Chapter 31. The Devil in Velvet
944 Words
The music didn’t play—it devoured. Bass slammed like fists against bone, shaking thought out of skulls, pounding reason into pulp. Light fractured across crystal chandeliers, spitting shards over bare skin, sequined sins, and men with pockets deep enough to drown saints.
Sandra slid into hell without a ripple.
Perfume clung to the air, thick as lies. Whiskey burned from open bottles, champagne sweating gold in slender flutes. Women swayed half-naked on tables, laughing with mouths that didn’t touch their eyes. Men lounged in leather like minor gods fattened on chaos. Every inch of the room stank of power trying to look like pleasure.
Her heels cut the marble with lazy precision. Boots black as midnight, sharp as contempt. Her dress clung like liquid darkness—sequins scattered like broken stars, hem criminally short. The wig blazed scarlet under strobe lights, framing lips lacquered in temptation. Everything about her said want me. Nothing about her meant it.
And she hated every second of this theater.
Smile. Move. Be bait. That’s the job tonight.
Not because she wanted vengeance—not yet.
Because somewhere in this golden carcass of a world, her second son breathed behind walls thick with arrogance.
Adrian.
Her boy with eyes like early storms and a laugh Clyde would have choked just to hear. Stolen from her arms, wrapped in silk chains, guarded like a relic. They thought they could cage him forever. They thought a mother’s bones would break quiet.
Sandra smiled under the strobe and let hate taste like honey on her tongue.
---
Eric lounged where rumor promised—white leather sprawling beneath him like tamed snow, his posture a love letter to self-worship. Two girls bracketed him, both raven-haired, dressed in whispers. They laughed too loudly, feeding his illusion that their eyes weren’t empty.
Sandra’s gaze skimmed him once. Blond hair disciplined into a crown’s idea of perfection. A jaw trained in cruelty. A glass sweating amber between fingers that had never known consequence. Little prince of rot, she thought. Pretty enough for corruption to use as a mirror.
She turned before bile could sour her smile.
---
The dance floor swallowed her whole. Bodies writhed in heat and strobe, every motion a sin rehearsed to look like impulse. Sandra moved through them like smoke, hips spelling invitations in a dialect older than kingdoms. Her pulse hammered, not from fear but fury—caged, sharpened, hungry.
One more move in the script. One more name to cross out.
Behind her, the air shifted. Attention crawled up her spine like a tongue. She didn’t look. She bent deeper into rhythm, arms carving arcs of false abandon, dress flashing like a dare.
Let him come. Let him think it’s choice.
A hand landed on her hip—hot, heavy, claiming. Fingers pressing ownership through velvet.
Sandra turned.
Slow.
Predatory.
And the bass staggered for a beat when their eyes locked.
Eric’s gaze glittered with recognition of a flavor he didn’t deserve. His grin spread like oil across water. He opened his mouth—probably to purr some line about fate and fun.
The needle struck before his ego could shape a syllable.
Her hand moved like silk over steel, curling to his neck as if to pull him closer. The syringe slid beneath his jaw, so intimate it looked like seduction. No one noticed. The music ate every whisper, every gasp. Liquid fire spilled into his veins, a lullaby written in poison.
His glass shattered against the floor. A few heads turned, shrugged, kept sinning.
Eric’s lips fluttered on questions that would never survive the air. Sandra’s fingers gripped his chin, tilting his face toward hers. She let him see her smile—razor-edged and ruinous.
“Goodbye, little prince,” she murmured, her breath a kiss of frost. “It was lovely seeing you again.”
His pupils dilated, blue drowning in black. Knees folded like paper burning from the edges inward. She caught his weight with practiced ease, lowered him onto the couch between the black-haired dolls who giggled through narcotic fog, too dazed to register gravity’s theft.
To anyone watching, it looked like pleasure tipping into excess. Just another boy too rich to care, too stupid to pace his poisons.
Sandra straightened, sliding the empty syringe into her clutch, heartbeat steady as a metronome wound in malice.
One step back. Then another. The dance floor swallowed her like a wound sealing shut. Bodies writhed. Music roared. The world stayed drunk and blind.
---
One piece off the board, she thought as her heels cut rhythm into the marble. And with his crown tilting toward the grave, the walls around Adrian will crack.
She’d mapped it in cold ink weeks ago. Power guarded power. Pull one pillar, the others sway. Eric’s family would panic, circle wagons around the mother’s only pride left—the golden heirloom Adrian had become. And panic meant mistakes. Thinner walls. Fewer eyes. Gaps wide enough for a mother to slip through with claws unsheathed.
And when that happened, she’d be waiting with teeth.
The door loomed, veined in gold, guarded by men in suits heavy with arrogance. Neither glanced twice at the woman gliding past them with a smile sweet as sin and eyes colder than the steel singing in her veins.
Outside, the night split open like a vein. Rain slashed the pavement, washing sequins into shadows. Sandra breathed deep, sucking oxygen through the chokehold of her dress. The invitation burned in her clutch like a relic of war. She didn’t look back. Didn’t need to.
Behind her, the music roared on, deaf to the devil sliding out its door.
- Writer
