At the side lounge, Jonah’s panel hangs with twenty others on the community wall. It reads like him: bold line, colorsthat make you feel something before you decide what. My three small pieces sit on a quieter wall near a bar with water and champagne. They look fine. The hand study is level. The runner is placed so you have room to breathe before you reach it. The cheekbone I hate looks less loud in this light. I touch the bottom of the frame of the hand study with one finger to absorb the static before the crowd does and step back.
“Perfect,” Lila says. “We keep moving.”
We do. The gala has a way of making the floor feel like it’s moving under you. People slide along preferred currents, drawn to wherever cameras congregate. The stage at the far end is dressed without looking dressed: tasteful banner, no podium yet. I clock exits without meaning to. Security watches without staring. One of them might be Ward’s. Two are definitely the venue’s. One is the kind of man you don’t notice unless you’ve practiced noticing. He sips a coffee he doesn’t drink and moves when the crowd moves and slows when we slow. He reads like a neighbor. He is not.
An announcer near the stage tries my name into a microphone and mispronounces it in a way that is harmless. I correct him as I pass without stopping. He looks embarrassed in a performative way. Behind us, someone laughs. Jonah leans in. “We could change your name to something unpronounceable, so they try harder.”
“I like my name,” I say.
“I like your name too,” he says, and then shuts up, which is one of his better skills.
We run the routine. The museum’s education director says hello and asks two good questions about procession through the side lounge. I give two good answers and keep the details we don’t share. A donor asks me to take a photo with his wife. I do. He thanks me in a way that isn’t slimy. A young artist tells me she carried her sketchbook in her dress because shedidn’t want to leave it at coat check and we both laugh because that’s something you admit only to a person who understands.
Every so often, eyes land. Some of them are cameras. Some of them are men. Most are just curiosity with a credit card. The back of my neck prickles twice in the space of five minutes for no visual reason. I stand straighter by an inch. Lila squeezes my wrist once, a warning and a comfort. Jonah drifts at my shoulder like a tide. After twenty minutes my spine sings. Sweat gathers at my lower back under the silk. I resist the urge to wipe my palms on a dress I can’t ruin.
“Breathe,” Lila says out of the side of her mouth. “Water.”
We stop at the bar, and I ask for still water. The bartender pours like water is harder to pour than vodka. A man in a tuxedo that fits too well tries to step between me and the bar with a line I don’t bother to hear. Lila raises two fingers and the man’s attention goes elsewhere like someone tugged a string. I drink. I re-thread my spine the way I do when a piece demands more hours than a human should give a day.
It happens the way recognition always does: too fast and too slow.
I set the glass down. I turn to give it back. I pivot because something in the room moves that isn’t air. I don’t know why I look up. I don’t know why I look at the mezzanine instead of at the door they brought a tray through. He stands above the auction floor at the rail that isn’t smoked glass here, just steel and tempered clarity. Tall. Charcoal suit that reads like money but not fashion. The face is not one you call beautiful because that would be the wrong word; it’s intact in a way that says expensive discipline. The eyes are teal-green, not sea, not sky, something that lives between.
He’s speaking to an aide when I find him. The aide leans in like the instructions are always given this way. If I didn’t knowthe voice, I would still know him; but knowing the voice is what pins me to the floor.
The room noise drops the way sound drops when you close a door in a storm. I hear my own breath first, and then the music again, and then nothing. The silk at my rib cage tightens like a hand. Lila is saying something that doesn’t land in my head. Jonah is a presence at my shoulder, warm, and unaware. I don’t touch either of them.
He’s too far away for me to pretend I made a mistake. He looks down and his gaze moves past people like they are obstacles in a hallway. It lands on me. It doesn’t move. He doesn’t smile or frown. He lets me know I have his attention the way a surgeon lets a room know he’s ready to cut.
I do not look away. “It’s him,” I whisper, not to Lila, not to Jonah, but quietly to myself, because saying it aloud is the only thing that keeps me standing.
Chapter 10 – Cassian
Large rooms make people forget their edges.
From the rail I can read the hall the way I read an intake chart one column at a time, then all of it at once. The crowd moves on set paths: donors orbiting photographers, press drifting toward the stage, staff cutting diagonals with trays and purpose. Security lines the seams, both ours and the venue’s, visible enough to reassure, invisible enough not to intrude.
She comes in with the two people who have learned her cadence. Lila first with her head up, eyes tracking routes, and already looking for a person who owes her a favor behind a desk. Jonah follows half a step behind, garment bag slung over his shoulder like he adopted it, grin tuned to harmless. And Aurora walks between them, leaning a fraction toward the wall with the space built into it. Her gown is a backless silk number with a clean line at the shoulder. Her hair is low and fixed. Her hands stay loose until the first flash hits, then she raises a glass of water she doesn’t want, and the prop gives her somewhere to put the tremor.
She glances at exits, catalogues faces, and keeps the edges of the crowd from pushing her into a corner.
I note the two with her. Lila is friend/confidante asset, she is protective, and skilled at creating cover. She intercepts a mispronunciation at the check-in desk with a correction that reads like care, not pride, and slides a “no step-and-repeat” preference across the counter without asking permission. Her body makes room around Aurora without looking like she’s making room. Jonah is a male threat vector only because cameras see a man and write a headline before they find a story. He gestures when he talks. He stands in the wrong place twice and then notices and moves. He’s tactile by default,not predatory by intent. He will complicate photographs, not operations.
There’s a spike I don’t like in my chest when I watch his hand touches her shoulder. Possessiveness is a bad medic and a worse manager. I log the feeling where I put other hazards: acknowledged, not indulged.
I smooth my tie and tilt my head at Reid—two fingers down, hold, clear. He taps his sleeve once and relays. The security aide at the east wing alters the flow with a practiced conversation about a fire code until a cluster of photographers forgets the balcony bar for the next three minutes. Space opens in the corridor. If I want to put two minutes between us and the room, the opportunity is now.
I leave the rail and take the stairs. Donors nod with that mild deference that comes when your name sits on a program without a face to go with it. Staff step out of the way because they learned to. I acknowledge two board members with the smallest version of a hello so they can tell their friends they spoke to me later and now I don’t owe them anything. I feel the cold air at the bottom of the stairs before I see the balcony door. It sharpens the fine motor tremor I train out of my hands when I need to.
I know I am close when her scent cuts through the event’s collective perfume. It lands under the chandeliers. It does something to my throat I do not indulge. She’s twenty feet away, then ten, then five, separated by two donors who want to be seen talking near the side lounge and a journalist who thinks she’ll catch a moment by standing in a doorway. Lila stops to answer a question with half a sentence and a smile sharp enough to classify. Jonah takes a step left to wave at a collector who likes his walls. The lane opens.
I step into it intercepting the path she was already taking toward the balcony bar and put myself at the exact angle whereshe’ll see me before she has to stop. I can pretend it’s a chance meeting. We’ll both know better.
“Aurora Hale,” I say, my voice in the register that reads as even under noise. “I’m Cassian Ward. Welcome to my event.”
Her body reacts before her face does. The freeze is a tightening, not a stop. Then the face follows—professional smile, the version that keeps people from thinking they got to you. “Mr. Ward,” she says. “Thank you for the invitation.”
It’s the first time she’s used the name with a body attached to it. She plays it clean. Her mouth holds the line. Her eyes flick once to the rope at my right, once to the balcony door, once to Lila who is still talking to the journalist, and once to Jonah who is gesturing with his free hand and laughing to blunt an approach from a donor who wants to turn street work into content. She maps the board in three seconds and ends back on me.
