Once, an architect named Montgomery birthed a hotel from stone, steel, dreams, and avarice. His creation thrust skyward, a profane fist into the very throat of God, plucked from Parisian fantasias & woven intricately into the grasping sinews of the City pulsating, insatiable. Grandeur is Hunger and the City feasts on dreams of more-more-more.

The Beaux-Arched maw agape, promising luxury succor from the City’s din, seductive & softly veiled beneath frescoed rapture, velveteen folds & the golden filigree glow of chandeliers traps inside which lost souls gather to bask. To Be Seen amid the opulence, to touch the dream & be touched in return, caressed till old skin sloughs away, their new flesh raw as birth.

Magnates & dignitaries, ingenues & intellectuals, all come to rut & glut & be glutted in turn, supping on Grandeur until they are juiced, ripened to bursting with aspirational rot. Gilded & aged & ageless, the hotel hoards the essence of all who pass through her gullet, a hungry beacon defying dawn & decay—each artful revivification merely a fresh coat of paint slapped across grinning bones.

Enter a raven-tressed specter, a dangerous splash of midnight silk, obsidian, & emeralds lancing the lounge’s lush hum. Music unspools from the piano like arteries, gushing & spurting. She ghost-glides through the blood-spill & buzzing voices straight to the elevators, her smile a blade.

Penthouse. Soft chime & the snick of the lock’s tongue. Inside, the City glimmers coldly through glass eyes—millions of pinprick gazes like needle-teeth hungry to consume her milky skin, ravening for the secrets her inner sanctum safeguards behind steel & shadow.

Secrets. Secrets. Secrets. They swarm and squirm inside the portfolio’s leather carapace–photos and papers writing like maggots–

knock
(Champagne, roses, a boy with watery eyes)

Knock
(A man trembling in his silver skin)

“Sinclair.” She rolls his name around her mouth like a lozenge, sour-sweet. “A pleasure?”

“No”—he gulps the bubbles like medicine—”no pleasure at all.”

Out pours a tale of ruin, of reputation’s scaffolding precariously poised over an abyss hungry as any lover’s bed. She smiles, cobra-coy, & from the depths of shadow conjures his perdition in glossy black & white—click-click, caught in the camera’s teeth, frozen in original sin.

Sinclair gawps, slick with flop-sweat. “Are you…blackmailing me?”

Ravenelle laughs, the slink & hiss of a blade unsheathed. “No, darling. I’m your salvation.” She scrawls numbers on paper whisper-thin as moth wings. “Take this. When you are alone, call, & I shall make your troubles…vanish.”

With a dry click of a swallow, Sinclair flees—but he can’t escape the coils of her regard or the silver secrets gleaming at her throat. She etches ethereal sigils onto the window glass with one blood-dark nail & loses herself in the endlessness of her own reflection.

The hunger never stops, but it is Grandeur, and the raven feasts well tonight.

Not. The. End.