As he sang, he looked steadily around the stadium, pausing now and then to focus on the crowd. His gaze made its way up until it reached the reserved box where Sydney stood. And there, he let his eyes fixate briefly on her, locking on her so surely that Sydney could almost feel it click into place.
Then he moved on to the rest of the crowd. But the embers of their brief stare still seemed to drift in the air, and heat flared on her cheeks as surely as if she’d been burned.
She wanted to scream at him for pointing his attention at her, forbringing this song to life before an entire audience. She couldn’t bear the emotion that the song was surfacing in her chest, whole tendrils of her heart exposed to the open air. She needed to replace it with something else, with anything else.
He shouldn’t have done this. It was a good song, too good, the kind where people would hunt down information on who inspired it, where they would dissect every lyric, where everyone in the world would soon be singing it. And if they started digging deeply enough, would they find out who he was singing about? Would they somehow connect it to her? Sure, he had looked around the entire stadium—but to her, the moment when he’d settled on her felt like the only thing people might notice.
You are my meditation.
The light on Winter went out with the final note of the song. The stadium burst into thunderous cheers. Sydney let out her breath, her skin still hot, her throat thick from holding back tears.
Then, in the midst of the noise, as she fought to collect herself—she saw Mr. Seah bow his head at his guests.
“Excuse me,” she heard him say. Then he stepped away from the cluster of people watching at the balcony and headed for the door.
Sydney forced herself to calm her breathing, to focus. Then she moved like a shadow out of the distracted crowd. No one watched her leave. Like a phantom, she headed toward the door, her eyes trained on where Seah stepped through the sliding glass door and out into the hall.
As she went, she tried to push the memory of Winter’s performance from her mind. But it stayed there, refusing to leave, along with the ghost of Gavi’s words and Tems’s bold bet. Her heart hammered frantically. They couldn’t do this, this little dance around each other. Every time they drew close, the world around them drew closer, suffocating them, threatening to crush them. They had every reason to not work and no reason to be together.
Besides. They were dangerous together. Too dangerous. What wouldhappen if others really caught on? What would happen if Gavi started spreading public rumors about them, or Dameon started connecting the dots? Compromising their cover, revealing such a weakness, could kill them.
No time, no time.She simply had no time to think about what it meant that Winter performed that song. She gritted her teeth, shoved him out of her mind again, cleared her throat, and filled her heart with anger.That, she knew how to do. She let herself be angry about the unfairness of it all, that she should have to think about nonsense like this while on a life-threatening mission. And as the anger built in her chest, it began scalding away her confusion. She let it burn and burn, until she could focus again, until she saw not Winter in her head, but the corridor before her.
She was here for a job. And she’d be damned if she’d screw it up over a boy.
There weren’t many people outside. Security guards patrolled up and down the corridor, their eyes flickering to the occasional person hurrying along the hall. Sydney blended in with the guards, her black suit matching theirs, and as she went, a few of them seemed to acknowledge her with a terse nod, as if she were one of them, tasked with maintaining order at this concert.
A new song had started inside the stadium. The screams from the crowd were so loud now that Sydney could feel the floor vibrating. She walked near the wall as Seah headed down the corridor, his figure disappearing through the sparse crowd. For a moment, she thought perhaps she’d been mistaken, and that all he was doing was heading to the restrooms.
But then she saw him reach the curve at the end of the hall and glance momentarily over his shoulder. Sydney stayed where she was, silent and still.
When Seah finally disappeared, she moved, walking as quietly as she could.
Abruptly, the hall widened into an open-air section of the corridor,the wall turning into a long railing that overlooked the parking structure and then the tangle of thick trees beyond.
Sydney froze and pressed herself against the wall, blending into the shadows of a doorway.
The silhouette of Seah appeared again—this time while standing over part of the railing, with his back turned to Sydney. His head was tilted slightly to one side, and his hand was pressed against his ear, as if he were trying to hear someone on the phone.
Right away, she could tell that Seah was speaking in Mandarin. But one Western name stuck out, the sound startling and clear.
Rosen.
13Walking on a Blade
“You promised me he would be at the table.”
Sydney could barely make out his syllables, but it was enough for her to understand the Mandarin.
“No, Ididpass it on.”
She missed the next few lines. Then his words came back into focus.
“But I expect him to be there. If you want me to pull through, you’ll have to—”
Him?Sydney wondered.
His words seemed to turn into a hiss here, as he momentarily lost his composure and stabbed the air with a finger. As he turned his head slightly, Sydney lost the trail of his words, only to see glimpses of his moving lips as he paced a little against the railing, ignoring the occasional fan or security guard passing by.
