Cyanica

GLUTTONY: 2

"Mistress Amani, a word please!", Giovanni shouted out.
"Yes, Giovanni, what is it", she shouted back.
"I need to talk with you about some very pressing matters", he shouted again.
A moment of silence, and then...
"Okay, I'm here! What did you want to talk about?", Amani asked.
"Thanks for scaring the shit out of me, Mistress", he joked sarcastically.
"So what's going on?", she asked.
"I have a lead on who Cyanica is, but it's not super solid", he whispered.
"Everything is useful, Giovanni. Please continue", Amani affirmed.
"I read an article that said that Cyanica has a barbed wire tattoo on their wrist", he said.
"So did everyone in the nineties. What's your point?"
"That's the thing. Y2K tattoos are coming back in style, including the barbed wire. That gives us two age groups to look at, and I'd like your help in figuring out where our person lands", he finally said.
"Don't worry Giovanni. I'm the best girl detective in all of Castelletto! I'll look through my guest profiles and see if any mention tattoos", she said.
"Thank you, Mistress. Just don't joke around too much please? It still hurts to think about", he pleaded.
"I'm treating this with the utmost respect, Giovanni", she replied, "She was my friend too, remember?"

Amani got to work almost immediately, sifting through patron records and any physical descriptions they came with. Every little piece of information was crucial to finding out the identity of the murderer. A certain eye color, if they dyed their hair, a perfume or cologne they liked to carry around. She learned that Mrs. Wexler, heiress to the "Sapphire Crystal" empire of golf equipment, always carried around a tobacco-scented perfume to ward off evil energies. She also learned that Giovanni had a small notch in his ear from a previous workplace accident. But no physical descriptions of tattoos were anywhere to be found in these files. Every page of her little guest book had no description of a barbed wire tattoo anywhere. Searching again and again, getting more and more frustrated that she could not find any description that matches the claims she's heard, Amani Marino's faith began to run out.

After hours of searching through the stacks and stacks of guest records, Amani gave up her search for the day. It was 12:45AM, way later than her usual time, and she was feeling the effects of her sleep deprivation. Retiring to her grand bedroom for the night, she slipped into an oversized Måneskin shirt with holes in it and some red plaid pajama shorts. Amani was a fashionista at heart, but when it was her alone time, she put comfort above everything else. Her dark hair was let down from the snatched bun she had spent all morning getting to look right, letting all of the tension off of her head.

Even still, Amani still found herself searching through her memories of the night Cyanica showed up, looking for any clues they may have missed that night. Staring directly at her vaulted ceiling, she found herself wondering how the rafters were holding everything up. Sure, she knew the normal way, with nails, glue, screws, and a lot of time. But then she was thinking about how they made those things back in the B.C's. And that's when she realized the missing piece of the puzzle.

Cyanica had an accomplice to support them, in the same way that wood planks stacked in a certain way can support a ceiling like hers.

But who could it possibly be? No one else at the party was suspicious, not even a little bit.
But it was too late for that now. By now it was 1:30AM... needless to say that Mistress Amani did not get her beauty sleep that night.

_________________________________________

The date had gone exactly as planned. A beautifully crafted dinner at the restaurant Contraste, two glasses of champagne, and a taxi ride home later, Ingrid was on top of the world. Dante was everything she could have ever asked for and more; a truly miraculous man. And he was loaded. According to him, he worked at a Fortune 500 company that primarily produced military equipment for the U.S. Air Force, and the salary was well into the 6 figure bracket. Ingrid, on the other hand, was working odd jobs in offices around Milan, and could just barely get by month by month, so the man was like an Angler fish, tempting the defenseless mermaid with a treasure chest as a lure.
Dante was chivalrous, stoic, and an actual MENSA-level genius who treated Ingrid like the princess he saw in her. He held every possible door open for her, made sure she was seated and served first at the restaurant, paid for the entire night, including her ride there, and made another reservation for the next week, and her next date.
Nothing could be better.

And so, it would stay that way for seven months.

Seven months of bliss.

Until her future-husband became a nightmare she could not wake up from.