“Apologize to her,” I say again, more quietly now, which makes it land harder. “Before I forget you’re my son.”
He swallows.
Good. He knows that tone. He grew up with it. He knows exactly how little patience sits behind it, and exactly how much worse this becomes for him if he decides to test me in front of witnesses.
“Sienna,” he says stiffly, not looking at her for long, “I apologize.”
It’s weak. Forced. Worthless in any private room. But here, in front of everyone, it will do for the moment.
Only then do I let myself turn back to her.
She’s still staring at me. Shock. Hurt. Recognition. Something hotter beneath all of it. Her lips part slightly, like she’s about to speak and has forgotten how. And God help me, I remember exactly what that mouth feels like under mine, exactly what it sounds like when I make it open for me.
I drag my attention back where it belongs. She’s pale beneath the soft wash of makeup, and there’s anger in her face, yes, and humiliation too, still clinging to her skin like heat after a fever. But there’s also something steadier than either of those things, something I remember all too well from the plane. Because even then, when she had every reason to fold in on herself and letfear make her smaller, she didn’t do it, didn’t break, didn’t beg for softness she did not truly want. The memory of that—the memory of the way she took me, the way she looked at me while I ruined her with my hand over her throat and my mouth at her ear—returns with enough force to settle low and hard in my body before I shove it down again, firmly, because if I let myself dwell on it now, even for a second, then I’m no better than the jackals I have just interrupted.
The room is still waiting for me to decide what happens next, and I am well aware of it. Aware of the tension sitting beneath the chandeliers and silk and polished silver. Aware of the way the guests have adopted expressions of polite discomfort that fool no one. Aware of the servants along the walls keeping their eyes lowered while hearing every word, every laugh, every shift in tone, because houses like this are built on memory just as much as they’re built on stone, and whatever happens in this room tonight will be carried in whispers long after the flowers rot and the bride’s family sends out their thank-you notes.
Camille, to her credit, understands before my son does that the evening has slipped away from her, and though she keeps her chin lifted and her shoulders squared in that elegant, brittle way women like her learn young, I can already see the calculation beginning behind her eyes.
She knows she has overreached. She knows, worse, that she has done it with an audience, which means whatever dignity she recovers from this must be recovered carefully if she wants to keep it.
Ethan, unfortunately, still looks as though he believes he can outlast my patience if he stands there long enough with his jaw set and his expression blank, a childish instinct that would be almost funny if it didn’t so often embarrass me.
I look at Sienna again. I can’t not look at her. Someone like her should never have been left standing alone in a room full of wolves.
Something cold moves under my skin, and I lower my voice, though in the silence it still carries. “Are you all right?”
For a second she just looks at me. Not as if she doesn’t understand the question. As if she doesn’t know which answer is safe. Her throat works once. Then she gives the smallest shake of her head. Barely anything.
I nod once, a small acknowledgment, then turn away from her before I do something unwise in front of two hundred people and several branches of my own family.
“Dinner will proceed,” I say.
The room moves instantly. Conversations don’t resume so much as restart in awkward fragments. Chairs scrape. A server nearly drops a wine bottle before catching herself. Someone laughs too loudly at nothing at all. People look everywhere but at the center of the table where this just happened, which is how the wealthy like to handle ugliness once it has become inconvenient.
I don’t take my seat immediately. Instead I look at Camille. “Mrs. Laurent should be seated there, I assume.”
Her mouth parts, then closes again. “Yes.”
“Then sit her there.”
It’s not an instruction I should have to give. Still, she obeys.
Sienna is already moving, trying to step back into the machinery of the evening as if she can disappear inside her own competence. I watch her exchange a few clipped words with oneof the servers, watch her place the binder down for a moment so she can straighten a setting that does not need straightening.
She’s buying herself a second.
A breath. A wall. Some shred of control.
I know the instinct. I respect it. I should leave it alone, but instead I cross the room.
By the time I reach her, she has picked the binder up again. Her head comes up instantly, wary, and I get a better look at her face from this distance. The anger is still there. So is the humiliation. And behind both, buried much deeper than it was on the plane, is the same nervous tension I noticed in the lounge. The same alertness. As if she has been bracing for impact for so long she no longer knows how to stand any other way.
“You don’t have to do anything else right this second,” I say quietly.
Her eyes flick to the room, then back to me. “Yes, I do.”
Her voice is rougher than I remember. Or maybe that’s just what hurt does to a voice.
