* 𝕧𝕖𝕝𝕧𝕖𝕥 ╱ 𝓈𝓅𝒾𝓇𝒾𝓉

May’s rain paints a sheen on apartments, flowers, and cars in the slick streets as Cleo waltzes into Celestina’s office, ten minutes late, rain beads on the shoulders of her coat. She hopes the folder she is carrying will make up for her tardiness which, for once, is not intentional. Cleo likes to make people wait, play her little mind games. But never with Celestina. She has a silk twill scarf wrapped around her hair, sunglasses on, looking like a blonde Audrey Hepburn as she drops the manila folder on the desk between the two women. “Ever heard of the Artemis Fund?” she asks, lowering herself into a chair. “It’s legal advocacy for women. Emergency housing, education grants, the whole shebang.” Cleo knows it’s not really about generosity in their world. It’s about optics. Philanthropy is social currency. “A little birdie told me their founder is about to be nominated for the Berggruen Prize.” Considered the Nobel Prize for philanthropy, Cleo knows someone on the inside who has confirmed this. “And they’re getting a story in Time. Which means…” She taps a lacquered nail against the armrest. “A lot of attention incoming. They’ll be the hottest charity to support once the news breaks. Which is why you get in early. If you do something public to show support now, you’ll look like you believed in them before the applause arrived, instead of jumping on the bandwagon after the fact. What do you think?”

She leans back, satisfied with herself. The right cause is just another accessory. Then, she crosses her legs, pivots. “I’m having people over Saturday. Small crew. Some NYU art PhD students. A few people from one of the galleries. You should swing by.” She doesn’t expect a yes. Celestina doesn’t party with her anymore. But Cleo asks anyway.

The gallery, usually a murmuring hive, is closed when Nico arrives. Cleo has sent the assistants and curators home, locked the front doors, told security to make themselves invisible unless the building catches fire. She knows Nico prefers it that way; the knowledge of who is in a room, who is listening, who has a reason to remember what they heard. Sunlight filters through the building's high windows, casting golden rectangles across the polished concrete floor where Cleo stands. The exhibit laid out in front of them is an ugly saccharine nightmare called Honey for the Wound. The artist (some outsider art wunderkind) has worked almost entirely with caramelized sugar, sculpted, twisted, and contorted to look like rotting things, a statement on sweetness and death being intertwined, like how flies swarm honey the same way they do a dead body. Nico is not here to talk art, and Cleo knows this. The Caravelli Financial Group handles her finances. Cleo launders for The Mob. This is a business check-in. Still, she can’t resist the urge to ask. “Thoughts?” On the exhibit, she means, eyes catching on a small marzipan-looking statue of a lamb, split open along the belly. A critic from Frieze had called it grotesquely thought-provoking.

Cleo is still getting ready when Rüya arrives, long hair wavy and wet on her silk robe. Going out tonight was Cleo’s idea, though neither of them have figured out yet where they’re actually going. She pads back into the bedroom after letting the other in, a call of, “Help yourself to the champagne on the counter,” thrown over her shoulder. She pulls on a vintage black dress, a shimmer of blue on eyelids, red lipstick, and reemerges, her cat, Brontë, trailing behind her like a shadow. Pausing in the archway leading to the kitchen, she properly greets Rüya. “Welcome, schätze.” It’s German for darling. German, which means Cleo’s had a few glasses of wine already. She only slips into foreign languages when she’s buzzed. “So, I still have no idea where we should go tonight. Do you have any leads?” The city feels different with everything going on, though Cleo is determined to forge ahead. “Are you feeling something lowkey? I know about a loft party in Tribeca, but it won’t really be worth hitting up until after midnight.” She scoops up Brontë, leans against the kitchen island, and points her chin toward the champagne. “Really, help yourself to that. It’s an expensive gift and I can’t think of a better way to enjoy it. It’s been too long. How is fortune favoring you these days?”

It’s the kind of party where everyone has gathered to drink and flirt and forget the ugliness going on in the city around them; a casual house party that is anything but. Cleo is perched on the kitchen counter. A spread had been laid, dip and crackers and wedges of cheese, little éclairs, but she isn’t impressed. Though Cleo is rarely impressed by anything. Still, she picks at the crackers, snaps it neatly between her teeth as she observes the party around her. She notes an old man with big ears and a toupee slapped on top of what she assumes is an otherwise bald head. After a moment, she leans toward a blonde next to her, eyes still on him. “Keep him off the terrace. One gust of wind, and it’s over.” Cleo oozes sarcasm like an infected wound, casual roll of her eyes hardly implicating any investment in the matter. “Society is too kind to men. I mean, we spend hours getting dolled up, meanwhile they scotch tape a toupee to their heads, throw on some uninspired suit and call it a day.” Pitching a sigh, eyes move over the blonde, who Cleo recognizes as Camilla Caravelli. Cleo isn’t surprised to see Camilla in a place like this. She wonders if, like herself, this was a “friend-of-a-friend” invite, or if Camilla actually knows whose brownstone she is in right now. “Life would be much better if we were a matriarchy, don’t you think?”

The bar is humid in the way a bathhouse is humid. Architecturally, it cannot handle the crowd it draws, which is part of the appeal. Cleo chose it because it’s busy, full of drunk idiots and, under those conditions, who knows what she and Henri might get into. She emerges from the crowd with two drinks, moving with the ballerina’s grace of someone who has no intention of wearing anything sticky tonight. “Say thank you to Jeff and Mindy,” she says, handing Henri one of the glasses. “And if they come over, we just loved our honeymoon.” She lifts her left hand, one of her rings refracting bar lights. It’s been newly relocated to her fourth finger for the bit. Then she waves toward a couple at the bar. “So cute. They say ‘true love’ drinks on their tab all night,” she adds, lowering herself across from him. Cleo can afford the drinks. This is not the point. The point is the sport of it all, the theatrics of it all. Spinning some silly little web and pulling in Jeff and Mindy from Idaho who believe in true love and are willing to sponsor it one round at a time. All because of some harmless, stupid little lie.

She takes a sip, looks at him over the rim of her glass. “I’ve been thinking of enrolling in a doctoral program. Which means I’m clearly either bored as hell or having a mental breakdown. Talk me down, I beg you. Anything remotely interesting going on with you? Please, sir, can I have some diversion?” she asks, cupping her hands out in her best Oliver Twist impersonation, begging for distraction from her own allegedly boring life.

It’s not entirely clear what they are fundraising for tonight. Something about children. Empowering them, perhaps. Though the specifics of what that actually means, Cleo can’t be sure. She just knows that she’s drunk at The Yale Club, debating politics with some guy whose name begins with an M and ends, in her mind, almost immediately after that. She is barefoot, in a gray Versace dress on the balcony of the rooftop, smoking a cigarette and engaging in a disappointingly tepid conversation regarding virtue in politics. Somewhere under some table, her heels sit. And somewhere under her skin, the last of her patience circles the drain as she taps two fingers against her chin, feigning deep thought until she can’t possibly twist her mouth into another shape. Frankly, this man is an idiot. Not even an interesting idiot, which is especially cruel. Her eyes drift, briefly scanning the crowd until they settle on a familiar face. “Santiago,” she calls out, beckoning him over with the wave of a hand. “Help me settle a debate, would you? Is political idealism a foolish endeavor in Washington? I mean, does the political machine inevitably disillusion everyone in the end?”

( anya taylor joy, cis woman, she/her ) SPOTTED: CLEO CALHOUN-DIETRICH in new york city! heard the THIRTY-TWO year old belongs to THE MOB as a MONEY LAUNDERER. word on the streets is that they can be REFINED, but they can also be HEDONISTIC.( olive, 31, they/them, cst )

tldr ; Cleo is the inheritor of her great-grandmother's elite ballet school and her grandfather's real estate company that owns theaters, art galleries, and other arts-related spaces. She uses these to launder for the mob, operating as a cultural front that makes dirty money look like arts and philanthropy. An ex-ballerina raised on a meat farm, Cleo is elegant but not delicate. Old-money and connected, she's confident, educated, and vivacious but pretentious, irreverent, and impulsive.