I stop outside Aurora’s door and knock once. The lock clicks before I can decide how long to wait. I open and step into paint and light and the particular curve of her shoulder I know now with my hands.
She’s at the easel, hair twisted into a knot that is losing the argument with itself, sleeves shoved to the elbows of my shirt. She looks over, first surprised, then wary, then something else that hits behind my sternum with the neat efficiency of a blade.
“You didn’t wait for permission,” she says, which is a greeting in our language.
“Doors in my house have an unlisted rule set,” I answer. I hold up the bag. “Truce offering. Or weapon. Depends on who’s naming it.”
She wipes her fingers on a rag and eyes the silhouette of the dress like it might bite. “What is it?”
“An argument with a headline,” I say, crossing to the bed and laying the bag across it. I pull the zipper down. Wine silk spills light in a narrow cascade. “Wear this tonight.”
She doesn’t step forward. She doesn’t step back. She cocks her head a fraction. “Youwantme to wear it.”
“Yes.” I meet her eyes, so she knows it isn’t a request disguised as strategy. “And I want you on my arm at the White Cross Gala.”
There’s a moment where she processes the name. It travels across her face in a series of small decisions: memory of the last time she stood under chandeliers while photographers called her name wrong, the way strangers tend to reach without asking when they meet a woman whose work made them feel something they didn’t expect.
“I have work,” she says, her chin tipping toward the canvas. “And I don’t like marble rooms designed to polish men.”
“They’re not designed to polishme,” I say, stepping closer to the bed so the silk sits between us like a flag laid down.“They were designed to launder money and apathy. I use them to finance refusal.”
She gives me a look that meansspare me the sermon and say the part you called a weapon.
“Caldwell’s men are sniffing within ten miles of the north perimeter,” I say. “They’re scraping your mentions and guessing you’re here. If you disappear, they keep digging. If you stand under lights with me and leave in a car they can’t follow, the story becomes something else: you’re not hidden, you’re in my world by choice. And if you’re seen next to board chairs and benefactors and a former first lady who still knows how to sharpen a room with one sentence, messing with you becomes a more expensive proposition.”
“So you’re using me as a decoy.” She says it without heat. It lands like a test.
“I am protecting an asset I refuse to call an asset,” I say. I let the honesty sit unclothed between us. “And yes, I want you with me. Both are true.”
Her attention drops to the dress. She reaches out and touches the silk like people touch a pet snake in a controlled setting. “It’s beautiful,” she says quietly, like it annoys her to admit that. “And obvious.”
“Obvious is the point. Caldwell expects scared. Give him unafraid.” I pause. “Givemethe right to make that picture for him. On my turf.”
She looks up atmy turfand there’s the spark of defiance, and desire, the part of her that wants to walk into a trap just to set it on fire from the inside.
“What else?” she asks. “Who will be there? What am I walking into?”
“Senator Caldwell if his schedule holds. His comms director, who studied under a man I beat two wars ago. The director of the State Arts Council. Three donors who sit onboards that don’t like me because I don’t let them put their names on the buildings. A philanthropic photographer who thinks ‘candid’ means ‘predatory.’ A journalist who owes me a favor and another who would like to collect my head. And the chief of staff to a mayor who can open or close fire doors for my people in a fifteen-minute window if I ask with the right sentence.”
She absorbs it as if she’s sketching the room in her head.
“And friends?” she asks, which is a question I fail most of the time.
“Mara,” I say. “She’ll stand next to you when you want me to stop touching your back. Reid, who will not admit to existing unless you’re bleeding. A woman named Elise who runs my survivor scholarships and will talk to you about anything other than men and art if you ask her.”
She watches me while I talk. When I finish, she comes around the bed and stands in front of me with her arms loose at her sides like she’s not giving me a target. Her chin tips up.
“I’ll go,” she says, and the muscles in my shoulders uncoil a notch I didn’t authorize. “On one condition.”
I wait. Conditions keep people alive.
“You tell me the truth while we’re there,” she says. “If Caldwell comes at you. Or me. If a donor uses me like a prop. If someone in your camp goes off script and tells a story with my name in it. You don’t leave me smiling at a table while you put out a fire that was my match to begin with. You bring me in or you get me out, but you do not vanish.”
The condition is simple and perfect. I close the distance between us until the hem of my suit pants brushes her bare toes. I lift her chin with two fingers, so she knows I heard her and I’m not smiling my way around it.
“Agreed,” I say. “I won’t vanish.”
There’s a second where our breath touches and remembers last night without either of us moving. I step back first.
