PART 2:

I know you’re down here, the first voice said, not to his friends, to her. His tone had changed. The annoyance was still there, but underneath it was something worse, something that had decided. You made a mistake running. That little scene outside the hotel. My father is going to be on the phone with your family’s lawyers by morning. She kept very still.

Your family already knows you’re an embarrassment. Getting closer. She could hear his breathing now, uneven from alcohol and exertion. Your own father announced tonight you’re getting cut off. You’re homeless and you don’t even know it yet. Her jaw tightened. He wasn’t wrong about the announcement. That had been real.

Her father at the podium during the reception. Champagne flute in hand, announcing to 400 people that the family would be consolidating assets ahead of Selen’s new household, which meant some difficult but necessary decisions, which meant Ava’s apartment, the apartment she paid rent on, the apartment that happened to be in a building her father owned, was being sold, effective immediately, giving her 90 days to find alternative accommodations.

400 people, champagne, polite applause. She’d stood there in her silver dress with her calloused hands and her 10-ft cake, and absorbed it the way she’d absorbed everything the Morettes had ever done to her, by going very still, by turning her face into something neutral, by performing okayess at a level that should have qualified as professional theater.

She’d managed it for about 4 minutes. Then she’d walked very calmly out of the ballroom, through the lobby, out the hotel’s service entrance, and onto the sidewalk, where the rain had immediately destroyed whatever was left of her composure, and several drunk men had decided her exit from a fancy event in a torn dress was an opportunity.

The footsteps stopped about 8 ft from her position. “I can hear you breathing,” the man said. And then a different sound, not footsteps, something else. The sound of multiple people moving with a coordination that had nothing to do with drunk entitlement, efficient, practiced, coming from the stairs at both ends of the platform simultaneously.

The man near her went quiet. Who’s he didn’t finish the sentence. What Ava heard instead was a very short, very decisive series of sounds that she couldn’t fully interpret in the dark. Something hitting something, something else being moved, a voice saying one word. one word quietly that she couldn’t make out.

Then heels on concrete coming toward her. Measured steps. She’d heard those steps before. A flashlight beam cut through the dark and found her face. She flinched. The beam dropped immediately, re-angled to illuminate the floor. Behind the light, a silhouette, tall, wide shouldered, moving like someone who’d decided what he was going to do three decisions ago, and everything since had just been execution.

Lucian Vil crouched in front of her. He was in a suit, black jacket, no tie, collar open at the throat. There was something dark on the cuff of his left sleeve that she registered and then didn’t look at again. His face in the reflected light was exactly what she remembered. Sharp-edged, controlled, with that particular quality of stillness that wasn’t peace, but was something adjacent to it.

The stillness of a person who had decided long ago that visible emotion was a currency he couldn’t afford, except his hands. his hands when he touched her face. Two fingers, the lightest possible contact, turning her chin to look at her lip, her eye, the bruising along her cheekbone. His hands weren’t entirely steady. She noticed.

She didn’t say anything about it. Your rib, he said. Not a question. Left side. I hit the railing. He made a sound that wasn’t words. His jaw moved. The men, she started, have been handled. Lucienne, I don’t want They’re not going to bother you again, he said. His voice stayed flat. She knew better than to push it right now.

Can you stand? She tried. Her ribs sent a detailed objection, and she made a sound she hadn’t intended to make. And then his arm was around her, careful in a way that cost him something. She could feel it, the effort of careful, the deliberate modulation of someone who wanted to do something differently. He got her upright.

She leaned on him more than she wanted to. He removed his jacket without releasing her and put it around her shoulders. It smelled like him, cedar, and something darker that she’d spent 3 years trying not to remember. “I have a car outside,” he said. “I can’t go.” She stopped. “Go where?” her apartment that was being sold.

Seline’s wedding reception back to her family who’ just publicly discarded her. “I don’t have anywhere.” Lucienne looked at her for a long moment in the dark. “Yes, you do,” he said. They came up the subway stairs into the rain. Ava registered distantly that there were other people, his men, four of them that she counted, though she suspected there were more, moving with the same practiced efficiency around the perimeter.

The kind of presence that made other people find reasons to be elsewhere. No one on the street near the station entrance. An armored black SUV at the curb with its engine running. Another one behind it. Then the flashes started. Someone had a camera. Then two. Then she saw the media van half a block up.

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