LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 3 (Patreon)

Content warning: Depictions of abusive food control and restricted eating.

Samira’s parents lived in one of the midtown highrises; a glassy tower with a locked lobby and a doorman. Their view wasn’t as good as Adra’s, but they had slightly more interior square footage to make up for their lack of outdoor space. The footprint of their place was a squat rectangle divided into two sectors. The kitchen and living area took up half the layout with high ceilings and the other half was split into two levels for the sleeping areas and bathrooms; there were two bedrooms upstairs and a master down. Samira’s room was upstairs, next to the guest room. They were rich people, so every bedroom had its own private bath with a half bath downstairs.

Bellamy Sr.’s text message had said ‘dinner’, but they walked into a cocktail party instead.

“Darling!” Samira’s mother, Helena, greeted them at the door, already buzzed, with insincere air kisses.

She was a handsome woman in a long white shirt dress with a narrow black belt that Mira recognized, through Samira, as part of the Genvinchy runway collection. She’d paired the dress with a set of black mules with oversized bows on the toes. She had her dark hair in a blunt bob that had been slicked back behind her ears and parted in the middle, possibly to set off her chunky Van Leef dangling Alhambra earrings. There was a trace of age on her face, but not much—which was either due to good genes, injections, or both.

“You look so much better! I was worried you’d let yourself go again.” She was loud, so everyone in the immediate vicinity could hear.

“Thank you, mama,” Mira said, returning the air kisses. She could already see where this was going and was glad she’d grabbed a snack while she was still in the salon. Those chocolate covered blueberries and the iced coffee were going to have to hold her for a while. She should have listened when Adra asked if she wanted to stop for a late lunch.

She wanted to be generous and say that these were the kind of people who wouldn’t see the difference between a meal and a drinks party, but she knew better and her suspicions were confirmed when she and Adra headed over to the little buffet someone had set up on the kitchen counter.

Helena caught Mira by the elbow before she got more than a few steps and swung her over to talk to some strangers, who were not actually ‘dying to speak with you, darling.’ She did the same thing a few more times over the next hour, but she did let Mira have three different drinks starting with several glasses of wine and concluding with a strong gimlet. Mira had never actually had a problem with ‘wine before liquor’, but she also did not usually try to drink on an empty stomach with near zero body fat.

She didn’t intend to start now, either.

Helena had already been well on her way to hammered before Mira arrived. Mira would pretend to sip at her glass if Helena was looking, but otherwise she’d swap her glass with something from the tables of empties when Helena’s back was turned. Her stomach was growling, but she wasn’t about to lose this game of bitch chess. Whatever Helene wanted her drunk and starving for was not going to go the way that woman wanted it to.

There was no evidence of Samira’s sisters anywhere in the party, which tracked with Samira’s memories of them. Her older sister, Vestea, was from their dad’s first marriage and had left for college before Samira was old enough to remember her. The youngest, Violani, was either off at boarding school or jet-setting around Europe. They both lived in San Aurelio, at present, but Vestea had her own place and Violani had a very demanding party schedule when she wasn't in school. If Violani was in town then she probably already had plans for tonight.

Someone finally peeled Helena off of Mira to go deal with a catering problem and Mira looked around for Adra. She was getting annoyed and overstimulated by this party of posers, wannabes, and hangers-on with no one to hang onto. Samira’s father, Virgil, had gotten Adra early on and dragged him away to talk about stocks and cryptocurrency. She’d caught a glimpse of him a few times and he’d looked like he, too, was wondering if maybe they should just take their chances with whichever relative inherited Mira’s guardianship. Now that she knew it would probably be Helena, Mira was pretty sure they should leave Virgil breathing for a while yet.

She didn’t see him, but the snack board was unguarded and she took advantage of Helena’s distraction (someone was showing her a thing on their phone that was allegedly embarrassing for someone else, so she was rapt) to get herself a small plate.

A young woman in the standard catering uniform bumped lightly into her before she could get there.

She was half a head shorter than Mira, with long chestnut hair tied up in a braided bun with curtain bangs that framed her romantically downturned and sleepy grey-green eyes. She was on the tan side with minimal makeup and a practical-looking short ballerina manicure. She had a narrow waist, a slight bosom, thin wrists, delicate hands, and just about everything else on the list of character traits for the heroine of a reverse harem drama—including a 10/10 ass. Wow.

‘We meet again, Cece,’ Mira thought, feeling bemused.

“Sorry, Miss Samira!” Cece chirped as Mira startled backwards. “Oh, let me get that glass for you! I’ll get you a top off. Here’s your plate back!”

Plate? Mira almost wasn’t following, except Cece deftly plucked her empty gimlet glass out of her one hand and pressed a little cocktail plate of duck breast slices, cut fruit, and crudites into her other hand.

“Eat fast, OK?” Cece whispered, in a totally different tone, before slipping back into the crowd.

Well, Mira didn’t need to be told twice! Here was the protagonist, already coming to her rescue. She really didn’t waste time.

Mira found cover behind a bunch of tall men who were talking about somebody’s start-up and knocked back the contents of her tiny plate. She was still a little peckish afterwards, but she didn’t feel like her temper could take a nosedive at any second. She left the plate on one of the collection trays and walked smoothly away.

In retrospect, she was going to have to be careful. This body didn’t seem to have come with standard hunger cues. She hadn’t felt hungry today until she was all but starving and about to have a bitch meltdown. Unless she’d missed her guess, that was thanks to Helena fucking around with her daughter's access to regular meals.

Now that she wasn’t hungry, Mira had a little more attention to pay to the other party goers. She recognized the bulk of them from Samira’s memories as the social equivalent of houseflies; they’d appear out of nowhere whenever there was food or alcohol. The rest were a mix of Samira’s relatives and their plus-ones.

‘I suppose that tracks,’ she reflected as she debated the possibility of serving herself a glass of water and doctoring it up with some lime juice and a mint leaf. No one else was serving themselves from the bar, though. The wine was ‘serve yourself’, but the cocktails had already been poured and the caterers were carrying them around on trays to serve the guests. If she wanted a mocktail, she’d have to ask for it. There were no mix stations sitting out and this wasn’t the kind of party where they had water available or easily accessible.

Where had Cece gotten off to? Mira was pretty sure she could get the heroine to sneak her some water.

It was a shame that Samira hadn’t realized she had someone in her corner.

Samira’s memories of living at home with her parents were all jagged and blurred with high emotion. There wasn’t a lot of room in her experiences to remember the maid, even if said maid had been trying to help her. This was why Mira had originally thought that Samira wasn’t a likeable person. All her attention had been turned inwards, except for her parents and her fiance, but for good reasons.

To her surprise (or maybe not to her surprise), Mira found Cece backed up against a wall by a tall, dark, and handsome figure in quiet smart-casual luxury that Mira recognized, thanks to Samira’s encyclopedic memory for fashion, as L’Estrange—Adra would look good in that. She made a mental note of the brand, but also moved in to interfere. Cece looked uncomfortable (like some guy had her in a kabedon while she was trying to work) and that would not do.

Cece had a wine glass in her hand, up against her chest, and a nervous air as she looked up at the man leaning over her. He wasn’t touching her, exactly, but he was running his fingertip up and down slowly along the stem of the glass as he talked to her in a quiet voice. It was hard to tell how welcome Cece found the attention since, see above re: she was at work. On the other hand, that honestly looked kind of hot and Mira didn’t want to ruin things for Cece if she thought so too.

“Mister Cross,” Cece was speaking through a tense smile. “I really need to deliver this.”

Oh, so that was Julian Cross?

Mira found herself frowning as she looked at the man one more time. Julian Cross was one of the five Magnates in ‘The Maid and the Magnates.’ He was kind of a cardboard cutout deuteragonist with alpha male overbearing CEO energy and a menacing sexual energy, except that was all there was to his personality. The book didn’t really get into his background, beyond implying that his personality sucked because his stepmother was mean to him sometimes and therefore he couldn’t be held responsible for his dick behavior. Obviously, he wasn’t in the front running for True Male Lead and so Mira hadn’t cared about his arc all that much.

Seeing Julian in person made Mira realize that there was something wrong about him.

When she read the book, she hadn’t been able to guess who in the cast was who, aside from Cece. In retrospect, that was a little weird because she was usually at least somewhat interested in what fate had in store for Lasol, Markim, Able, and Tio. Peleon could die in a fire, especially after that last life, but she liked knowing what was up with the other boys and the male cast in ‘The Maid and the Magnates’ had failed to grab her. The whole thing was about Cece. She was unmistakable. The rest of the male leads kind of blurred together as five palette-swaps of the same trope, including the one who eventually ‘won’ in the end. Mira had thought, at the time, that the book had just been written by one of those authors who can only write one gender with personality, but now?

Now, she’d just realized she didn’t know who that man was. He was an actual stranger.

Cece spotted her and unadulterated relief flashed across her face. She ducked under Julian Cross’s arm and brought the wine glass over to Mira. “Miss Samira! Here is your refreshed drink!” she said through a tight, bright smile. Her eyes said ‘please make him go away.’

The color in the wineglass was just a little off; slightly darker than the pale gold wine she’d previously discarded. Mira took a subtle sniff and was surprised into a small smile when she realized what Cece had found for her. It was sparkling apple juice.

“Miss Bellamy,” Julian said, following Cece just a little too closely. His body language wasn’t violent, but it was territorial. “I’m glad to see that you’re feeling better. I heard you were in the hospital until recently.”

“I was discharged earlier today,” Mira agreed in a pleasant tone, as she debated with herself how best to get rid of him. If she overplayed her hand then Julian would dig his heels in and Cece would find him waiting by her car to do stereotypical rapey tyrant CEO romance novel love interest things when she left for the night and, if that happened, then Mira would have to give Julian to Adra as enrichment for his enclosure. Nobody wanted that. “I came by to see my parents, but I probably won’t stay for long.”

“Did Mason bring you?” Julian asked. He drifted a little closer to Cece and Mira gave up trying to see reason in his behavior. Who even got this possessive of someone else’s employee, right in front of them?

If she hadn’t already figured out what kind of setting this was, she could have guessed just from his bristling. Men in soap operas, especially the love interests, acted like all other women were a threat to their girl—and the worst part was, he wasn’t entirely in the wrong for this type of world. If Mira's pre-awakened self had had any wherewithal to care about romance, she might have become the stereotypical dress-tearing, wine-throwing, rumor-mongering soap opera bitch. It wasn’t like she’d had any decent feminine models, aside from Helena.

Come to think of it, that was probably why Cece had gotten a little protective of her, as Samira.

Speaking of siblings, Violani was absolutely the type you should protect cute maids from so it was hard Mira to truly fault Julian for his actions.

Violani was the villainess who replaced Samira in the book once Samira finally flamed out. Her brand of violence was a sharp escalation from Samira’s. Samira just competed with Cece for professional opportunities and would only spread rumors about her that had some basis in truth. At worst, she’d wrecked a dress Cece planned to wear to a charity gala. Violani, on the other hand, tried to have Cece mugged or, worse, assaulted.

Anyway, Julian’s attitude was typical of the genre, especially when it came to his automatic dislike of Mira based on very little acquaintance. None of the Magnates could like a woman in any capacity without offloading their bad feelings onto another one. That would involve confronting their internalized misogyny and that wasn't going to happen.

In the book, Samira had the role of Cece’s emotional foil, so they all vented their negative feelings onto her instead of the heroine.

Julian still was doing too much. It was early in the plot and he was supposed to have only just started to get interested in Cece as a fling. Maybe he was doing that thing where romantic male leads sometimes run off the heroine's female friends. If so, gross.

“He did,” she said. “We need to pick up his car now that the doctors have been reassured that I don’t have a concussion.”

“Your…?” Julian blinked politely. “I’m sorry, I hadn’t heard that you’d hurt your head.”

Mira could just bet what rumors people in this social circle were telling each other about how Samira Bellamy had ended up in the hospital again. The truth wasn’t even going to help so she stuck to the minimum facts, hoping to distract Julian enough for Cece to sneak off. She pulled her hair back so he could see the steri-strip on her temple. “I fell and scratched my forehead, is all.” She turned to Cece. “I can’t find Mason. If you see him, could you please tell him that I’m ready to leave?”

“I think I saw Mr. Bellamy take him back to the office,” Cece volunteered. “I’ll go find him for you.”

“No need,” Adra interjected, materializing from amongst the crowd. He slid his arm around Mira’s waist and she realized he’d reverted back to Mason’s default face. All his ‘improvements’ had vanished. “Here I am.”

Julian frowned at Adra, finally distracted from Cece. “Did you do something to your eyebrows?” he asked.

Well, most of his improvements, anyway.

As soon as Julian’s attention was focused on Adra’s face, Cece backed away and slipped out of sight. Mira wished her godspeed. Julian seemed like he was exhausting and what was even the point of dealing with him if he wasn’t one of the boys?

Once Cece was out of sight, Mira allowed Adra to lead her away.