And much how harder it would feel the next time.
6
NAOMI
The dress is a trap.
Slick black silk that glides over my skin like a second thought I don’t want to have, and it arrives hours before the gala with a note in Vasso’s precise, slanted hand:
Wear this. Be on my arm. Smile.
—V
Controlling bastard.
I wear it anyway.
For Grandpa when the nosy brigade call him to gossip tomorrow.
For the illusion.
For the war I’ve chosen to fight with lipstick and stilettos instead of swords.
We’re staying at the island house, but the event is across the water—a preservation trust gala at a Gilded Age cliffside mansion in Rhode Island, all limestone and arrogance with a ballroom that opens onto a terrace over exquisite grounds. The sky is the color of cold champagne when we arrive; gulls wheel, cameras flash, and somewhere a quartet murders Vivaldi in a way only money forgives.
Forced proximity starts at the car door.
Vasso offers his hand; I take it because there are lenses everywhere, and his palm is warm and practiced, and his smile is the kind that makes donors sign checks and enemies grind teeth. Inside, the crowd parts like the tide around him.
He fits here in a way that makes me want to break something beautiful.
“How did you sleep?” he murmurs as we pause beneath a chandelier that looks like it should come with a maintenance crew and a prayer.
“Like a baby,” I lie, because my body still hums with the memory of his fingers ghosting the tie of my robe.
He doesn’t miss a beat. “You only saythatwhen you’re lying.”
The floor shifts. That’s a sentence from another life—the greenhouse summer, the boy who knew my tells better than I did.
For half a breath we’re in that bubble again, where the noise falls away and only the two of us exist under something that feels like a sky.
He slides his hand to the small of my back as we move through the room—firm, possessive, a brand—and the heat where his palm rests becomes its own pulse. The mansion is a museum of old money with portraits that watch, corridors that echo, and ballroom windows tall enough to make the ocean bow.
Trustees hover in tasteful clusters, the men in midnight suits, the women in gowns that whisper when they walk. Every glass glitters; every smile judges.
“Smile,” Vasso murmurs against my ear, his breath a tease over skin. “They’re watching.”
I do, because I understand stakes, and because the board of this trust could bless or bury everything tied to Dillinger Island, and because appearances are bridges even when they’re built over hell.
We circle the room. He keeps me close.
He greets a senator who pretends not to recognize me; he introduces me to a hotel magnate who kisses my knuckles as if women are relics and I am a particularly valuable one. I stand with the poise my grandmother molded into me and think about the lighthouse’s slow blink across the bay, steady as a heartbeat.
Then I see her.
Tall. Blonde. Dangerous. The kind of beauty money buys and the tabloids cultivate.
“Vivienne.” My voice is smooth; my stomach is not. Supermodel. Socialite.
