Lady Boss Takes on Vegas Bullies! novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Brass Key

Four of Leigh's new guards started down the center aisle, with the cousin trailing them, pale and sweating.

They did not get far.

The sergeant and five old guards in rented tuxedos had been standing at the ballroom doors the whole time, and they closed the aisle.

Reuben stepped in front of me.

"This building has a rule," he said, and his voice reached the back wall. "Nobody puts a hand on a worker. Page nine."

"She isn't a worker," Leigh said sharply. "She's a thief."

"Then the police can ask her about it," said Reuben. "After she's finished."

Leigh's smile slipped.

I took off my cap.

My hair was flat and honey-blond under it, and the dimple in my left cheek had probably come out of hiding.

I had stood in this room as a girl in a velvet dress, behind my grandfather's chair, and nobody in it had looked at me.

I looked at all of them now.

"My name is Veronica Ellington," I said. "I'm thirty-three. I have owned the Aurora for four years. The woman on that stage is Leigh Kincade, my chief of staff, and she's wearing my grandfather's watch."

A sound went through the ballroom.

"She's unwell," Leigh said into the microphone, with a pained laugh. "Poor girl. Please, someone."

"Prove it," called a man from table four.

I let it hang for a moment.

I hadn't planned the next part.

"Mrs. Gallagher," I said.

Dot stepped up beside the cart.

She was a foot shorter than the cousin and two feet shorter than the guards, and she straightened her cardigan.

"Forty-one years I've worked this building," she said, loud as a bell. "I was Walter Ellington's housekeeper on the forty-first floor. I put cocoa outside that girl's door when she was nine and her mother had just died. That's his granddaughter. Anyone who says different can say it to me."

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