbow as she sent a quick text message.
"Mr. Vance," Arthur began, setting the leather welcome binder down on the edge of his desk with both hands to stop them from shaking. "I have served this property for twenty-two years. If I had known you were checking in personally at the main desk rather than coming through the private garage entrance with your legal team—"
"I didn't want the garage entrance, Arthur," Marcus said quietly, his eyes still on the black-and-white photograph on the wall. "When you're buying a four-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar hotel that's six hours away from bank liquidation, a red carpet in the basement doesn't tell you anything. You learn how a house is run by walking through the front door in a sweater."
Behind him, Brittany let out a quiet, defensive huff. "So this was a setup. You walked up to my desk trying to look like someone who couldn't afford the room just to trap me."
Marcus turned slowly to face her.
"I walked up to your desk wearing a twelve-hundred-dollar cashmere sweater, carrying a valid institutional credit card, to check into a room I had already paid a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit to hold," Marcus said, his voice calm and level. "You didn't ask for my driver's license. You didn't ask for a confirmation number. You looked at my skin, you looked at my clothes, and you hit cancel inside of twelve seconds."
"Because the booking looked irregular!" Brittany insisted, her voice rising sharply as her eyes darted toward the office door. "People use stolen corporate credentials in Manhattan every single day! I was doing my job!"