Few moments before...
The evening had settled over Hell's Paradise Island with the patient golden weight of a sunset that knew it was being watched by people rich enough to have opinions about it.
Patricia Bloom nursed her drink and had opinions.
She and Valentina had taken up a position at a remove from the main group — close enough to observe, far enough to signal that they understood the geometry of the situation, which was to say: they were watching a court in session that was not, technically, theirs to be near.
The distance was deliberate and polite, and it was also, if Patricia was being honest with herself, the distance two women maintain when they have been deposited into a social ecosystem several tax brackets above their usual habitat and age and are still calibrating how much oxygen they're permitted to breathe.
They had arrived yesterday.
Their time on Hell's Paradise Island since then had gone, broadly speaking, exactly as they'd hoped — almost.
