Lost Russian Luna

Chapter Two

The elevator’s a refrigerator box, windowless, humming, sharp with the scent of citrus floor wax and melting latex gloves. The lights overhead flicker, then buzz to a sullen yellow as we lurch up through the hotel’s guts. Rosa’s voice is a steady, static sound in my right ear. She keeps talking because the silence makes her nervous. Or maybe it’s me. The last time we rode the night shift together, I didn’t say a word for five straight hours, and when she asked if I was mute, I nodded.

“This is the penthouse, baby. Have you ever been up there?” Rosa nudges the mop handle with her knee. Her smile’s the color of bubblegum, she smells of strawberry vape and knock-off Good Girl Blush. She keeps her black hair in a bun and her makeup freshly patched, even at four in the morning, even though everyone we clean for is too rich or too drunk to notice.

I shake my head. My arms are already going cold from this over-refrigerated box from hell. I can feel my pulse in my throat.

She grins. “The tips are insane, if they don’t skip out. Some nights I make more than the supervisors. You just got to smile and take it, you know? So, try to smile, that was the hint, Val.”

I nod again, but my hands are locked on the cart’s metal frame. Every floor we pass, the numbers tick up in a digital stutter. Six. Seven. Nine. It’s a decent hotel, but they try to spruce it up with fake marble and light-up fountains. The penthouse has its button, molded in gold plastic instead of the usual gray. I don’t look at it, but it burns in my peripheral vision.

“Relax, chica. If it’s a party, we dump bleach and take the empties out. Pretend we don’t notice the hookers. No one’s gonna judge you. I’ll do all the talking.”

She isn’t wrong. The trick to surviving was to let other people stand in front, to let them soak up the attention, the smiles, the suspicion. I tuck my chin and close my eyes for a second. When I open them, we’re there.

The doors yawn open, and the world flips inside-out. It’s far worse than hookers and drugged-out college kids.

The carpet is pale cream, ruined by a spatter of something wet and maroon. Broken glass, glinting like ice chips, edges the threshold. Inside, the suite is too bright, every lamp and chandelier blaring. There are three men, all in the best suits, and they look like they were poured into them from the same bottle. The one on the left has a gold watch and a white silk shirt so thin I can see the tattoo on his chest. He had dark hair with faint red highlights, which he wanted to peek out of locks that were wild and pulled into a tail at the back of his neck in waves. The middle one, seated, is even paler than I, with perfect golden blonde hair, like a news anchor or a politician’s son. The third is big, NFL big, with a face so sharp you could cut your palm on it. His hair, even cut short, was angled in sharp brown lines. None of them even looks at us.

Instead, they talk. Not with their mouths, at first. There’s a crackle in the air, like radio static before a thunderstorm. They hold themselves loose, casual, but there’s something wrong with the way their shoulders angle, the way they spread their knees. Not a triangle, not a pyramid. It was the three points of a snare. Waiting for the animal in the middle to snap. I knew and understood the language. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I could feel it in the air.

Rosa rolls the cart over the glass. The wheels crunch. “Housekeeping,” she says, as bright and bubbly as her lipstick. She starts scooping shards into the dustpan with practiced, bored sweeps.

I follow, keeping my eyes on the stains. The blood is still wet, already soaking into the padding underneath. I kneel, fish the bottle of cleaner from my apron, and spray. It had to wash to start pulling the blood up.

The first hit is always the worst. The sting rips up my nostrils and paints the inside of my skull with a white, blind panic. I focus on the chemical burn, let it smother the rest. I could ignore the blood and focus on the cleaner, slamming my instincts down.

The men keep talking.

“I’m telling you, it was a setup.” The pale one gestures with a whiskey glass, slopping amber onto the glass table. “Nobody clears out a security checkpoint that fast unless they’re on the take.”

The gold watch shrugs. “Or unless they’re terrified. You saw what the last one looked like.”

The third, the biggest, snorts. “Please. Vegas has had Alphas before. This is nothing. He’s just new. A little overeager.”

They laugh. The sound makes my hair stand on end, but Rosa hums and empties the dustpan into the trash. She doesn’t know the words behind the words, the way “Alpha” sticks to the roof of your mouth like a threat. The wolves had no fear of what they were talking about in front of housekeeping. We were invisible, no one, and didn’t matter.

“Yeah, but the bodies,” says the pale one. “Did you see the bite radius? I haven’t seen that in the West since, well. Since those Eastern European bastards moved in.”

My hands jerk. The cleaner splashes onto my wrist, stinging hot. Damn, I didn’t want to know about the politics. I tried to keep out of this. This was not my world.

The three of them go silent for a breath. It’s almost like they heard my heart skip, but that’s stupid. They’re wolves, not sharks.

Still, for a half-second, I see the old moon reflected in the hotel window. I see snow, teeth, and blood in the ice. I see the red and gold banners torn from the rafters, the smell of fur burning, the silence after. Death. Death followed me. The Alpha that needed my death wanted my death—no, pushed it down. I shook my head and continued to scrub the floor. This wasn’t my problem.

I press the rag down harder, grinding it into the carpet until my knuckles ache—the cleaner fizzes, drowning out everything.

“Don’t be so sure,” says the big one, “the boss is taking it personally. He doesn’t like surprises. If there’s a rat, we’ll find it.”

Ugh, not Rat Shifters in the city. That might make me move.

The others nod. The gold watch tilts his head, looking right at me, but his eyes just slide off. Like I’m a mannequin, or a ghost. Invisible as I had worked hard to become in the world.

Rosa kneels next to me, her shoulder bumping mine. “You okay?” she whispers, low, as if she believed only I could hear. “You look pale.”

I try to smile. It must look wrong, because she glances away quickly.

The bloodstain is stubborn. I pick at the carpet fibers with my nails, scraping until my fingers are raw and my eyes blur.

Behind me, the men’s voices dissolve into one long, growling undertone. I hear scraps, pieces: “territory,” “run,” “alpha,” “burn them out.” All the old words, all the old ways. I know enough to know it’s a territory issue.

I wonder, not for the first time, what they’d do if they found out what I was. If they’d rip my throat out like the others, or if they’d just laugh and kick me down the stairs, or worse, far worse, send me home to let him kill me. Maybe they would just toss me off this casino and let gravity do its job, ending it quickly. I think I would rather go that way than ever return home.

Rosa reaches for the can of foam cleanser. Her hand shakes. She sprays a stripe across the stain, and the chemicals hiss as they mix. This should finish the nasty job.

The men stand. The gold watch swigs his drink, tosses the glass onto the couch, where it bounces, then rolls onto the floor. The pale one slicks back his hair and checks his phone. The big one stretches, arms above his head, and cracks his knuckles.

“Cleaners are almost done,” says the pale one, “let’s go get breakfast before he gets back.”

The three of them move in perfect sync. I don’t look at their faces. I keep scrubbing, watching the red swirl into pink, then clear, then just a faint shadow, easy to miss unless you were searching for ghosts.

As the men leave, the air changes. The static drops. I hear Rosa breathe out, a little too fast.

The stain is gone, but I keep rubbing.

It’s only when Rosa puts her hand on my arm that I stop. Her fingers are warm, sticky with cleaning spray. “Hey. You sure you’re okay?”

I nod. I want to say “I’m fine,” but the words get stuck in my throat. I am stuck, here, there, somewhere in between places.

We finish the room in silence. I collect the towels, pile up the broken glass, and mop the sticky footprints out of the entryway. Rosa does the rest: smoothing sheets, fluffing pillows, lining up the shampoo bottles on the sink. We worked in sync with one another, finishing the cleaning job.