But even the most lucrative tables have their edges. Caldwell has not gone away. A man like that does not disappear because he’s been publicly outmaneuvered; he withdraws and plans. I saw the set of his shoulders in a mirror across the room, and I watched his aide slip someone a note. I tasted the air of intent that comes before a storm. For a man who makes careers of tearing down quiet structures, this was not about immediate victory; it was about escalation toward control. He’d maneuvered himself into a position where he could say the Sanctuaries were illicit, then demand oversight and publicity that would uproot the lives we protect.
Later, when a camera finds us and the evening presses for a photograph, I lift Aurora’s hand to my lips. The motion is old-fashioned; the photograph will be older still. The sensor light stings and the applause is polite. In the mirrored face of agilded frame nearby, I see Caldwell’s reflection: a man dialing, an image of fury that does not yet look tailored for a statement.
Chapter 40 – Aurora
The sound of the string quartet has the exact tempo of my anger—measured, relentless, and impossible to ignore.
I stand beside Cassian at the edge of the ballroom, smile glued in place while donors with winter tans and polished teeth tell me how “moved” they’d been by my last show. My cheeks ache from courtesy. Every time I blink, I see the moment replay: his mouth shaping the word girlfriend like it belonged to him. A claim made in front of cameras, spun like silk, and anchored with the weight of his hand at my back.
I keep my chin high. The chandelier light flashed off crystal; the floor smelled faintly of wax and old perfume; the journalists floated the perimeter like sharks trained to smile. I nod when a museum trustee praises “the honesty” of my canvases, and I thank an heiress for admiring my “color choices” as if I’d picked them from a rack. Inside, I was counting my breath and rehearsing the words I wanted to put in Cassian’s ear the second we were out of the flash.
My clutch digs into my palm until my knuckles go numb. Every time I shift my weight, the silk at my back whispers against my skin, reminding me of everything I’d agreed to and everything I hadn’t. Across the room, Senator Caldwell laughs with a donor, but his eyes cut like a blade when they find me. He looks at Cassian the way men look at problems they intend to fix with headlines. The string quartet slides into another song without a seam.
“You’re shaking,” a woman in a diamond cuff says gently, misreading it for nerves. “First galas can be overwhelming.”
“Firsts always are.” I smile with my teeth.
Cassian’s hand squeezes the back of my arm once. I feel him bend toward another donor, shift his voice into the smooth register he uses when he wants people to believe the world is safeif they just write the check. He’s good at it. I’ve watched him turn a room. Tonight he’s turned me into a narrative too, and I want to peel that word, girlfriend, off my skin and hold it up between us like a knife.
A photographer lifts his camera, and I feel Cassian tug me half a step closer, the angle calculated. The flash burns white. I turn my face slightly.
“We need to talk,” I tell him under the applause for someone’s speech. My smile doesn’t move. My mouth barely does.
He angles his head like he is smelling the air. “Yes,” he says lightly, as if I’d suggested fresh air or champagne. “This way.”
He threads us through donors, board members, and the honeyed air of winter money. He doesn’t hurry; he doesn’t need to. People make room for him the way they do for a tide they’ve learned not to fight. He stops at a velvet-draped door that looked like decoration and presses his palm to the brass lever.
Inside, the air changes. It is a side parlor; the kind people use for private calls they don’t want overheard and staff use to stash cases of wine. One lamp glows at a low table, light pooled on mahogany. Velvet curtains soften the edges of the room. A credenza stands against the far wall with a line of unused glass carafes. The hum of the gala bleeds in through the seams like ocean noise under a dock.
He closes the door but doesn’t flip the lock.
“Really?” I throw my hands in the air. “You’re going to leave that—”
“Unlocked,” he cuts in simply. He slip his hands into his pockets and watches me like I am the unsteady thing in the room. “Yes.”
“Girlfriend?” I bite off the word. “Without asking me.”
“If I’d asked,” he starts, calm as a bench, “you’d have said no. It was the cleanest line through Caldwell’s trap.” He shifts his weight a fraction. My eyes track it like a reflex. “Now he can’t posture on camera about me hiding women. You’re visible by choice.”
“My choice,” I take a step forward, “is mine. It isn’t something you pick up and pin on me because it serves your war.”
“I don’t pin anything on you,” he counters too evenly. “I move pieces so the people I protect don’t get crushed when men like him decide outrage is better television than nuance.”
“I’m not one of your pieces.” I can hear the heat sharpening my voice. I see it land in his eyes. “I’m a person. A person you decided to rename, in public, because it made your story cleaner.”
“I decided to change where you were standing,” he replies softly. “So the bullets would miss.”
“Don’t dress control as safety,” I snap. “You don’t get to decide how I’m seen.”
He steps closer without menace, and I feel the credenza at my hips before I realize I’ve backed into it.
“I decide,” he whispers low enough the lamp’s filament could hear, “how you’re protected while you stand next to me. Out there, in that room, where men like Caldwell purport to save the world by exposing its soft parts, I decide what gets exposed. I did not call you anything you aren’t already becoming, Rory. I gave a word to something that already exists and used it like a shield because we needed one.”
Fury spikes and feels chemical. “That wasn’t a shield. That was a brand.”
He looked down at my mouth the way men look at an instrument they know how to play too well and have promisedthemselves they won’t touch. “You’re beautiful when you’re furious.”
“Stop doing that.”
